I’ve worked in marketing in B2B SaaS my entire career.
I’ve worked in almost every marketing function in companies both big and small.
I’ve spent half of my career in demand gen and the other half on the brand side. When I was junior in my career these two disciplines seemed so distant. Today, the lines are blurred.
I’ve always enjoyed the process of quarterbacking a great marketing campaign. I would treat it like a sport. I’d go to my 1:1 with my manager and get the plays. I’d build the plan and then start bringing in the right people to help me execute. I created a TON of leads during my days in demand gen. Should I get another gold star for my helmet?
I’ve been talking a lot about the importance of transparency in marketing recently.
Do you want some real talk?
I think leads are vanity metrics that have existed since the dinosaur days of marketing measurement to give us something to point our activity to.
Have you ever had a sales leader tell you that they need more leads?
We’ve all been there.
I’m going to get on my marketing soapbox for a minute and make an announcement.
I might be the brand guy these days, but that doesn’t mean I can’t start a new campaign.
I want to welcome anyone who is reading this post to be a part of the movement.
It’s the Modern Day Marketers campaign.
Here are the core tenets of my platform:
- We will prioritize adding value to our audience above all else
- We will not compromise the trust building process by referring to people as objects that we are trying to push through our process
- We will educate “me” centered marketers on the benefits marketing like it’s 2022
- We will assess our own individual businesses and identify the right performance metrics to point to because we believe cookie cutter metrics are for the birds
- We throw shade at transactional marketing tactics that make marketers feel good in the moment, but do tremendous brand damage in the long run (e.g. content syndication, batch and blast emails, list buying, the archaic use of marketing forms, etc.
Would you mind if we put a Vote Yes for Modern Day Marketers sign in your front yard?
I’ve got an amazing bench of marketers who are on the campaign team.
In fact, go listen to any episode of the 3C Podcast. You’ll hear stories of Modern Day Marketers who aren’t doing their best pirate impressions by prioritizing “capturing leads”. Instead they are focused on creating kick ass experiences with their sales and customer success teams.
They are on the campaign trail waving the Modern Day Marketing flag!
Who said the brand and content guy couldn’t run a campaign anymore?
Let me be real for a second and close with some story time. That’s what brand people do, right?
I believe stories are the best way marketers can earn trust.
People don’t remember features. People remember stories.
Stories are the primary vehicle that I use to be real with people taking the time to read, watch, or listen to my stuff. I never take that opportunity for granted.
So here it goes…
Modern Day Marketers is a culmination of all of the conversations, feedback, posts, episodes, messages, and more that I’ve received from the community over the past year.
I knew something was going on day-to-day, but hadn’t taken a step back to realize how dramatically different the mindset was today of B2B marketers.
I can remember the moment when I realized that we needed to go all-in with this concept of the Modern Day Marketer. I was in the process of working on a collaborative project with former guests of the 3C Podcast on why they thought B2B marketing sucked.
The goal wasn’t necessarily to dump on the industry that was responsible for our paychecks, however, I saw an opportunity to elevate passionate voices to drive awareness on how we could make it better.
The first few submissions had come through and they were all really good.
They were striking the right chord and using stories to share experiences for how this group of marketers were thinking about their role from an audience-first perspective.
I was closing out my day and received an email from Nicole Klemp who used to run content at 6sense and now works on the agency side of things. I read her email and then clicked on her post. The title immediately sucked me in.
I started reading and immediately got lost.
You know that feeling where the world stops and you can actually feel yourself processing every word that you are reading? That’s what happened when I read Nicole’s work.
By the end of it the hairs on my neck started to stand up and hit the blue share button at the top of the Google Doc and sent it to my team in Slack. I started to feel something big.
It wasn’t just Nicole’s post. It was a culmination of all of my interactions with other marketers like Nicole. Her article was the icing on the cake and the catalyst for me to start thinking bigger about the opportunity that I had with the community that I was building.
I’m sharing this story because I believe it helps set the stage for all of the work The Juice team will be putting together around the Modern Day Marketer.
The Modern Day Marketer is the hero in the story we are telling. I hope that the more we talk about her the more you find opportunities to level up your own work and the work of the companies who pay you.
I’m shining a light on the Modern Day Marketer and giving her the seat at the head of our content table. Of course the work that I am doing has intention.
I want you to sign up to be a member of The Juice. I want you to be curious and interested in learning about how you can become a customer of The Juice. We all have business goals to hit as marketers. We just need to be more transparent about them.
Find opportunities to use stories to earn trust. The more you do this the easier it gets to tell your audience what you need from them.
Remember, the Modern Day Marketer prioritizes her audience above everything else.
Nurture these relationships and watch it grow.
At a minimum just be real with your people. It goes a long way. 🧃
If you enjoy what we are doing we’d love for you to do a couple things:
