“Obsessed with quality” is me want 12-year-old me already… but unfortunately, I ended up with boatloads of Forever 21 T-shirts.
Turns out, quality really does matter. Our current master – Emily Kramer, marketer, investor, and advisor for B2B growth-stage startups (and creator of the MKT1 newsletter) – told us that her “obsession with quality” is the reason she’s been so successful on the bulletin board. (With 48k subscribers and counting.)
Want to learn more? Keep reading to find out how the creators of the MKT1 newsletter “don’t miss it”, and advice for marketers who are the “first” marketing leaders in their company.
Why the “don’t miss” MKT1 newsletter.
1. Be ready to tell the leader what you will stop, start, and continue.
Kramer has been a “first-ish” marketer four times in companies ranging from 10 to 300 employees, so my first question is simple: If you were the first marketer in your company, where would you start?
Kramer told me whether you’re a team of one or leading a 200-person marketing department, the answer is the same: Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.
“First, you need to know where you can win. Where can you stand out? Where do you have the biggest advantage over your competitors? What channels are best for your business?”
This translates to: Stop doomscrolling through TikTok for “inspiration” or convincing yourself that a good newsletter gift will save you. Start with the most important.
“You need to have a framework for how you prioritize – you need to pay attention to what you think is important, and why. Otherwise, you’ll just get barraged with requests.”
One of Kramer’s steps when joining a new company is to create a “start, stop, continue” plan. That way, executives can quickly see, “Oh, we’ve tried,” or “We’re stopping this, and this is why.”
If not, your founder can just get a little too obsessed with the idea of you publishing ebooks on Amazon as “the next best marketing move.”
(Not speaking from experience or anything.)
2. To sell marketing to executives, compare it to the product team.
“The biggest challenge in my career was selling marketing. Early in my career, I didn’t know the delta between what I knew about marketing, and what the founders or the rest of the team knew about marketingKramer said.
I feel him: As someone who comes from a family of salespeople, I spend most of the Thanksgiving dinner trying to explain that brand awareness is still a valuable result.
Fortunately, Kramer’s got a metaphor that works: He likes to tell founders and executives that a marketing team is like a product team… not sales.
A few key similarities: Both products and marketing are multidisciplinary; both have portfolios of ideas and roadmaps of great things to do; and both require a balance of optimizing certain features/campaigns – while launching new ones – to help the biz grow.
Kramer also encourages marketers to know exactly what they are standing for think marketing is.
“During the interview process, just ask the founder, ‘Hey, when you think about what marketers do, what’s the most important thing?’ Because what if they respond and say ‘trade shows,’ and you hate trade shows?”
The bottom line is simple but good: Make sure your marketing vision aligns with your founder’s, or get ready for long pushback and less creative freedom.
3. Don’t create a newsletter if you have nothing interesting to say.
Kramer’s MKT1 bulletin success depends on one question: “Am I going to write this content for everyone I know who is in that space?”
Kramer’s obsession with quality is reflected in the cadence of his newsletters: While many marketers like to send out weekly or even daily newsletters, Kramer prefers to send them about 2X per month. They only want to send you a newsletter when there is something new.
“People say ‘I never miss a beat’ with my newsletter – I don’t know if that’s true,” he added with a wry grin. “I definitely miss it. But the obsession with quality is there.”
And he has some wise words for anyone looking to make their own: “If you don’t have a story line that you can tell in a unique and compelling way — better than anyone else — you shouldn’t be doing it.t. You can’t just say, ‘I want to start a newsletter’ and then paste the content into it. It can’t be like that.”