3.20: Marketing for Academics

In today's episode, I discuss how lessons from entrepreneurship can apply to academia, particularly in terms of personal development and overcoming self-limiting beliefs related to marketing and networking.

I emphasize that promoting one's work is crucial even in academia, where the quality of scholarship or teaching may not automatically gain recognition without active promotion. I share insights from my business coach, Racheal Cook, regarding a marketing framework consisting of five phases: 

• Attract
• Engage
• Nurture
• Invite
• Delight

In the "attract" phase, I encourage academics to expand their audience beyond their immediate colleagues by leveraging platforms like LinkedIn, conferences, or digital tools to increase visibility. The "engage" phase involves active networking and participating in scholarly conversations, whether through social media, conferences, or other academic forums. "Nurture" focuses on consistently sharing research and maintaining academic connections through newsletters, podcasts, and mentoring activities.

"Invite" refers to making opportunities for collaboration and engagement explicit, whether in research projects or teaching initiatives. Finally, "delight" underscores the importance of delivering high-quality teaching, research, and service that resonate positively with colleagues and students.

Throughout my discussion, I challenge the misconception that good work speaks for itself, emphasizing the necessity of proactive marketing to build academic reputation and impact. 

I invite you and other academics to consider marketing as a means of enhancing your professional visibility and fostering collaborative relationships within your scholarly communities.

You can access Josh's substack & podcast here:
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/

Episode Details

Transcript

Ep 3.14 Marketing for Academics

Hi. And thank you so much for lending me your ears this week on the mindful Academy. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about some lessons learned from entrepreneurship that I believe apply to work as a professor. So there is a saying that floats around in the entrepreneurial world, that owning a business is the best course in personal development you could ever take. And I believe this to be true. It is certainly true in my life, because as an entrepreneur, you come up with a thing, in my case, coaching and facilitating for academics, and you market it and deliver it to people. And especially if you come from the kind of work background I came from, which is training, and work in the humanities, the notion of selling a product to somebody is scary, it's foreign, it may be seems like you're selling out and becoming a dirty capitalist, like there are all sorts of narratives, limiting beliefs that I had to overcome, in order to embrace the fact that I have a service that I offer people and that I'm enthusiastic about it, and I want people to be enthusiastic about it with me. And then there's the delivering of the service and getting out of your own way, developing your skills, showing up in new ways, building courage to talk to people in in new ways. It's a constant sort of putting yourself out there. And practicing in public. As I market my stuff, as I market my services, and that is a course in personal development, right, you will learn very quickly, what you're afraid of what you feel confident about where your limiting beliefs are, what you're attached to. Right. And I think that this notion of running a business as a course in personal development, actually also has a lot of analogies to the professoriate. In part because I believe that any endeavor that we are emotionally invested in, right, your research, your teaching, my services, the things that have our hearts, the things that we want to see succeed, if we really are committed, and we want to see that thing blossom and grow, we will have to grow along the way, we'll have to acquire new skills, we will have to get out of our own way, we will have to overcome self limiting beliefs, right. So I'm going to use marketing today as my example, in part because that's the biggest self limiting belief, I had to get over all of my thoughts about what it means to market were things I had to grapple with and still grapple with when it comes to talking about coaching and facilitating. And there are lessons lessons that I have learned about marketing that I believe applies really well to work in the academy. So I'm going to speak to my earlier self. And maybe you find some affinity with Jennifer 1.0, who would have heard the words marketing, or even networking, and just thought it through, not for me, right marketing and networking. That is what you need to do. If you don't have a good quality product, like you would only need to network and put yourself out there and self promote. If whatever you were producing by way of scholarship or teaching or research or leadership wasn't good enough to stand on its own two feet. That was the narrative I was working with. Now, I also know logically, that very little just rises to the top because it stands on its own two feet. And certainly not in the 21st century. There are hundreds of millions of people on this continent alone. And 10s of millions of those people are engaged in creating something that if you open your phone browser or computer browser and go looking, you will find if you go into a library catalog or database and put in a couple of keywords, you will find gazillions of hits. Right. There is tons of information out there. And so the notion that your teaching or your scholarship or your leadership service is just going to be acknowledged recognized scene applauded, bought into because it exists and is good. We can probably look at the world around us and say, there are a lot of things that exist and are good. And that fly under the radar because nobody shining a spotlight on them. But that narrative around, oh, well, if it's good, you don't need to self promote, oh, if it's good, you don't need to talk about it, you don't need to market it, you don't need to network so that people know your name. That is like we're sort of buying into the genius cult. If we assume that just because we're creating good work, it's going to succeed. And the genius Colt, as we know is pretty limiting pretty patriarchal, pretty outdated. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I've learned about marketing and how I think it applies to your job right now, or Jennifer 1.0 is job. So I have learned, not everything. But let's say 90% of what I now know and believe about marketing, from my current business coach, her name is Rachel cook. She has a podcast called promote yourself to CEO. And I've been listening to the podcast for years, and I've been working with her directly for about a year. And in that time, so between the podcast and the intensive one on one work, I have really come to understand her marketing framework as simple. It's not mark, it's not rocket science, requires practice requires dedication and focus. And I think it has analogues in the academic world. So she describes marketing as having five phases. So there's attract, engage, nurture, invite, and delight. And so I'm going to loosely use her framework and talk about what that might look like from an academic perspective. So attract the Attract phase of marketing, is getting your work in front of people who maybe haven't seen it before. Now, if you're a scholar of 19th century German literature, of biochemistry of whatever, you have a group of colleagues who kind of know your stuff. And you go to conferences, and the people who do 19th century literature go to each other's panels, because they understand the context. And they have some of the same questions. And that's great. But how do you get more people to read your things and pay attention to them? Because we joke in academia, especially in some of the more arcane fields, like my, my colleague and friend out there, who's a medieval Chinese philosophy expert, right? How do you get more people to listen to your message and draw from it, things that apply to what they do today? Because we tend not to want to write for just those 12 people who are subject matter experts. So if you want your research to get out there, how do you get in front of new people. So if you want to, if you want to be written by more than 12 people, there are ways to do that there are ways to promote your work. And if you've ever written a book book proposal, you will have seen this in action, because the publisher in having you fill out, either the book proposal or the marketing plan for the book, when when it gets to that stage will ask you Okay, who are your readers? Okay, great. There's your primary readers. Who else? Right, so a client that I worked with years ago on a book, she was doing research that happened, where the subject was the French court. And her research touched on other disciplines. She looked at dance a little bit, she looked at politics, a little bit performance studies, and there was something else, I can't remember them all. But she had to sort of pull out from what she was writing, oh, people here, here, here, here and here on the academic map, might find something valuable in this. And then the question from the publisher, or the question you can ask yourself is, how do I let the people in performance studies or in French literature, or in political science, know that I have written this book and there might be insights in them in the book that would be interesting for them. That is attract marketing. We if you're filling out a marketing plan For a book, they might ask you, okay, what conferences? Do your people go to do the prospective readers of this boat book go to? Can we get in front of that audience there? If you're writing a book that isn't with a scholarly publisher, if you're writing a trade book, they will want to know, okay, how big is your mailing list? And who's going to blurb this book? And who do they have on their mailing list? So this notion of, are there other audiences we can get in front of that aren't the people who are already paying attention to you? There are, let me see here I have, I have a few notes I want to consult and I'm kind of bouncing around in them. This is, it's like building your academic brand and your academic voice. And brand is also one of those words that not all academics love. But if you can get behind the notion of I have something really cool that I'm doing over here. And I would like to show you what I'm doing to see if maybe you'd like to pay closer attention. That is a concept also that I've heard my colleague Jen Polk talk about and she runs the company from PhD to life where she does sort of career mapping for early PhDs. And she thinks of marketing as like, I'm over here having a party, you want to come hang out with me nifty, right? So this notion of you're doing a cool thing, how do you get people to notice it? So there has been I think it has dwindled since the days of Elon Musk. But there has been a very vibrant community on Twitter, around academia, where people talked about their research, I think I see it sort of developing a little bit on blue sky. I think there were some attempts on Mastodon, but how do you put yourself out there in a place where people might come across you? In my work, I decided LinkedIn is the place where I'm just going to put myself out there and see if people come across me. Other people in my shoes might run ads. That's not where I'm at right now. But there's also the notion of Do you have, okay, in business, we would talk about SEO, search engine optimization. So are the right keywords in the right places, and all sorts of other digital boo, do that for me? But for you as a scholar? Do you have a website? Are you findable? What is interesting, is that linked in for, for reasons I don't understand, comes up really high in Google searches. So if somebody searches your name, and you've ever created a LinkedIn account, it is likely that will come up on the first page. Now, if you created that LinkedIn account five years ago, and you never uploaded a picture, and you haven't done anything with it, and I'm interested in like, oh, what institution? Is she at? What is what is he doing? And I click there, I will find things that are outdated. And don't point me in any useful direction about where you currently are and what you're currently doing. Do you have a university webpage that profiles you, that also comes up? And I'm not? I'm not saying that you need to eat, go surf and see like how often you show up in the world, but having a sense of how people find you, and what is publicly available about you and your research can be really valuable when sort of assessing? How far is my reach? How might I be attracting people to my work beyond just the publications and the conferences that I present it? What does building my voice and my brand and my platform look like for me. And I think that in that particular like in that phase of marketing, networking plays an enormous role. If you have been working for any amount of time, you have an amazing network of people, graduate school colleagues, current colleagues, maybe even people from undergrad. And as we move because academics tend to be kind of peripatetic. If you drop those relationships, we might be dropping the potential for a more robust network that makes you more visible in the ways that you choose to be visible. So just think about how do people learn about you and your work? And if you're just expecting that it is good enough, and it will stand on its own? And then you wonder why nobody notices you. Like if everything's working just perfectly in your career around this, then maybe you don't need to worry. But if you would like more opportunities, more collaboration, if you would, if getting an award at some point in your career is an important goal for you. Thank you Thinking about this notion of attracting people to your work is an important thing to think about. And I think that depending on your discipline and your personal history, there are some interesting things that you could experiment with there. A lot of them are going to be digital, but not all, there is good old fashioned, you know, email or picking up the phone or shaking hands at a conference, and actually being willing to talk about yourself, and the work that you're doing when you're in those face to face places. Okay, the next stage in my business Maven, Rachel Cook's marketing plan is engage. And this is it's, we parse it pretty finely for those of us who are running a business, but engage is, when you've gotten in front of people, they kind of see what you're doing. And they they put their hand up and say, Yeah, let's keep talking.

And so this is, this is hardcore networking. For academics, this is you give the talk, and you follow up with people in the room. This is you present at the conference. And if people are on Twitter, or blue sky, you use the hashtag. And you get involved in that conversation. This so that you're talking with people, and your name becomes more recognizable. This is maybe being on LinkedIn, and reaching out to folks who are doing work analogous to yours, and saying, Hey, I'm doing a thing too. Would you like to talk? Or have you seen this thing that I've written? Right? So it's not just the passive Hey, see, I'm out here. It's the engaging with people. And in my world, it's basically saying, Can I offer you something that will entice you to give me your email address, so that I may periodically let you know what's going on with me and the fun party I'm having over here in coaching and consulting, so that if you need my services, I remain front of mind, right? For an academic that engagement is, I'm not just over here doing my own thing, either as a solo scholar or in my lab, but I'm part of a broader scholarly conversation. And we are engaged with one another, even in that lightly touch base kind of way that various forms of social media allow for. And again, if you don't like social media, there are other ways of doing this. If your discipline has a very robust newsletter, or journal, where updates happen, if there's a personal section, if going to conferences is your happy place, and you can cultivate a scholarly conversation around that conference for yourself. So that again, you kind of remain front of mind with people when it comes to opportunities, visibility, things like that. Okay. After engage comes nurture. So nurture marketing is newsletters, podcasts, you know, just reminding people that you're still alive and still doing work for you. What does nurture marketing look like? Nurture marketing, is publishing, right? It's writing book reviews, it's a lot of the scholarly activity, that's part of your job, and that you churn out on a yearly basis, to remain current and relevant. It can also be at other stages in your career, doing the editing during the collecting of research and sharing it with others. Nurture can also be the mentoring and supervision that you provide to undergraduates and postdocs, right, which is another way that your work and your influence in your voice, get a broader reach. So are you engaged in that kind of work? And my question as a coach is, are you engaged in that kind of work intentionally? Right? What what is the outcome for the mentee, and you in that supervision? arrangement, right? How is that a win win thing, in terms of your own work, as well as the work that you're nurturing in them? Invite is the fourth stage in marketing. And that's, that's making the offer in in my world, right? Would you like to work with me? Would you like to hire me? What does that look like in academia? How are people invited into your work? This is something that is it's maybe seems a little obvious. I think now that I'm sort of pondering it, but if it isn't out there, you can build it and you'd don't have to build it alone. And I think there are some disciplines that are naturally collaborative in nature and like inviting people to be a part of your work is just the way they operate. Right? All of the scientists I work with are just nodding their heads. But for humanities scholars, a lot of them for social science scholars, a lot of them people who are trained in disciplines that are sort of solo work. What happens when you invite others in? What happens when you collaborate? What happens when you invite your reader in? What does it look like to invite people into your work? Whether it's your research work, or your teaching work, or your leadership work, right? To not engage in that work from an entirely defensive posture, but a collaborative and co creative posture? How might that impact your voice and your and impact your voice and impact your impact? I use the word twice. I don't like that. How might you? How might that impact the reach of your voice? There you go. That's what I think I meant to say there. And then the last phase in in Rachel Kooks marketing plan is delight. And that's once people are paying attention to you in your work. What are you delivering them? That is delightful. So this is the quality of your teaching the quality of your research the quality of your service leadership. Right. And this is being a good colleague, this is being responsive being ethical being engaging, right. And so I've been attract, engage, nurture, invite delight. I walked through that sort of from the perspective of research. If I think back to Jennifer 1.0, I could have easily walked through that from the perspective of teaching, because I taught German Language and Literature at a university quired to take language classes. But that was a couple semesters, and once the semesters were gone, anything above and beyond, you know, German, one, and two, unless you were a major, it was entirely elective. And so attracting students to those classes, was an annual event, right or a semester by semester event, here are the cool new electives we have, please come look at them, please come and roll. And then once a student took a class with you like and were part of your community, how are they paying attention? How did you invite them in? How did you you know, get them to engage with the content? How did you nurture them along and deliver a delightful experience? All of those things that might be part of how you already are automatically working, are a kind of marketing. And if you're not doing those things, and the marketing framework is intriguing, like how are you marketing your work? Who is your audience? What do you want to see your work and why? And I think that if I had not? Well, how do I want to put this when I was a professor, and I was beholden to the genius notion that if it was good, it would just stand on itself. I resented marketing. Now that I see both academia and my coaching and consulting business, through through different eyes, I realized that even good things need to have a light shone on them to say, Hey, this is happening over here. And it's really cool. And if it looks like it's your thing, why don't we exchange information and just keep tabs on each other. And then when you have a need, I might have something that can fulfill that need and vice versa. Right? So making friends with the notion of marketing, making friends with the notion of networking, because it allows you to find your people because it allows you to engage in that pedagogical or scholarly conversation with more than just yourself. And this impacts when I talked with my clients about things like this, this has impacts on the confidence you have in your voice because you have confidence in who it's reaching. It has confidence in how you submit things for publication and how you talk with editors and reviewers. Again, because you're confident in the fact that you're part of a scholarly conversation and you are not a sole individual who is weathering some kind of critique storm. But if you if you're not out there, right if you're not attracting and engaging your people. Then when it comes to marketing your classes, pitching your research going up for grants, you end up feeling a lot more alone. So building your voice, building your brand and finding your people, all of those things that a part of marketing, I think they make the job of the academic, less lonely, and more engaging, because it foregrounds the fact that this is happening in community.

So I would love to hear how you feel about marketing, in higher education, how you feel about marketing your own work, because there's the marketing of the institution and the degree programs that is being done by marketing and communications, professional professionals on campus. And you might have thoughts and feelings about that too. But when it comes to your own marketing, marketing, your own work getting it out there. How do you feel about it? does it inspire delight and joy? does it inspire dread and fear? I would love to hear that because I think there are fun ways to approach this with sort of some expansive ungenerous thinking that get us out of our own way. And allow us to adopt a model like the attract, engage, nurture, invite delight model, to just see are we doing the good things that we can do that enhance our reputation, that enhance our know ability and find ability, so that when we are the answer to something, and when we do have a voice to use in a conversation, people know that we're there. So those are my thoughts today on marketing as a professor. I hope you found it interesting, and I look forward to hearing what you think. I will be back again in a while to talk with you some more about insights from where I sit about being an academic.