Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
How to Build a Lean Marketing Team That Actually Works
In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, I sit down with Alex Love—VP of Marketing and Communications, adjunct professor, and co-host of the podcast Mastering the Art of Failing. We dive into her unexpected journey into marketing, the lessons learned from failure, and the art of building small but mighty teams.
Alex shares how her career evolved from writing grants at a nonprofit to leading marketing teams and teaching the next generation of marketers. We explore:
The Power of Learning and Teaching
- Why a love of learning keeps marketers adaptable and relevant
- How Alex turned her passion for education into a teaching role at GW
- The challenges (and joys) of engaging students who just want to “check the box”
Lessons in Failure and Resilience
- The rise and fall of Digital District, a pioneering social media community
- Why Alex considers it both her biggest success and her biggest failure
- How failure becomes fuel for future opportunities and growth
Building and Leading Lean Teams
- Why relationship-building is the secret weapon of small marketing departments
- The importance of hiring for ambition and drive over technical skills alone
- How to communicate that no single marketer can “do it all”
- Why outsourcing and specialized support free teams to focus on strategy
Creativity, Risk-Taking, and Viral Wins
- How one “crazy idea” born on a dog walk turned into an award-winning campaign
- Why sometimes the riskiest ideas resonate the most with your audience
- Redefining what “going viral” really means for niche organizations
Key Takeaways for Marketers
- Marketing is as much about relationships as it is about tactics
- Lean teams thrive when curiosity and problem-solving lead the way
- Failure is inevitable—but also invaluable in shaping future success
- Sometimes the boldest, quirkiest ideas lead to the greatest impact
Whether you’re a solo marketer, part of a lean team, or leading communications at a larger organization, this conversation is full of insights into how to stay creative, scrappy, and resilient in an ever-changing landscape.
Connect with Alex Love:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexslove/
Website: https://rivasolutionsinc.com/
🎧 Ready to rethink failure and lean into creativity? Tune in now to hear Alex’s inspiring journey and actionable lessons.
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Hi, I'm Kendra Korman. If you're a coach, consultant or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science, and that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. All right, hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, kendra Korman, and today I am joined by Alex, who is a VP of Marketing and Communications I believe right and a host of her own podcast, mastering the Art of Failing, which, in perfect marketing, failing totally get it. Love it, so welcome. Thank you so much for being on the show. Why don't you tell me a little bit about how you got into marketing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. Thanks so much for having me. It was an accident, I'll be honest. It wasn't something that I have any degrees in in any sort of capacity. My undergraduate I was a little bit aimless. I love school and I love learning, but you know I have a bachelor's degree in like political science and international relations, so not too much I could do with that outside of getting into politics, which I learned pretty quickly in my undergraduate career that that was just not a career path for me, and so I started to take internships that were kind of tangential to that.
Speaker 2:I had the opportunity to go to Washington DC to do a summer abroad between my junior and senior year and I worked at an organization that was doing sort of get out the vote for youth movements and I worked in their grants and development department because one of the skill sets that I have and really love is writing. So it was an opportunity for me to see how can I translate some of my writing into a career after I graduate. Working in that department I got to experience a lot of, at the time, up-and-coming social media, so I'll update myself a little bit, but these were newer networks that were coming out when I was in college and high school and so you know, the interns at the time really got the stamp of hey, you use this Facebook thing or use, you know at the time, this Twitter thing and can you help sort of figure out how we write content for this. So it's one of those things that I use personally and I really enjoyed at the time, twitter and Facebook and things like that. So every internship that I took my senior year I got more and more involved in marketing and communications because, again, at that time it really wasn't something that was built into digital marketing, it was still very much traditional methods and people were like we don't know what to do with these. So you know, when I graduated I had the opportunity to come back to DC and sort of figure out what I want to do next, and so I was still kind of unsure.
Speaker 2:But I had some experience writing grants and sort of raising funds for organizations.
Speaker 2:So I had the opportunity to join a nonprofit and I had the opportunity to have a split role. So on paper I wrote grant applications and I helped with raising funds for a local homeless shelter, but they had no one who was doing any communications or sort of outreach to the community to raise awareness or build a brand for them, and so it was something that I found an opportunity to say, hey, I kind of like doing these things too. There's a gap for me. Let me have a little bit more of an opportunity to work on some creative things, because if you've ever written a grant application, they are like square, peg, round hole, and that's just not how my brain works. So I really found myself enjoying that creative side of the house, and so after two years, it was very clear to me I was not meant to write grant applications. I was certainly very sold on the social media side of things and marketing side of things, and so, two years into my career, I took my first job as a social media manager and I haven't really looked back.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. So I love your passion for learning. I am very passionate about learning myself. I was just talking to someone the other day. They said are you thinking about like getting future degrees? And I was like if I could go to school all day, every day, I would and I'd be happy camper. So I love, I love learning and that's a big piece of what I love about marketing, too, is you're always learning, so what's something that you've you've learned recently.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm learning to be the educator on that side. So, to your point, I also really love school and when I finished my master's degree I was really sad that I was done and had to go back to the workforce first for a time. But one of the things I've been able to do on the side is help to mentor some of the students who are coming through. Both of university programs I came through, so this is sort of a lesson in always ask the question and always ask for the opportunity.
Speaker 2:Speaking to an alumni advisor at GW and made a joke that my last name is Love and I would be remiss if I didn't go back to get my doctorate so I could be Dr Love, and she kind of looked at me and said, well, you don't need a doctorate to teach. And I said please tell me more about that. So I'm really excited. I'm actually going to go back next spring to be an adjunct professor in teacher marketing class at GW and I'm really, really excited. And so that's what I'm relearning is how do you structure learning? And then how do I translate that into a younger generation?
Speaker 2:So, while I do manage Gen Z and I have a Gen Alpha, my daughter is only 18 months, so she's not quite there yet. So I'm kind of learning. How do I structure things that make sense? How do I translate the real world experience that I have into something that's really cool and my students can take? You know these opportunities to say, hey, I want to pursue marketing. This is something that I want to learn more about, or at least it's just knowledge for them if they go into general business or sort of whatever they do with their lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm adjunct faculty at a local university. I've been adjunct faculty for a long, long time now at different colleges and universities in my local area, so it is super fun and so fulfilling and you don't need a PhD for it. So I do not have mine. I'd love to get mine, but I don't. Yes, and yours fits perfectly with the last name. I agree a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:Let's talk a little bit about and I will tell you, other than that, that that is a big learning curve on how to get them engaged and wanting to do it, because so much is just check the box, right To get that degree and get out and doing what they want to do. So it's a lot of fun but definitely challenging. So I wish you luck in your endeavors. So let's talk about your podcast Master the Art of Failing. So I'm a big fan. I believe marketing is anything but a perfect science, right? Talk about a situation where you've been that maybe there was a failure because I don't necessarily believe that they're all failures, right, but they end up turning into successes. How do you talk about that? How do you tie that into your podcast? Tell me more.
Speaker 2:So my former business partner and I so after. So I'll step back a little bit. So about a decade ago, when I was getting into the marketing field and social media was really new, I joined a professional development organization that was focused on helping sort of give legitimacy to this platform of social media. And, like I said, you know the interns, the young people at the time, were the ones getting these roles. But we all know now it is a very legitimate platform and you do have to figure out how to work this into your marketing portfolio. So we stood up this organization called Digital District at the time, which was aimed at doing just that, which was saying like hey, we're marketers, this has a platform. Let's figure out how do we take this out of the intern world, out of the I do this for fun and give people the training and the opportunity to talk to other people who are going through this exact process, to either bring it into their organizations or just be able to formalize it within, you know, the portfolios that they manage.
Speaker 2:So we have these grand plans. To you know, once we had our chapter rolling, we had like 30 volunteers. We had a full calendar of networking events. You know we're getting sponsorship dollars, we're doing a really great job at curating our community locally. My business partner and I said, hey, let's think about how do we expand this and take this to different cities. But what we quickly found out was that, you know, first off we were doing this for free. So it's very hard to incentivize people to take on the level of work that we were doing, to be able to replace ourselves, to run successfully the DC chapter, for us to be able to focus on other cities and launching similar communities. So very quickly we realized we had no idea how to do this without ourselves in the picture. And as soon as we went to you know focus elsewhere, it kind of all buckled and fell down. But it was a really cool two or three year ride and I got the opportunity to do a crazy amount of things and just a lot of experience that you know, someone who is 23, 24, 25 just has no business doing some of these things. You know, I got invited to give like speeches at like really big corporations and did you know keynotes and stood up training programs and all of these things where I'm like I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm really good at faking it right. I'm faking it till you make it. So it's a really cool ride.
Speaker 2:And, you know, after a couple of years, my business partner moved out of the DC area and I went back to college to get my MBA, and so it was just one of those things that naturally, you know, we just didn't have the infrastructure to support, and so we closed it down after a couple of years. And two years ago he came back to me and said hey, I have an idea for a podcast. And I said cool, what better way to start something new? When he had just had his first child and I was about seven months pregnant with mine. So I said we're both about to be new parents, let's do something new together.
Speaker 2:But he brought the concept to me and I said I absolutely love it, because I'm one of those people who has historically been very type A, very perfectionist, and so thinking about being bad at something or talking about failures is just so uncomfortable for me personally, which meant that that was. Other people could benefit from that. So I said let's start with our own story, because I consider a digital district our biggest success, but also my biggest failure. At the end of the day, the goal that we set up to do, which was to build this huge organization and launch other communities, we miserably failed at. But we had a really good run for our chapter and learned so many things about myself, about management, about building, building businesses, which is ultimately what led me to go back and get my master's, because I understood there's a lot of things I just don't know and I need to understand these if I'm going to be successful doing this again.
Speaker 2:So it's a really cool opportunity to speak with individuals who had a grand vision and said, hey, I'm going to be the next rock star, or I'm going to be, you know, a podcast host, or I'm going to do this, and then, ultimately, it just doesn't work out. But at the end of the day, most of these people have ended up in such better places and looking back, I think, is always much easier to say. Once you're a little bit further away from the failure, you can point and say, hey, maybe this isn't what I envisioned my life or the path that I thought that I was going to be on, but look at all the things and all the successes and all the people and all the opportunities I got along the way. And now you know, I'm able to be successful in a different right, which is something that I didn't envision for myself. So I think, to your point, there's no failures, as long as you're willing to learn from it and pivot, I think everything is an opportunity to start fresh.
Speaker 1:I agree. I think that there's a much bigger plan for all of us and we don't see it because we're so close to it so often. But how things work out is just amazing, right? I mean, I can look back to just jobs that I didn't get, positions that I didn't receive, and, looking back, I'm like thank goodness I didn't get that, because I would have gone down an entirely different path and would not be where I'm at right now and I like where I'm at right and I like what I do. So that's really important. All right, so let's talk a little bit about small, lean marketing communications teams. Right, that's where you specialize. I always like to say I'm a recession style marketer, because I came up during heading into the Great Recession, when I was going through everything, so my job was to cut budgets, get out of contracts and a lot of different things, so I had to get creative with not a lot of funds in the beginning. Talk to me a little bit about how you build these lean, small teams and what you've learned from that.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, I'm in the middle of that now, so supporting government contracts where we're trying to do a lot more with a lot less, and that's just the world that we're living in right now. So, yeah, I spent most of my career out small to midsize organizations and, depending on sort of a vision and the CEO, you know, marketing is not always a top priority for individuals, so pretty used to being an afterthought or sort of one person can handle all of this, but those of us who work in marketing know there are a lot of skill sets that exist within a marketing team and you can't expect one person to be a copywriter, a graphic designer, a video editor. You know all of these things rolled into one. And, of course, you know there are multi-stack marketers who can do pieces of everything. But you do need a variety of skill sets to be successful.
Speaker 2:So I've been in the position where I'm a one-woman show, and that is very difficult because, again, you also have to borrow a lot of knowledge and time from other individuals in the organization. I can't go out and market something that doesn't exist, and so I have to work and build relationships with our solutions teams or specialists or figure out what products we're offering, what services we're offering. So you need a lot of buy-in, and what I've learned is probably more on the relationship side of the house. It's so key to be able to build relationships and build trust with individuals within the organization and then also your customer base too, because, as I said, ultimately at the end of the day, I don't have anything to market if people aren't willing to engage with me, and so I've spent a lot of time sort of figuring out how do I make other people's jobs easier, which will ultimately make my job easier, because when I go back and say, the marketing girl is here for content or I'm here to ask you to do this, people are more willing to engage, and so that is probably one of the core skill sets that I look for when I look to add to my team and currently, you know, we just went from a team of four to a team of three because of you know, the situation and the environment which we're in with government contracting is, budgets are getting slashed and positions are getting eliminated and so I think the number one thing I'm looking for is someone who has the drive to learn, who wants to make an impact, who is a can-do problem solver.
Speaker 2:You can teach a lot of skills, but it's very difficult to teach that ambition and drive side of the house, and so I've been the most successful building my team and keeping it small, with individuals who are willing to learn and make an impact, because, at the end of the day, we're here as a creative, shared service for the rest of the organization, and so we have to look at ourselves as how do I make everyone else's job easier so I can get my job today?
Speaker 1:Well, I think there's so much important stuff in there that you're talking about. So one is it's the learning right. You're constantly learning. You're learning new things because you have to learn about the products, about what's changing right, about the customer, and that feeds into your passion for learning. For sure. That relationship building is so important because everybody is the first to blame marketing right when it doesn't go right, but they're also the last to give marketing time unless you have those relationships.
Speaker 1:One of my previous bosses, long long time ago, used to call me the shell answer woman, because I had so many relationships throughout the corporation that I could get almost any question answered or find the resource, because I had built just a ridiculous network of, like web of people that I always wanted to learn new things from. So that's really good. And then one of my interns I told them in marketing, one of the key skills you need to learn is stalking. And he kept coming back to his desk and I'm like, did you get the information? And he's like, no, not.
Speaker 1:Yet he says he's too busy right now. I said, okay, take a book and sit outside his office. I don't really care what you do, but we need that information today because we've been waiting for it for a week and he's been too busy for a week. You need to sit outside his office and I remember on the exit interview I'm like, so what's the biggest skill you learned for marketing? He goes stalking, gets things done, so yeah. So it's really important because you have to have that drive, because there are so many bottlenecks to getting things done.
Speaker 2:And we're remote for the most part. So it's a little bit harder to your point that you know, when I was in the office full time before COVID, I could knock on somebody's door, you know, attack them when they got back from a client meeting and be like, hey, you owe me edits on this. Relationships matter even more because it's so easy to ignore all the chats and emails that you have that are building up, because there's just so many things that are on everyone's table that I don't have as many interaction points. To go up to someone personally and say, like you put a hole in my content calendar because this blog isn't done, which then you know has a cascading effect and people don't think about it that way and they shouldn't have to. That's not their job. But yeah, building those relationships, finding those opportunities that when we are in person, to make sure that individuals will answer the call when I do put those out but yeah, stalking is definitely a very critical marketing skill and has served me very well in the organizations that I've supported.
Speaker 1:One of the other things that we were talking about was the team right, so there are so many different skill sets in marketing. You know, when I was getting my MBA, we did a business plan and I realized that 90% of the business plan was the marketing plan. Right, so we've adopted everything except for the part that goes to finance, and even some of that we've adopted into the marketing plan right. So a marketing plan is, in essence, a business plan. There's so many components and not everybody can do everything right, even as a one-woman show that you've been before and I've been before.
Speaker 1:You still need additional skill sets, that you can be okay in a lot of things, but you're not great at all of the things. Right, and I think that's where people get tripped oh, it's just in Canva. Oh, you can just use AI. Right, and don't get me wrong, I love AI and I love Canva, but I don't have a graphic artist's vision of what things can look like and I can't put it together that way. And a lot of my clients like they benefit because I have a small team and by hiring me they're paying for less than a full-time person. But getting those three, four skill sets right, and I think that that's so important. How have you learned since the beginning, when you were the one woman show, to communicate that, to explain to people that not one person can do it all? And I think that that's really important too, by the way, for solopreneurs, coaches, consultants that are trying to do all of the stuff themselves too. You need to ask for help sometimes, but how do you communicate that to people?
Speaker 2:I think the conversation has evolved since I started my career because of the injection and tools available now through AI platforms. You know, I didn't have Canva when I started out. I wish I did, but you know, here I was trying to figure out like to be good enough at InDesign or good enough at PowerPoint to sort of get your point across. You know, I think it just comes down to asking someone you know, what's your vision, what's your goal? How do I get you there at the end of the day? Because, again, as a marketer, you're really there to help propel someone else's goal and someone else's vision for the organization. So I like to frame it that way, like I'm here to sort of be an accelerator to what you want to do, and it's taken me a long time in some organizations to get you know the funding or get the buy-in.
Speaker 2:Then I can't handle everything Because, to your point, you know I am a little bit better at PowerPoint or a little bit better at some of these things than the average person, and so I can get you a pretty good version.
Speaker 2:But as soon as you add someone in, you know I'm lucky to have a wonderful graphic designer on my team, because that is one of the specialized skill sets that we do absolutely need, even in the world of AI, is that she's like 100 times better and faster too. I think part of it is the trade up on resources. You know, if you want me to do the PowerPoint for you, I certainly can. It will look fine, it will look great, but it's going to take me about four times longer than it is someone else, and so I think it's just that trade off of. Would it make more sense to outsource some of these things that are more specialized skill sets, because this frees up my time to do what I'm better at, which is the high-level strategy or the vision, or sort of the big picture thinking to help support the brand. And then, you know, have someone else take care of those details who can be much quicker than I can.
Speaker 1:Well, and nowadays, with Upwork and Fiverr and everything else, there's so many resources for us to be able to get access to skill sets at reasonable prices right that we couldn't get before because you had to hire a full-time person. Now, maybe not all of them need to be full-time, right? So I think that the landscape has changed and I love how we keep you know. Talking back, I remember I was the Jeep advertising manager and we had Facebook ads running at the time and we had to have. One of the other people at the office had a kid in college because it was limited to edu email addresses at the time, and so we had to go to someone else that had a kid in college that would give us their login to Facebook so we could see our ads. That's how far back I go with social media. So it's yeah, we've come a long way from there, for sure.
Speaker 1:Well, this has been an awesome conversation. I love how we've talked about learning, your passion for learning. It really does cross over into so much of marketing. You know we've talked a little bit about being, you know, lean and scrappy, which I think is extremely important in today's day and age, because even outside government contracts, everybody needs to be lean and scrappy and creative, and I think that the more that we do to do that, the better we are as organizations, because we get a little bit more creative. You know, those big budgets sometimes are not all. They're cracked up to me and they really do limit our creativity at times. Before I let you go, I do have to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests, and that is that the show is called Imperfect Marketing, because marketing is anything but a perfect science. What has been your biggest marketing lesson that learned along the way?
Speaker 2:I would say take the chance. So you know, government marketing not someplace that you think cool or edgy campaigns but I've had the ability to put out some things that you know our competitors would never and, to be honest, were things I never thought we would also put out. A couple of years ago we had the opportunity to put out a video that was meant to be internal. You know, we had a contract that went under protest for quite a long time and so we just thought let's have a little bit of fun with it with our partners, to thank them for sticking around while you know the government was trying to figure out what to do with this contract. And so, you know, we played on the Office parody like it's happening meme, and we got a couple of people to shoot this like ridiculous video. And I'm originally from New Jersey, so you know the contract was called Boss and so to me Boss is Bruce Springsteen and so we had like a Bruce Springsteen cameo, like it was just this ridiculous video that was supposed to poke fun at some people. And just again, thank people for sticking around. For the year and a half we played it at an internal meeting with our partners and everyone loved it and I was shocked by that. And then they said, well, when can I share this on my networks? And I was like so this is, like you know, well outside of what we would typically publish. I wasn't going to put it on our social media networks but, you know, enough people came up to me and liked the video that I said let's do it like why not? Right. And that was one of those pivotal moments where I'm so glad that I just kind of threw our strategy to the wind, because not only was it like super well received and sort of went viral in within our own community, but for weeks and months, you know, people would come up to me at industry events and reference the video and we actually ended up getting like an award for it in terms of government innovation, and then someone allowed me to give a keynote speech about it too.
Speaker 2:So it's just one of those wild moments where I'm like this was a crazy idea that came out of a walk with my dog and just me honestly not having enough time to think about a proper marketing campaign, because you know, when you're a small team and you've got competing priorities, thinking about things that are under protest is just not top of mind, and so I think that's my biggest takeaway is that most of the ideas that are in my head are either genius or terrible, and I always lead with that when I'm talking to my teams, just to level set like, hey, tell me if I'm wrong, tell me if this makes no sense, but sometimes the crazy ones are the best ideas.
Speaker 2:And so you know, still check with your, make sure that it checks some boxes and you know you're not gonna piss anybody off with the content that you put out there. But I definitely think that I'm a little bit more willing to take some risks with our marketing because at the end of the day, we sell services and we're trying to connect with people and there are a lot of pop culture references in that that. You know people are behind the agencies that we support and they were able to make a connection point with that and have a laugh, which I think we all need today.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, and I one of the things that I really loved that you said is viral within our community, because, well, no, but I think that that's so important, because what viral means for most organizations, for most companies, for most people doesn't necessarily mean a billion views, right. The industry. That itself speaks volumes to the fact that you didn't need a billion, you know, views on some TikTok video, right, being within that target audience made everything possible, and so I think that that says volumes too. So it's okay to be a little crazy, check it out with some of your team, right, and do some different things, because you never know where it'll go. Sometimes it is terrible, but sometimes it's genius and that's pretty fun. So, thank you, guys all so much for tuning in, listening or watching.
Speaker 1:If you learned something today and I hope that you did please rate and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching If you want to connect with Alex or check out her podcast. The act of, or the art of mastering the art of failing. I'm sorry, it's like it helps if I read the notes mastering the art of failing, and then we'll have notes links to that in the show notes also. Thank you again so much for being here. I really appreciate your time and everybody. Have a great rest of your day.
