- Marketer Milk
- Posts
- 7/19/2022
7/19/2022
Marketer Milk
July 19, 2022
Hey 👋
As a marketer, how do you choose which companies to work with?
You work for a company that doesn’t need you to stay alive, but needs you to thrive.
Hear us out.
The silent killer of many startups is retention. If a company can’t retain its users, or create repeat customers, the marketing process is going to be an uphill battle that you’ll eventually lose.
Acquiring more users, or customers, is going to be like pouring water into a bucket full of holes at the bottom. You will never be able to pour enough water to fill the bucket.
Brian Balfour, former VP of Growth at HupSpot, famously said, “retention breeds acquisition, not the other way around.”
People think marketing is about getting more customers, and it is to some degree. But if those customers don’t stick around, there’s no point in getting more of them — it’s a waste of time and money (unless your business strategy is to churn and burn — which is not ideal).
When people do stick around, it makes marketing more effective.
It’s more fun when you’re working at a company that has a strong retention rate. Your marketing efforts will work better — making it more enjoyable for you because your confidence will boost and you’ll feel good knowing you’re trying to get people to use a product loved by others.
Of course, there are other important things to look out for like company culture and avoiding shitty managers. But... next time you’re interviewing for a marketing position, ask “how is your retention rate and how do you plan on retaining users?”
If there’s no clear answer, it may be a good idea to keep job hunting (unless you truly believe in the product or service a company is providing).
With that, let’s get into what we have in store this week:
Marketing news from the past week
Marketer's Talk
How Loom became a $1B company
Social media stats in Europe
How MakeMyTrip reached 34M visitors/month from SEO
Ad from the past
Website of the week
Cool marketing jobs
And much more
🗞 In the news
🎙 Marketer's Talk
This week, we chatted with Omid Ghiam — founder of Marketer Milk! Here’s what he had to say:
Why did you choose marketing as a career path?
I actually never thought I’d get into marketing as a kid — I didn’t even know it was a career path. I always wanted to be a pilot but ended up studying engineering in university because I grew up in a family of engineers. Pretty quickly, I realized how bored and uninterested I was in what I was studying. So, I randomly started a clothing line during my first year of college for fun. It completely failed, and led me to question what went wrong. I realized how important a strong brand was and how you first need to find people that care. I went down a rabbit hole of trying to understand how to find attention and get that attention to care (I became obsessed). After college, I decided to ditch the engineering life and work at a marketing agency to improve my people skills. Then, I moved to San Francisco to lead content marketing and SEO for a big tech company and learn from the best. But after a few years, I realized that I love marketing more than anything. And I noticed how a lot of companies weren't that great at it. I've also had the privilege to learn in-person from marketers at Google, Facebook, Uber, and other big companies, and I felt like I was doing a disservice by not making this knowledge more easily accessible to others around the world. So, I created Marketer Milk.
What do you think is the next "big thing" in marketing?
I can't predict the future, however, there are two things on my mind at the moment that I think will become a trend in marketing — both revolving around decision making. The first one is that there will be a shift from content to personality. Today, Gen Z doesn't care about your white-paper or 3,000 word blog post (overgeneralizing here). They use TikTok, Reddit, or YouTube to find a solution or recommendation. In other words, they trust personalities over face-less content. So brands will have to learn how to adopt aesthetic values and charm to win the hearts of consumers. The danger here, however, is that when people say they want to search on TikTok for a particular subject or recommendation, what they’re really saying is they want an influencer to tell them what to think. So while I do think this trend is happening, I don’t know if it’s the best for critical thinking. Which may not be important, because the second big thing I think will be AI-based decision making. IBM Watson is working on some incredible technology that I believe will help us marketers make better decisions in our day-to-day work. And there may be a day where consumers use AI to help them make purchasing decisions. When someone is torn between going with option A or option B, AI will tell them the best answer. There will be a day where AI helps us make informed decisions (without much human interference) in our daily lives. And we are already kinda seeing it with dating apps — many people today are finding partners because an algorithm brought them together.
If you could just give one piece of advice to a young marketer, what would it be?
If there’s just one piece of advice I could give marketers it’s to be your customer. Many marketers say that you should know your customers, and that is true. But you will never fully understand another person until you walk in their shoes. If you’re marketing a product, make sure you use the product regularly. Better yet, work at companies that sell products and services that you already use. It will help you understand the customer journey better because you’ll be able to study your own journey of finding, using, and loving a product. This is especially important for those that work in product, lifecycle, or content marketing. The level at which you can create resources for your customers will be unmatched compared to someone that doesn’t really know the competitive landscape or how to use a product they are promoting. You’ll know the smallest pain points and be a better communicator in your content.
What book do you think every marketer should read?
Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwartz is a book I believe every marketer should own. It’s a timeless book about understanding human desire and how to turn desire into action. Many marketing books and blog posts around this topic are derived from this book. It’s more pricey compared to other books out there, and I treat it more like a dictionary than a book I read cover to cover.
Which goes in the bowl first, milk or cereal?
Believe it or not, I used to always pour the milk first. It wasn’t until I went to college that my roommate questioned if I was a psychopath. I tried his recommendation of pouring the cereal first and haven’t looked back since. Fun fact: the word “milk” in Marketer Milk is actually an acronym for Marketing Is Lucrative Knowledge! ;)
Have a question you want a marketing leader to answer? Submit it here!
📈 All things growth, product, & sales
Loom's product-led GTM strategy to reach $1B, what growth marketing means in 2022, how to learn to talk to customers, and the 6 stages of a B2B sales funnel.
💭 Guess the riddle
What word contains 26 letters, but only has three syllables?
Answer is at the bottom of this email
✍️ Content, social media, & branding
How to work with content freelancers, stats about social media in Europe, and how colors affect branding.
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🍭 Marketing resources
How to track OKRs in Google Sheets (with a free template).
⚙️ SEO (search engine optimization)
How MakeMyTrip gets 34M monthly visitors from SEO, site structure and internal principles, and a case study on 510 CBD websites ranking in Google.
📣 Ad from the past
A Western Electric ad from 1959 — a great example of the BAB framework:
Before: The old painful way of doing something.
After: A future way of doing something.
Bridge: Your way of doing something.
💻 Website of the week
Mojicode, by Attentive, is a game where you guess brand names from emojis.
🧠 Productivity
🏝 Remote marketing jobs
Check out some cool marketing job opportunities right now:
Head of Growth at Draft (fka Contentfly)
Content Marketing Manager at Fingerprint
Paid Media Manager at #paid
Okay, that's it for now 🧡. See you next Tuesday!
What did you think of this newsletter? |
“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.” — Ovid
Riddle answer: Alphabet