Jan 1, 2018
Happy new year from The Inbound Success Podcast! I can't believe today is officially 2018 and the new year has already begun. In last week's Christmas episode, I looked back on 2017 and shared why I started this podcast and thanked the guests that have joined me on this journey so far.
This week, its a holiday again and I wanted to look forward to what I'm resolving to do in 2018, both personally and professionally.
So here goes... Listen to the podcast to hear my Inbound Marketing New Year's Resolutions for 2018, or read the show notes below for a quick summary.
So much has changed since I started practicing inbound marketing. It used to be that you could blog once a week, write an ebook or two and put it behind a gate, promote your content on social media and via email, and your audience and leads would grow. That basic formula - what I would consider the "plain vanilla" version of inbound marketing - just isn't enough any more.
The digital marketing landscape has changed, and today, we as consumers are more concerned about our privacy and less willing to give out our email address and other personal information.
At the same time, more people and brands have jumped into the game and are creating content - and a lot of that content is poor quality.
When you combine these two forces - a growing volume of low quality content and an increasingly privacy-focused audience - you get a climate in which business as usual just won't cut it. Marketers that want to continue to see results from inbound marketing now have to do more and take risks, and that's what has inspired me to come up with my own inbound marketing new year's resolutions.
My Professional Resolutions
Professionally, a lot has changed for me over the past year. On January 1, 2018, I was the CEO of Quintain Marketing, a Platinum level HubSpot partner agency. Now, I'm the Vice President of Marketing for IMPACT, and my team and clients from Quintain have followed me to IMPACT. It's been a great move for all of us.
During my first six months at IMPACT, I was in a sales role and when I look back on that time, I consider it a gift. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to get back in touch with what our audience cares about. Every sales call I had taught me more about what keeps marketers up at night, what their goals are, and what they need in order to be successful.
Now, I'm transitioning into a new role as Vice President of Marketing and taking on ownership of IMPACT's own marketing. Luckily, we have a great marketing team that is doing fantastic work. My job isn't to come in and upset the apple cart. Instead, my focus will be on working with the team to do all the things we already do so well (like publishing regularly to our blog) while also testing out new strategies.
To that end my professional resolutions for 2018 include:
- Ensuring that every piece of content we create has a point of view and embraces the notion of extreme authenticity;
- Treating IMPACT as an innovation laboratory and testing things out on us so that we can then apply our own lessons learned to the work we do for our clients;
- More effectively leveraging the personal brands of our individual team members, our partners, and the members of our broader community; and
- Doubling down on the community we began to create this year with IMPACT Elite, our private Facebook group, and really nurturing the community and ensuring people get value from it.
I'm excited about all of these goals and am looking forward to working on them in 2018.
My Personal Resolutions
In addition to my professional resolutions, I have a list of things that I want to accomplish for myself:
- Reinvesting in Twitter (yes, Twitter!) and working on building relationships with key influencers that I think are on the cutting edge of marketing;
- I would also like to build a presence on Medium, and the first step will be to determine what my "content tilt" is;
- With digital marketing changing so quickly, my BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal) for 2018 is to learn to code - at least at a basic level; and
- Once again this year, I'm aiming to write more (this is a resolution every year, and probably always will be).
I'm not sure if I'll be able to accomplish all of these this year, but it sure will be fun to try!
Will You Hold Me Accountable?
If there's one thing I've learned in life (and with New Year's resolutions), its that I accomplish far more when I have someone holding me accountable. One reason I decided to share my resolutions on the podcast is that I'm hoping all of YOU will hold me accountable (a good friend calls this having an "accountabilibuddy").
In exchange, I volunteer to hold you accountable too. Tweet me @workmommywork and let me know what your resolutions are!
Finally, if you enjoy the podcast, I would be grateful if you'd leave a review on iTunes, or Stitcher, or wherever you listen. We're still a small podcast, and every review means so much.
I would also love it if you'd tell a friend and/or if you know somebody doing great inbound marketing work, please do reach out to me. You can always tweet me @workmommywork. I'm looking for amazing marketers to interview in 2018. It could you, or it could be a friend. Let me know.
In the meantime, Happy New Year, and see you in 2018.