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A while back I came across the concept of career capital from Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You. The basic idea is that skills, networks, and credentials are a form of capital. Things you build up over time and trade for the lifestyle and compensation you want.

Think of the cranky technical expert who can take their pick of clients and charges eye-watering rates. That’s career capital working.

I found it intuitively true. But I couldn’t quite figure out how it applied to marketing specifically or to being freelance or solo.

So I asked a friend who manages a large marketing team what skills he thought were most valuable to develop. He said PPC skills are always in demand. Useful, but not quite what I was looking for. That’s a job function, not really a lens for deciding what’s worth building.

The clearer answer came from a different conversation. A friend of mine, fellow digital nomad, had just sold his business, was thinking through what he’d do next. He said he wanted to get back into consulting, but in a more leveraged way. Not hands-on delivery. Something where he could still earn well without running a traditionally staffed operation.

His answer: consulting built around uncommon expertise applied to a difficult objective.

That clicked for me. Career capital for marketers isn’t really about job titles or broad skill categories. It’s about being the person who can solve a hard, specific problem that most people can’t.

So for example, not just “I run Facebook ads,” but “I improve conversion rates on PPC campaigns where Facebook can’t track the conversion data.” Not just “I know Asana,” but “I can set up and train an entire team on an efficient Asana workflow from scratch.” That type of thing.

The distinction matters because the second version is rare. The first version has a hundred applicants.

Looking at my own skills, I can see the beginnings of some areas where I could build something like this. Conversion rate optimisation is one I know the basics, but I haven’t really pushed into a genuinely hard version of that problem. Content distribution without an existing audience is another (and honestly, if you’ve cracked that one, I’d love to hear about it).

The filter I’m now using when deciding what to invest time in: does this make me better at a hard, specific objective or am I just adding another general skill to a long list?

That’s the question I’d suggest asking too.

In 2021, I realised I’d spent 9 years doing work without actually learning anything from it.

I was Head of Marketing at an education company. My boss (a close friend now, for the record) pushed me to test something I’d normally have eye-rolled. He asked me to do what is now a classic technique. Promoting a lead magnet through organic social, asking people to reply a keyword if they wanted it. He’d got the idea from a course from what I assumed was a typical Dubai-style course-slinger, which didn’t help his case.

I’d been managing corporate social accounts for years. Hundreds of posts across Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. I’d pretty much written it off – good for keeping the lights on, not much else. So I briefed design, got the copy written, posted it, and moved on.

Then a lot of people replied. New sales came in.

My first reaction wasn’t satisfaction. It was this uncomfortable realisation that I hadn’t even been curious enough to find out if I was wrong. For 9 years I’d been hitting publish without actually testing anything. I didn’t know, and hadn’t tried to find out:

• How people grow followers without just posting more
• Which post types build audiences versus nurture them
• What copy or image formats actually drive engagement
• How to use a CTA to point people toward an offer

Most of that would’ve taken 20 minutes to look into. I had live accounts the whole time.

I think there’s probably a version of this in most areas of life, not just social media.

Trying Cal Newport’s digital minimalism practice for a few weeks was like putting on noise-canceling headphones.

While it significantly increased my peace of mind and lowered my time on digital devices, It wasn’t easy to sustain for long before I hit roadblocks that pulled me back in.

What is digital minimalism?

The crux of digital minimalism is to take a considered approach to using technology to achieve more productivity and peace of mind.

The idea comes from the practices of the Amish.

Cal explains that the culture of the Amish is to carefully consider whether technology is good, or bad for their values and community. If it is considered unhelpful, it is avoided, and vice versa.

To go through this process yourself, Cal suggests taking a break from digital technology and selectively reintroducing what adds value.

How the process works

Cal explains this in his book, outlining a two-phase process:

1. Take a cease-fire from nonessential app technology for 30 days, then reintroduce digital tech afterward.
2. Re-introducing digital tech afterward with purposeful consideration of what you need, and why.

This is how the process went for me.

Timeline Overview

Here’s a quick overview of how my journey went with the idea.

• Week one, I read the book and started implementing the idea of the digital cease-fire. I moved all the temptation apps on my phone to a special folder, so I knew whether or not I was stepping over the line. I full on deleted some like Twitter. I started changing the way that I messaged people to emphasize coordination for real human contact over messaging.
• Week two, By week two, I felt more at peace but also started getting really bored. Without the feeds of Instagram, and YouTube, to distract me, I ended up feasting on books. As much as I love reading, this can dry out really fast if you’re also avoiding blogs. I was probably doing it wrong, but I avoided digging into rabbit holes via YouTube for the time being too.
• Week three, I started caving. Life dramas triggered me into finding easy distraction and comfort from the feeds. Back to YouTube and Instagram scrolling for a few evenings.
• Week four, I’m starting reintegration early. Cal suggests doing 30 days first but I couldn’t last that long. The boredom was killing me and also, I felt frustrated not being able to use my typical digital means of digging into rabbit holes.

⏱️ Results

My mental health and relationships improved.

The pace of life slowed down. There were genuinely fewer distractions, and I was getting more peace of mind. And I would say my stress level went from 8 out of 10 to about 5.

My average screen time on the phone went from 5 hours per day to 2.7 hours.*

*This would have been lower still, but during the experiment I had a few bad days where I was only able to basically just zombie-out watching shorts or reels for awhile.

This wasn’t sustainable though, because I had to re-integrate technology. So the hours per day is back up to what it was before, but I would argue that it’s higher quality.

Key Benefits

There were some awesome benefits. Some of these you would expect, others, maybe not:

• Less time wasted on social media. Cutting the social media root was great because, basically, all the platforms give me some form of agony.
• Whether political or simply discussions designed to provoke a reaction, I found it interesting how each time I moved to a social media platform like Facebook, or Twitter, it was feeding me something that was trying to hook me in the very first post.
• Less mindless watching. I’m a fan of business and marketing-related stuff on YouTube, and sometimes I fool myself into thinking I’m not wasting time because it is edutainment videos. But it was just passive learning. Now, I jump onto YouTube and research a specific topic that I want to learn about and stop once I feel I have satisfied with that vertical.
• Fewer notifications. Because I changed my messaging style to wards coordinating better quality interaction, such as phone calls, the amount of light touch interaction needed was reduced significantly. People don’t need to ping you every day if they know you’re gonna call in a few days.
• Better conversations. In his book, he emphasizes Human interaction with people rather than mere digital connection with people. This means conversations and video calls, not messages and likes. You really do feel more connected and heard, and likewise, your friends do too.
• More focused study. By relying on books and purposeful inquiry, I studied more productively. I jumped onto YouTube only to learn something specific. I read a book on the topic instead of getting pulled in a thousand directions by Wikipedia or blog spirals.
• Better routines. Knowing that I needed to control my digital habits meant that I built new routines around when I engage with people. I reintegrated messaging technology into my life during lunch breaks and dinners eaten alone, for example.

Challenges

As you can expect, not all rainbows, though. Here are some of the challenges.

• Different perspectives on messages. Some people just love to ping back and forth. Particularly significant others. It can be hard to change to a higher-quality interaction focus without making people feel ignored or neglected.
• Boredom. The author warns that you need to be prepared to replace new downtime with hobbies. But there’s only so much you can do if your hobbies are fairly intensive. There was a lot of time where I had no idea what to do and didn’t have enough energy for any seriously demanding hobbies. I mostly defaulted back to reading books.

Tips

If you’re interested in trying digital minimalism these tips might help you.

• Prepare some time-sink hobbies. If you’re gonna have a lot of downtime, you really do need to prepare what you’re gonna fill the gap with. I suggest walking and reading.
• Discuss with your significant/close contacts. This is a key area of support. It will also make your experience easier, since likely, they may be the most impacted.
• Schedule messages. Both reading and replying. Scheduling emails to send at the end of the day prevents back-and-forth distractions and allows the recipient more time to respond thoughtfully.

• Leverage media wishlists. You know on YouTube how you can save videos to watch later? To stop yourself from scrolling use the feature. You can also use Pocket to save blog articles to read later. This helps break the reflexive habit of endless scrolling.
• Lean on content curators. I used Glasp to source of some of my read-later content rather than self-discovery. They saved me from getting stuck in the scroll.

So, has anybody else tried this?

Having been actively marketing for the last 10 years, and hired maybe a dozen juniors, this is a summary of everything I’ve learned and my tips for people trying to break in.

I will add the caveat that my experience is more towards working with startups and smaller businesses. But I’ve had a pretty decent spread of positions across the US, UK, and Asia, and on both brand and agency sides so hopefully, my advice can apply broadly enough to your situation.

I get that the current environment is hard so hopefully this can help.

Getting Experience Without A Marketing Job 🤔

If I had the appetite for risk, I would bet you $10 that this is probably your number one complaint.

How are you supposed to get jobs where everyone asks for experience if no one will give you a start? I’ve been there and I recall wanting to throw my laptop out the window when I saw a job post like this.

It is crazy frustrating.

The good news is that there are a couple of ways that you can get experience without having someone employ you in marketing:

• Make a blog. This was actually one of my cheat codes. by doing a blog, you can show that you can create content and probably do some basic analytics on what is performing and what isn’t. but if you take it to the next level, you might begin to start promoting your work on social media to get traffic. And hey, now you’re getting involved in social media. Heck, you might take it a step further and try to get subscribers, so now you’re doing a form of inbound lead generation. Your blog doesn’t even have to be about marketing. I created a super basic blog way back in the day that was just me interviewing people who I thought could share really interesting insights. It’s an approach I still use today on my podcast, but prospective employers loved it.
• Write socially. One small downside of running your own blog is that no one’s going to see your work until you stop promoting it. Which is a great thing to learn by itself. But you also sometimes need the data super quick, so writing on social platforms like Reddit and Twitter and Medium will give you that feedback. Again, this will show that you can create content but you’re also data-driven in learning what people like to read and how you can use that to optimize your posts.Treat your professional brand as your own business and build that up to show people that you have vision and the skills to build a brand. Spend some time developing an online portfolio, develop your social media skills — especially LinkedIn — and then use those as resume builders! I had an applicant who had no official business experience, but they had amassed a subscriber list of 1,000 contacts and 25,000 LinkedIn followers.Nick Mattar, Marketing Educator and Founder @ Digital Detroit
• Highlight your existing experience, where ever it comes from. When you’re new, and even when you’re experienced, your imposter syndrome is going to be through the roof. That’s okay, but don’t let it stop you from seeing the experience that you already have. For example, have you ever scheduled social media posts for anything, even your own Instagram account? Have you grown a social media following on Twitter by being a nutcase about games? That’s relevant experience. Have you done any kind of research on what people might like about content or products or how they consume media? That’s marketing experience.
• Make a small business. This is such a no-lose proposition. Provided that you don’t go absolutely bonkers and break the law, if you do a small business like selling T-shirts print on demand, or making a small neighborhood service such as cutting lawns which you promote using flyers, you’re going through the full works of creating marketing plans and executing them. The worst case is that you get experience. The best case is that you actually make yourself an income and an alternative to getting a job. You don’t need a perfect idea, just try something and go through the motions for 6 months.
• Volunteer. It’s intuitive to think that you can look for marketing roles at charity organizations or non for profits, but you can also fandangle your way in to do a marketing-related tasks even if that’s not the core of your role. For example, when I was a university student I volunteered at the MS Society I and pitched creating a student internship programme, which involved needing to market it to recruit students.If you’re keen to get into marketing, but lack experience, ask if your friends and family know anyone running an agency that can give you some work experience. Offering your services for free, e.g. writing blogs or helping with outreach tasks is a good way to learn, get feedback from marketing professionals and build your CV.Beth Baxter, Founder @ The Blurb Agency

Hopefully, these 5 ways show you some ideas and how you can get experience without actually having a marketing job already.

Starting Career Pathways 🗺️

Okay so you might be working on your experience now, where should you apply?

Honestly, I think you should just apply everywhere if you’re trying to break in but here are some general categories. These will be relevant to you if you’re looking to pursue a particular type of marketing career.

• Marketing agencies. The two main types are strategy/creative agencies that do stuff like cool branding and advertising, and execution/tactical agencies like your local web design or Facebook ads shop. Keep this in mind because if you’re thinking you want to be Donald Draper, then you’re going to be looking at a strategy, creative or advertising agency and not a pay-per-click house. But if you want to blow up apps on the Apple App Store with ads, then you’re looking at a tactical agency. The advantage of working for agencies is that you’re going to get a wide range of experience because they’re going to have a whole bunch of clients that you work with- not just one company. Arguably is more stressful though because you’re on the service end of the relationship working with other companies.
• Brands. These are the companies that buy services from marketing agencies. This is not just consumer products but also includes services companies, tech companies, etc. If you want to work with a particularly cool company, then this is the way to go. Also, it gives you the advantage of seeing your ideas come to fruition over a longer period of time. Arguably it could be less stressful than working for an agency because you’re the buyer if you work with a bigger company. If you work with a small startup, then it’s going to be stressful because you’re going to be having to do everything and work it out yourself. Management is going to be crap as well. The advantage of working with a smaller startup though is similar to working with an agency. You’re going to get a broad range of experience which you can use later.
• Freelancing. This is an interesting one because it’s similar to the starting of the business idea above. You’re going to go through the motions and you’re going to get experience no matter what you do. My advice is you going to have to pick one thing to try at a time. It’s really hard to get good at multiple things at the same time. Think of each service you offer as a product line and try to be as specific as possible. For example blog post writing, or email writing. Not email funnel building or inbound marketing. These are more advanced and you can get there, but the likelihood that you’ll actually be able to get any good at them in a short period of time is very low. You could think of it like a tech tree where you start at the bottom and then you work your way up and add more complicated offerings as you go along. For example, you might write blogs, then move to press releases. or you might write blogs and then move into lead magnets, then into conversion rate optimization etc.

Again, I don’t suggest you necessarily pick one pathway to start since you’re trying to break in here but it helps to know what the lifestyle might be like ahead of time.

Application Tips 📌

I know there are a million and one CV tips out there, so I’m trying to keep this to the stuff that you may not have read elsewhere.

• Use a text-based CV. It is tempting to make your resume in Canva, but the problem with this is that companies are using application tracking systems that screen the text of your CV. So if you do it in a graphical way sometimes the screening goes wrong. You’re better off using a nice clean word-based CV.
• Get feedback. Ask your friends and family who work in marketing for their feedback on how you can tailor your CV to better explain your marketing experience. it’s like having a free resume-writing service.
• Apply like it’s your job to apply. People are shooting out like 10 to 20 applications and then wondering why they’re not getting any interviews. When I finally got my first job, I was told that 150 other people applied as well. It is a numbers game. That was just after the global recession thing and it’s probably even worse these days. You need to hit hundreds of applications. Don’t worry about stuffing it up and doing a crap application. If 150 people are applying to the same thing the odds are that they remember your accidentally stuffed-up application is basically zero.
• Prepare for questions. We all know it’s a game but at least in this one you can work out the typical questions that they’re going to ask ahead of time and prepare some smart answers to them. Trying to be authentic and stuff here is cool, but the odds are everyone else has polished answers and you’ll just stand out as looking unprepared.
• Follow up gently. Try to apply directly by email where appropriate. this will let you follow up gently because odds are, Given the number of people who are applying, your application will get lost so this is important.
• Try harder than everyone else. Once you start getting interviews, now is the time to over-prepare. try to do things that impress the employer. For one job I got I had basically prepared an entire marketing plan for them to go through and they loved this. I was the only one who bothered.

With these tips, I hope you can start to take some action and start getting interviews.

Nice To Have Certifications 🏅

In my opinion, certifications are nice to have because they show you have some knowledge of the areas you’ve studied, and this saves time when onboarding new folks.

Sign up for a free HubSpot account and start getting certified, starting with Inbound Marketing, then on to more specialized certifications like Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, SEO and more. You can get really valuable hands-on experience using HubSpot that you can add to your LinkedIn profile and resume to showcase your skills in a very tangible way.

Jennifer Nixon, Marketing and HubSpot Expert at maka Agency

• HubSpot inbound marketing certification. This certification is free and it’s fairly robust in that it covers a lot of essential topics involved in marketing. Truthfully is directed more toward the startup and services industries, but it’s nice to have.
• Google Analytics. While Google is changing to GA4, much to everyone’s annoyance, Google Analytics is still the basic standard of online analytics. If you actually learn this and get good at it, you’ll look slightly better than a lot of other applicants. And there’s no escaping it, you’re going to need to learn it at some stage anyway.

If I had to choose one, I think it would be Google Analytics.

Recommended Books 📚

If breaking in was an exam, and you were looking to study to prepare, reading books to some degree is a little bit of an irrelevant distraction. But I do think they’re useful to help understand the greater context if you’re willing to put in the extra effort.

• The Long View by Brian Fetherstonhaugh. The author was the head of Ogilvy Canada, and wrote about how to manage your career. to me, this gives you the overarching structure of how a marketing career works. The basic summary is that when you start you focus on gaining skills, in the middle of your career you focus on making money, and at the end you look to give back.
• Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by Alan G. Lafley and Roger Martin. P&G is considered one of the best marketing organizations in the world. This is the top-down view of how they view strategy, and is very relevant to marketers. Strategy is easily a third of marketing but gets less than 10% air time. So it’s worth reading this one
• Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. These guys are the popularizers of the inbound marketing approach which is very relevant to service businesses or B2B SaaS companies. It gives you the framework of which the tactical marketing is happening.
• Hacking Growth by Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis. This is a foundational book for startup marketers, particularly those working with apps or platforms that involve lots of users spending time there. It gives you the overall framework of how to think about growing an app or digital product.

Again, I don’t think reading more books is necessarily the thing that is going to get people the job but it’s nice to have a greater perspective.

Other tips 🛟

Here are some other pointers I got from asking the marketing community:

Get into communities and groups early on, whether it’s on Slack channels, Reddit groups, Facebook communities, LinkedIn groups, etc. The insight you get from just observing the discussions by the experts there is gold!

Khyati Agrawal, Marketing Manager @ Content Beta

What To Do From Here 🏁

Hopefully, that wasn’t too much to digest all in one go, but regardless here is a quick roundup on what to do from here:

1. Start a blog
2. Finish your resume
3. Get feedback and adjust
4. Start applying now, and keep applying
5. Create a list of the common questions
6. Prepare your answers
7. Get the Google analytics certification
8. Read one or two relevant books

Recently I’ve been reflecting on the overall suggestion made by Cal Newport to declutter my digital lifestyle and focus on the essentials.

As part of his book Digital Minimalism, Cal recommends folks cut down on the amount of digital apps and tools they use to then re-intergrate them later with thoughtfulness as to what they are being used for.

The mission: tone down the noise of our modern lifestyles by 10 by reducing the amount of unconsidered digital interactions.

In doing this myself, I found that I needed to reintroduce technology in a productive way to help me find and read better blogs. One of my favorite tools for this has been Pocket, but unfortunately, the content discovery part of the app is lacking.

The problem is, and I’m sure that you’ve noticed it recently, is that you can’t really Google insightful stuff to read anymore.

Most of the first page of Google’s content is clearly SEO optimized content written by underpaid interns or worse, AI, which is a rehash of everything else you already knew.

Alternatively, if you want to get angry- you could try check for recommended content in your Twitter or Facebook feed. But I think we can probably agree that’s a rabbit hole that typically ends with clenched fists rather than a stack full of worthwhile reading.

Anyway, while researching alternatives I came across Glasp, a social highlighting tool.

Basically, you can highlight articles you read, store the highlights, then read others’ highlights while sharing your own.

And yeah, I get it. Adding a social media aspect to yet another thing may sound like a reason to roll your eyes 😂, but in this case it is actually cooler than it originally seems.

First, Glasp works by adding a Chrome extension into your browser.

From there, you can use their highlighting tool on the articles you’re reading (ahem, like this one?) to save the highights into your Glasp profile.

Example of me using the highlighting tool on Cal’s website.

Finally, once you’ve highlighted enough content, you’ll be able to review and reflect on your work at a glance on your profile.

You can comment on your own work to summarize it, or comment on others to start a discussion about their learnings from that particular piece.

Admittedly, I get a little vain satisfication from seeing other people enjoy my highlights, too. So yes, please, upvote my stuff 😉.

👉 But the best part of the app isn’t necessarily adding your own thoughts on there. It’s seeing the learning materials of others.

By setting your topic interests (currently limited to 10) you can start seeing a list of interesting content to add your reading list when you filter by topic on your home page.

Typically, the articles that people find most insightful can be great reads to add to something like Pocket, that I mentioned before.

So far, I’ve managed to stack up my reading list with authors I could never have discovered otherwise. No doom scrolling or Google searching required.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about community engagement for marketers to understand what certain groups of people are interested in and talking about.

Naturally, LinkedIn groups would be a fit for this, but my short interactions with them in the past have been quite sad in that I see most groups mainly full of spam.

But you know, that was in 2010 or something. I should probably take another look.

Here are my notes, not that in-depth but perhaps enough that you can get a quick read on the group situation yourself.

Is anyone interested in LinkedIn groups?

As you can see from the graph above, my super scientific method of looking up LinkedIn groups as a keyword on Google trends shows that interest has been slowly dying over time.

Hmm, no surprises there.

This is really sad to see but what was interesting to me was that popularity seemed to be greater in certain countries.

Singapore?

Singapore of all places seemed to be a really engaging place for LinkedIn groups. So I decided to have a closer look. Perhaps they will have some halfway decent groups.

Are LinkedIn groups full of spam?

With the country identified I headed over to LinkedIn and found one of the most popular groups that I could fairly easily join.

And I noticed as soon as I joined was that the group was mainly full of spam, as expected.

The first non-link post after 36 link posts in a row.

(Good on you, Sandeep!)

I appreciate that a lot of people have some great content to share but it took me quite a few scrolls to actually see posts that didn’t share a link and focused on networking or discussion.

I can’t really get a proper read on Singapore though. No other group accepted me. (The group quality is … probably ok, in there?).

Ok, so this was Singapore, but what about other places?

I decided to try and join a whole bunch of other groups and see what some of the stats were on how many posts were sharing links or spamming, and how many were starting discussions.

Unfortunately, many were much, much worse.

I won’t screenshot them here because they need all the help that they can get, but many of them had around 59 link posts to 1 conversation-related discussion post.

Is it worth posting in LinkedIn Groups?

Knowing that most groups were full of spam (except for maybe some Singaporean groups), this made me start to question, does posting in the groups even work?

I headed over to a super popular group with over 144,266 members and set up a poll.

Polls have been taking over LinkedIn recently so I thought this would be a really easy way to get a read on polls.

I will admit, maybe my poll wasn’t very interesting or useful to the hundreds of thousands of people in the group, but two votes including one of my own is a little sad.

Are they useful?

OK so posting in groups isn’t even that useful anyway it seems. Perhaps the reason is the reputation has been so tarnished that people don’t even bother, or there is way too much spam in the first place.

I reached out to about five different group owners as well to see if they were willing to share some insights or thoughts with me but sadly none of these have been accepted to date.

I might come back and update this email later once I have heard from some of them.

The question I have is, “What should LinkedIn groups be used for anyway? “

When I think about it, it’s not necessarily a great place to make new connections. You can just look people up and LinkedIn probably wants you to use Sales Navigator if you want to get more targeted in your searches.

For posts, you’re probably better off posting to your entire audience based on how much engagement and impressions you are getting on these things.

And lastly, for building a community, well it seems that Facebook groups are much better for this.

(An honourable mention here goes to Slack too which seems to always have interesting communities being created despite the lack of supporting features. But back to Facebook groups…)

Having run a Facebook group myself and even knowing that members don’t even see every post on their feed anyway, it is much easier to run a group on Facebook even if it is business related.

Something that doesn’t work well on Facebook, however, is trying to market events.

Anyone who has run ad campaigns for Facebook knows that the ad objective on Facebook is pretty bad at getting people to actually register.

They have that dumb feature where you can select “I’m interested” instead of “yes I’m going”, and that still counts as a conversion on your Facebook event ad campaign.

LinkedIn on the other hand much better response rate and you can invite people directly to an event using their mass invite feature.

Yes, I will admit that some people are abusing this right now but it is still a good feature if you’re running in an event yourself.

This brings up an interesting idea.

What could LinkedIn use groups for?

From what I can see they look like they could be an interesting opportunity for LinkedIn to use their groups as a way to build communities through virtual events.

If you survey the market you can see that webinars tend to be more popular with the professional crowd, rather than hobbyists, friendship groups and party-goers.

If LinkedIn wanted, they could probably become the go-to place for online professional events and have them nested in groups.

The audience is already there, people are using the mass invite feature and they are getting results.

Why connect events to groups?

From my experience running events, having the event attached to a group is a key way to get future attendance for upcoming events.

Groups complement and keep the events running.

When people attend more than one event and know other people in the same community, then they are more likely to attend the next and the next.

Perhaps if they leaned into this they could possibly even capture some of the professional communities back from Facebook.

Closing Notes

In any case, I hope you found this as interesting as I did. I know LinkedIn is probably not going to see this post so what are we really going to do about it?

I still have some hope for LinkedIn groups in that they may come back one day but right now it seems their potential is still yet to be realized.

But then again, I said the same thing about Google Plus.

This past week I finally submitted my exam for Mark Ritson’s Mini MBA in Marketing. Mark’s course covers 10 lessons in marketing, combining the best in theory and practice, to teach his marketing planning methodology.

Overall, it has been the best marketing course I’ve taken. I was honestly a bit sad for the experience to end as I was keen to drill into more detail and practice each of the concepts over time.

In order to make the most of it while the experience is still fresh, I’m sharing my key takeaways from the course:

1. Source external company data for the bigger picture

Especially when working in small businesses or technology-focused ones, my natural tendency has been to work out what is currently working and why.

But this distracted me from understanding the market as a whole.

Internal data only tells me what worked for the people who already converted, and who those people are. While the rest of the market may be the same, they may be different.

Getting external data, like from a survey, will help me understand the other opportunities out there in the market.

2. Use surveys to quantify %s of what people think

Surveys always seemed to be a deep-dive activity to me, designed for specific circumstances when you wanted to learn more about people’s experience with products.

But here, I learned that surveys can often be the backbone of your marketing plan after having done qualitative research.

A strong survey has questions that collect information on:

• Demographics
• Purchase funnel activity
• Brand perceptions
• Media habits
• Pricing tastes
• etc

Armed with the information above, I will have most of the answers needed to build a strong marketing plan.

3. How to properly segment a market (and use that to make choices)

Market segmentation is something that I had mainly ignored in practice and relegated it to being a concept that I thought was only for big companies.

But not true.

While I’ve also learned from a podcast interview on segmentation (coming soon), I learned in the course that segmentation is essential to forming a good strategy. It helps me understand who I’m targeting, why them, and what to say exactly.

Often, when working with SMEs and startups, we rush into the marketing with a pre-defined target in mind. At the same time, we don’t take the time to learn who else is out there and whether we’d be better off targeting someone else.

A key tool in Mark’s course was his meaningful and actionable grid. Here are some explanations of it:

• The Right Way to Segment a Market by Ian Barnard
• Market segmentation? Unwrap the best way to nail your marketing strategy by Peter Preston

4. Marketing strategies should be simple to survive the real world

I’ve read countless marketing books which have taught multiple views on marketing and business strategy. However, what I’ve found is that they often avoid spelling it out explicitly.

Mark teaches in the course that strategy, in some sense, is overblown. It’s not necessarily the most complicated thing. It’s a combination of three things:

1. Who am I targeting?
2. What’s my positioning?
3. What’s my objective/s?

As you can see, it is a simple framework but Mark warns it’s not necessarily easy to get right. There is a lot of marketing research and thought that goes on in the backend to make sure that I’ve targeted with good judgment, positioned well and have proper SMART objectives.

😁 Sidenote: Yeah, I cringe a little bit too at hearing SMART objectives. The concept has always seemed a bit rigid to my taste. But in the course, it really does make sense as a strong way to set objectives such that the objectives are instructive and clear.

5. Do both brand building and lead generation

After having been exposed to some of the work by Byron Sharp, using data to prove that you may be better off doing sophisticated mass-marketing rather than targeting, it was great to see Mark’s perspective here.

While not his exact words, the understanding I gained was that his answer is to do both. Long-term brand building to the whole of the marketed (sophisticated mass-marketing) and short-term, targeted marketing to key segments. He calls this ‘bothism’. I’m sure it will catch on.

In a way, this makes sense given the arguments for and against targeting. Against targeting, suggests that most people aren’t in the market for any product or service at any point. The 95% sit here. So why only target the 5%? Instead, build your brand salience and availability.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/i0OKdtaJ8g0?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

On the other hand, pro-targeting arguments suggest that you need that 5% because they are responsive and will give you the ROI on your marketing efforts.

Mark provides an interesting metaphor in that you need brand marketing (long-term) to grow the tree, and targeting (short-term) to pick the fruit.

Read more: How Brands Grow [Speed Summary] by Brand Genetics

6. Decisions multiply their impact on each other

This was a great point raised by Mark, which is that marketing is multiplicative. He explains that there are three stages:

• Diagnosis
• Strategy
• Tactics

His point is that you need to do a proper diagnosis to create a proper strategy. And a proper strategy to choose the right tactics. Screwing up one will screw up the others, sequentially.

This was an interesting point to reflect on as I’ve seen in practice that sometimes the best execution can only grow the business so much until it hits the limitations of the strategy.

This also came out in the exam, where screwing up one part of the process early could lead you down the garden path for the sections that followed it.

7. The core basics of marketing

One of the major values I got out of the course was Mark’s curation of the marketing models out there.

It was interesting to learn how certain ideas and practices developed over time. It became valuable when you had an experienced, reputable industry practitioner go over them with the understanding to pick out which ones you really needed to listen to and why.

In the end, it was a relief to know that there were truly a handful of basics to get right:

• Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
• The Purchase Funnel
• The 4Ps

Better yet, these were the classics.

While I have been over these in both formal learning at the CIM and elsewhere, I feel far more confident and purposeful in my marketing abilities after learning these classics properly and in a way that is practicable.

🖐️ Sidenote: One unexpected part of the course was that Mark himself was very approachable. While he may swear a lot in his presentations, he was very gentle and patient in dealing with folks both on the biweekly Q&As and in the LinkedIn community.

Update 13/11/2018: Google+ is now shutting down following a data breach security flaw. You can read the full article about this on the Google blog here.

Remember when Google+ came out in 2011?

My brother told me he was going to ditch Facebook for a platform that allows you to build circles so you could control who you share content with. It was going to be a Facebook killer, he said.

I always had a secret hope for Google plus. Even though Google is a behemoth, it was still like barracking for the underdog when putting Google+ against other social networks like Facebook.

But instead of becoming a dream social network, Google+ seems to have become a bit of a joke in the marketing world. A place for easy spam. Or a place where people go to build links ‘because it is owned by Google’ so it must be useful. Right?

For the past few years, I pretty much forgot about Google+ and its iterations. I’m guessing you did too.

However recently I began to wonder, what is Google+ in 2018? I did a little digging and here’s what I’ve found.

What does Google Plus do now?

My memory of what Google Plus is supposed to do is hazy. It kept changing after the initial push of being a social network. The latest wikipedia article on Google plus reads:

On November 18, 2015, Google Plus underwent a redesign with the stated intent of making the site simpler and faster, making the new features of Communities and Collections more prominent, and removing features such as Hangouts integration…

Ok, cool. So the main features are:

• Discover. The feed of Google+ which seems to show you posts from people in your circles (friends) and topics you are covering. I guess the dream of marketing folks is to promote their content so that it is organically on as many user’s discover section as possible.
• Communities. This is an easy equivalent of groups or a chatroom (remember those?) feature. Anyone who is in a community can post and comment on other’s material. Posts are organised like tiles, usually two in a row, in chronological order. I’m not sure if this makes it easier or harder to read than Facebook groups which have only 1 post per line. I think it’s probably more confusing.
• Collections. Collections are like Pinterest boards except you can post images and regular links. These are different to groups, because collections only feature posts from the collection author. This reduces the level of spam if the author is using their collection benevolently. I’m assuming the idea here was that one user may create a few virtual scrapbooks which others might find interesting enough to follow.
• Pages and profiles. I’m sure everyone knows these functions already. Businesses, organisations and brands can create pages. People have profiles.

The google meta title reads only ‘Google Plus’. At first browse, Google Plus doesn’t immediately tell me what Google Plus is for either.

The main message from Google on this seems to be the Google meta description of the site. It reads “Discover amazing things and connect with passionate people.”

So understanding this and the features, it seems as though Google Plus is a platform for collecting interesting content such as links and pictures on the web, curated by people that you can follow and communicate with via collections, communities and profiles.

Who uses Google Plus?

Now that I understand Google Plus a little better, I wonder who actually uses Google Plus?

I understand that basically everyone who has a Gmail account is technically a Google+ user but I wanted to go deeper than that.

A quick Google search lead to to find this article by Dustin Stout on social media statistics for Google Plus. The main statistics shown were:

• 395 million active monthly users
• 2 billion registered users
• 28% of users are between 15 and 34
• USA counts for 55% of users
• There is a 74 / 26 % split between men and women

[You can read the full report on all social media channel stats from Dustin here].

Just to double check, I ran Google Plus through Similarweb, a tool that you can use to get approximate insights on site traffic volumes and sources.

The free report on SimilarWeb shows quite different numbers.

The report suggests these statistics instead:

• 289m monthly visitors (compare this to the other estimate of Facebook’s 22 billion)
• Average session duration of 3 minutes
• 4.4 pages per visit
• 48% bounce rate

The demographic data was the most interesting here. The breakdown by user country reads:

[I was curious so I did a rough calculation. 289 million monthly visitors * 3% to approximate French users is about 8.67 m users. Interesting for a country of 66 million people. However a rough calculation based on estimate figures is not going to be that useful — just interesting].

It is hard to say who exactly uses Google Plus based on these two conflicting guides. Dustin notes that his figures are from Google’s own blog, so I assume these are much more telling even though the stats are most likely dated from 2015.

How do people use Google Plus?

Knowing the demographic breakdown and volume of users tells us half the story. With a little browsing around, I could roughly get an idea of whether people actually used the platform.

Was it just a home for spam? Or were people actively curating content, commenting and connecting with each other.

Obviously, the platform is far too big to survey the whole thing. So to get an idea of what is happening, I took the top 10 most popular blog topics from an article by WP Promote to narrow down my investigation.

For each community, I selected their most popular community and used a brief ‘eye-ball’ analysis to check three things which I think can give you an idea on how engaged the platform is.

• Quality of content posted
• Number of +1s
• Number of comments

Again, this is just an approximation in order to get an illustrative overview of what’s happening on the platform.

Here’s what I found.

1. Fashion

The Fashion Bloggers community has 357,000 members. The content is on topic, with mostly fashion bloggers sharing their latest posts. There are a few spammy commercial posts that slip in there. It has a decent amount of likes and comments, too.

2. Health and Fitness

The Health & Fitness group has 130,000 members. As you might imagine, it is unfortunately a magnet for online spam with poorly curated content and obvious link spammers. Comments and likes are expectedly almost non-existent.

3. Music

Music has 390,000 members. The posts are generally all on topic and there is a decent amount of likes. Not that many comments though.

4. Cars

The Cars group has 190,000 members. It has a good number of likes and comments for each post as people share pictures of their own or images/videos of the same. The group has great rules which are enforced by the moderators.

5. Real Estate

This one was not so good. The Real Estate community has 41,000 members and its the expected feed of link building posts. It looks as though the moderator has been inactive since 2016.

6. Beauty

The Beauty community is a mixed group. There are 1.24 million members, so it is huge. The content here is mostly related and gets a decent amount of likes and comments. It must be hard to control the quality in such a large group so I am surprised it is as clean as it is!

7. Travel

The Travel group has 130,000 users. Sadly, it is not quite a place where passionate bloggers share their latest reviews or guides on your dream island holiday. It’s mainly listicle repostings and a few videos — understandably there is a lot of work for one or two moderators to handle. Low likes and comments.

8. Food

foodies+ is one of the more inspiring communities. There are 297,000 members who like, comment and share their love of food. The moderators are doing a good job with strict rules and clearly it is paying off with a clean group. I think this closer to the vision of what Google Plus intended.

9. Movies

The Movies community has 175,000 members. The content shared here is quite good, with users even using sub categories to organise the content they share. There is a decent level of comments and likes too.

10. Photography

The final community I looked at was the Photography group. This group was the biggest of all that I saw with 4.2 million members. The content is generally on point and posts get plenty of likes and comments. This is probably another group that is closer to Google’s desired vision. Except that it is made possible by around 10 volunteer moderators.

Overall, it looks as though Google+ is active in visual areas like photography, food and fashion in communities with strong moderation.

A lot of these areas seem a bit easier to manage because the content that people naturally want to promote is also aligned with the subject.

Communities and spam

Communities on the platform seem to break down where there is misalignment with content that is generally on topic and content that people want to promote. It seems as though moderators can’t keep up and keep the group clean.

A health and fitness group may be easier to control if the topic was ‘health tips’ or ‘health products’ because the millions of list-based articles people are looking to promote would align well with the purpose of the group. Engagement might be higher as well because people visiting the group are likely to be interested in that specific topic.

Maybe this is an opportunity for marketers.

There are thousands of members signed up to groups filled with junk. Perhaps it is a potential opportunity to moderate and sponsor a group, turning it into a clean, useful and interesting community that people get real value from.

Conclusion

There you have it. Google+ looks to be alive in 2018 and focused on content-sharing communities. The quality of the communities depend heavily on moderators. Good groups are around and some of them are quite active but just a lot more of them are filled with junk.

There may be an opportunity for marketers on the platform to take control of low-value communities and renovate them into highly engaged groups but without testing this idea it is hard to say whether it is a good investment of time.

Google+ isn’t quite the social media channel Google dreamed to be but for some reason, I still hope that it will be one day.