You Don't Know What You Don't Know

The best marketers all have this one thing in common.

And here's how to make it your greatest asset.

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- Download the Marketing Director Roadmap to get the one-page blueprint to succeeding as a marketing director.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. One of the things I love most about marketing is that it constantly changes. It's constantly new and refreshed and different. And it never ends. It never gets old or boring. There's always more to learn and more to do. There's new channels and platforms. Of course, there's tons of new tools to explore and play with, and technology is constantly changing too. And it's fascinating to interact with users and test different things and see how they respond to see what gets results and what doesn't. So I love marketing so much for all of that. But it also creates a problem, a dilemma, which is there's nobody who knows everything about marketing. You couldn't possibly know even a fraction of everything about marketing because you only have limited experience. You've only worked at certain companies in certain industries, you've only worked with certain products or types of products, you've only done things in certain channels, launched certain types of campaigns. And there's only so much you can be exposed to. But I found something that's common across all of the best and smartest marketers. And I'm fortunate to have many of them in my private coaching group. And the common attribute that they all have is that they realize that they don't know what they don't know. There's a lot in marketing that you don't know, that you've never done, that you've never experienced. And that's not a problem, that's an opportunity. But if you're not willing to recognize it and realize it and admit that there's a lot that you don't know, then you can never lean in and get the help and support that you need to learn those things. And what's really cool in the coaching group that I have is one, all the marketers can get my help and support. I've seen and done a lot, but even I don't know everything and I haven't seen everything. And so what's helpful is to not only have my advice and coaching and experience, but also to have a group of peers. And that's where the real magic gets unlocked. It's so much easier and more effective, and frankly, more fun to do marketing with other marketers who are smart, who all have a different background and different experience, different exposure to certain types of campaigns or industries or tools, everything. And so marketing gets a lot easier when you have two things. One, an understanding that you don't know what you don't know. And two, a community, a group of peers to help support you and encourage you, to give you advice and feedback, to share what's working and not working for them, and to call out opportunities that you have to improve or to avoid costly mistakes. This is the benefit of admitting that you don't know what you don't know and getting the support and the help of other people. Listen, it doesn't have to be in my coaching group, although it's a great place to do it, and we have a lot of fun and we get amazing results, but you need support from somewhere, from someone, because marketing is a lonely job. And if you're a team of one, especially, you have no one to talk to about marketing. You have no one to bounce ideas off of or to get feedback from. And internally, it's even more of a challenge because typically, in most cases, the people inside your company don't understand marketing. They haven't done marketing and they have the wrong view of marketing. This is why it helps so much to build a community of peers who have been there, done that, who have ideas and understand your challenges and are in the same situation as you. When you surround yourself with other like-minded marketers who have ideas and perspective and experience that they can share with you, not only is marketing more enjoyable, it's also easier because you can bounce ideas and get that feedback and do it faster than you can do it alone. But also the quality of what you produce is much higher because you can skip the steps and avoid all the mistakes that you would make along the way. All the things you'd have to learn doing trial by error, you can just blow past them and get the right answer from the beginning and then build on top of that and improve it even more. That's what's so powerful about having a community of marketers. And so I want to give you some guidance here on how to get a community like this. If you don't have a community of marketers, let me share with you a couple ways you can get one because I think this is so important for every marketer to have. First, there's a lot of communities out there, Slack communities, forums, things like that. Those can be helpful if you want exposure to a lot of different people and a lot of ideas. It's a great place to start if you have no community and you need one. Second, what I think is even deeper of a relationship is to find a few people you like and know and trust. Maybe it's people on LinkedIn, maybe it's someone you've been following their content, engaging, or someone you've worked with in the past in a marketing capacity, or maybe it's someone you already have a conversation going in the DMs, but reach out to them and say, hey, would it be cool if we jumped on a Zoom once a month, bounce some ideas off each other, and talked about and shared what we're working on? I do this with some of my colleagues who I trust and respect, and it's always super helpful to give them feedback and advice and my observations and to get the same from them. It really helps me a lot. The third thing you could do is you could build your own kind of group here. You can get some people together, whether it's in person, like a book club for marketing, if you will, or virtually. I do this every month with the marketing leader roundtable, where we get a big group of marketing leaders together and we talk about our issues, we work through challenges, we share ideas, and every month I teach a few strategies from inside my private coaching group. So if you want to join the marketing leader roundtable, it's free. We do it every month. We usually have about 70 to 80 marketing leaders on Zoom at the same time talking about marketing, working through some strategies and ideas. It's a lot of fun and it's super cool. I'll drop the link in the comments if you'd like to register. Again, it's completely free. And if you're listening to this on my podcast, just go to the podcast link, marketingdirectordaily.com, and click on the button for marketing leader roundtable. You can join for free there. And of course, the last way, and I think the most effective way, if you want a dedicated group of marketers who will be honest and give you constructive criticism, who will encourage you and support you, and someone who will help give you the strategies that have been proven to work and shortcut your time to success, then I think the advisory board is the best place to do that. That's my private coaching group for marketing directors. It's a small group. We meet multiple times throughout the week, and you have all the support and guidance and coaching you need to crush your goals and advance your career. And more importantly, you have a group of friends, really, who can help you and support you and cheer you on through anything, challenges, obstacles, and opportunities. It's an amazing place. If you want the details for that, just send me the DM with the word group, or if you're on the podcast, go to marketingdirectordaily.com and click the button to contact me and just send me the word group or on LinkedIn. No matter how you find a community, you need one. Every marketing leader does. So decide how will you approach this? How are you going to get that community? Because it's essential that you find other people, other marketers who are serious about marketing, who are serious about improving and pushing themselves to help encourage and inspire and push you further. The first step is to admit you don't know what you don't know. And that's a good thing. That's a healthy thing to admit. But then the next thing is you have to find a community of marketers that will be there to support you and to help you develop in your role and in your career.