[What's a marketing leader?] by Joe Pulizzi
Joe shared his definitions of marketing, leadership, and marketing leader. He also gives us a "survival marketing kit" to succeed: the one book, one quote, and one word to wrap it all up.
Joe Pulizzi’s definitions of…
➜ … marketing:
We talked about how a marketer basically sells through consistent communication. That's how I look at it. If you're a marketer, you are in sales. Well, how do you sell? You sell through how you communicate. That's what marketing is today. So that's how I would look at it. So if you get hired into marketing you are a sales salesperson, you just do it differently than someone calling up people one by one.
➜ … a leader:
A leader is just someone who has followers. I mean, generally, it's somebody that's unafraid, takes risks, but doesn't have to. So it is basically someone with the initiative to do what needs to be done. And if you do that, generally people end up following you.
➜ … a marketing leader:
So basically, if you're a marketing leader, you should know how to build subscribers inside the company and outside the company. By the way, that's where if you're looking at content, if you're a content marketer and an enterprise, you should have an internal program that communicates what you do, what the content program does to executives. A lot of people don't realize this, most content marketing programs are killed, not because of lack of performance, but because of lack of understanding, because most people in the organization don't know what you're doing: “Oh, why are we creating all this content and we're not pitching our products at all?”.
You will get a traditional marketer advertising person in there, and they will say you are wasting your time! And it might even be working and they'll say, “cut it. I don't get it”.
So you have to do that first and foremost. You have to figure out how cold or warm the water is, because if you get hired by a company, you might need to say, look, if I'm going to be successful, I need to create some air cover for me. And you need to do an internal communications program for your content. And if you already have to buy in and everybody gets it if you're a John Deere or if you're a guy who's done it for years or whatever you say “oh great”. It means it’s already part of the culture.
To wrap it all up: 1 book, 1 quote, 1 word
📚 Think and Grow Rich - by Napoleon Hill
This book is a very chauvinistic book, and a lot of people don't like it, but still, “Think and Grow Rich” from Napoleon Hill, you know, I talk about it in the end conten. So, put the chauvinism aside, it has really good life lessons. It made a huge impact on how I defined success and what I really wanted to do with my life: “opportunity has spread its wares before you. Step up to the front, select what you want, create your plan, put the plan into action, and follow through with persistence”.
✒️ The quote
“If we try something and fail, we are vastly better off than if we had tried nothing and succeeded”.
(He found it on the back of a sugar packet years ago and he loves that for obvious reasons…).
🥇 The word
“From a business standpoint, because I would probably say “husband” and “father”, those would be the first two, because that's depending on where your priorities are.
I guess, patience is a good one. Grit is another one, persistence, they're all the same”.