“An obsession with quality” is what I do Wish When I was 12 years old I had… but unfortunately I ended up with boatloads of Forever 21 t-shirts.
As it turns out, quality really matters. Our master today – Emily Kramera marketer, investor and advisor for growth-stage B2B startups (and MKT1 Newsletter creator) – told me that her “obsession with quality” is the reason she is so successful in the newsletter space. (With 48,000 subscribers and counting.)
Would you like to find out more? Read on to learn why the MKT1 newsletter creator “never misses a thing” and her advice to all marketers who are the “first” marketing leaders in their companies.
Why the creator of the MKT1 newsletter “never misses anything”.
1. Be prepared to tell leaders what you will stop, start and continue.
Kramer has been the “first” marketer four times in companies with 10 to 300 employees, so my first question was simple: If you’re the first marketer in a company, where the heck should you start?
Kramer told me that whether you’re a team of one or you’re managing a 200-person marketing department, the answer is the same: prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.
“First you have to figure out where you can win. Where can you stand out? Where do you have the biggest advantage over the competition? Which channels make the most sense for your company?”
This means: Stop scrolling through TikTok looking for “inspiration” or convincing yourself that a fancy newsletter giveaway will save the day. Start with what matters most.
“You need to have a framework for how you prioritize – you need to be specific about what you think is important and why. If you don’t, you’ll be inundated with requests.”
One of Kramer’s approaches to starting a new business is to create a “start, stop, continue” plan. This way, leaders can quickly see, “Oh, we already tried that,” or “We’re stopping that, and here’s why.”
Otherwise, your founder could Just be a little too obsessed with the idea of publishing eBooks on Amazon as the “next best marketing move.”
(I’m not speaking from experience or anything.)
2. To sell marketing to executives, compare it to the product team.
“The biggest challenge in my career has been selling marketing. At the beginning of my career I didn’t understand the difference between what I knew about marketing and what founders or other teams knew about marketing“says Kramer.
I feel them: As someone who comes from a family of salespeople, I spend most of my Thanksgiving dinners explaining that brand awareness is still a valuable outcome.
Luckily, Kramer landed on a metaphor that seems to work: She likes to tell founders and executives that marketing teams are like product teams… Not Sales.
Some key similarities: Both product and marketing are multidisciplinary; both have a portfolio of ideas and a roadmap for the big things they want to do; and both require a balance between optimizing specific features/campaigns and introducing new features to support business growth.
Kramer also encourages marketers to make sure they know exactly what their founders are doing think Marketing is.
“During the interview, simply ask the founder, ‘Hey, when you think about what marketers do, what’s top of mind for you?’ Because what if they answer and say “measuring” and you hate measuring?
Their point is simple but sound: Make sure your marketing vision aligns with your founder’s, or prepare for a long road filled with resistance and much less creative freedom.
3. Don’t create a newsletter if you don’t have anything interesting to say.
Kramers MKT1 newsletter Success depends on one question: “Would I text this content to everyone I know is in the room?”
Kramer’s obsession with quality is evident in her newsletter cadence: While many marketers like to send their newsletters weekly or even daily, Kramer prefers to send her newsletter about twice a month. She only wants to send a newsletter if there is something new in it.
“With my newsletter, people tell me ‘I never miss’ – I don’t know if that’s true,” she adds with a wry grin. “I definitely miss it. But this obsession with quality is there.”
And she has a few words of wisdom for anyone looking to create their own: “If you don’t have a storyline that you can talk about in a unique and compelling way – better than anyone else – then you shouldn’t do itT. You can’t just say, “I want to start a newsletter” and then plug content into it. That’s not how it works.”
