How I Made it in Marketing Female Entrepreneurship and Marketing: Having built a big community doesn't mean you will be able to monetize it (episode #71)
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It is hard to make this episode of How I Made It In Marketing and share it with you.
Because you are professional marketers and entrepreneurs, many of you know marketing, business, and content creation better than I ever will. So I could work on this forever just to make it better, bulletproof to criticism, dare I say… perfect.
Of course, then we wouldn’t be able to publish regularly. Instead of the other 70 episodes we’ve produced so far, there would only be this one.
Which brings up a great lesson I read from in a podcast guest application – “Done is better than perfect.”
A truism I know I’ve had to live with. It applies very well to my job, as someone who wants to create awesome content, yes, but also lives in the constant reality of deadlines.
In this episode, Cordula Pfluegl, Marketing Director, TNW (https://thenextweb.com/), shared the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories.
TNW, which stands for The Next Web, is mostly known for its annual tech conference hosted in Amsterdam but is also a media company writing about technology with 1 million monthly readers. TNW is a Financial Times company. I’m sure you’ve heard of the 130-year-old newspaper, and it probably stuck out to you if you ever saw it, as the pink newspaper. FT is owned by Nikkei, Inc., which reported 175.2 billion yen in sales last year.
For the lead-up-time to the conference, Pfluegl oversaw a team of 10 people, including the event-focused marketing coordinators and the company's brand team of designers and content creators. When marketing the annual TNW Conference, they created over 2.8 million organic impressions with user-generated content on LinkedIn alone, in the two weeks around the event.
Stories (with lessons) about what she made in marketing
Some lessons from Pfluegl that emerged in our discussion:
- Working in various industries and for different brands/products (D2C/B2B) makes you a better and more versatile marketer overall.
- Having built a big community doesn't mean you will be able to monetize it
- Practice 'in-company' and 'across-team' learning together
- Having a clear purpose will always guide the way
- Market localization is important
- Done is better than perfect
Related content discussed in this episode
6 Good (and 2 Bad) B2B and B2C Value Proposition Examples (https://marketingexperiments.com/value-proposition/6-good-2-bad-b2b-b2c-value-proposition-examples)
Launch and Learn: How marketers can keep up in a real-time world (https://marketingexperiments.com/social-marketing/real-time-marketing)
Pfluegl’s Substack (https://thisisjusthestart.substack.com/)
About this podcast
This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (https://meclabs.com/course/) free digital marketing course.
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