Jaclyn Mullen has mentored close to 1,000 marketers throughout her entire career across her time teaching at General Assembly, speaking for USC’s Masters of Marketing Science program, and building her own teams. Professionally she has spent the past 15+ years riding the digital wave, first starting off in content marketing and organic social in B2C before switching to B2B SaaS. Now at her 4th startup, Jaclyn loves her place as Head of Marketing for TheLoops, an AI platform improving CX, where she handles every aspect of the company’s marketing.
Questions and topics we covered include:
And more!
Connect with Jaclyn on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaclynofalltrades/
Jaclyn Mullen 0:00
So I know that some people listening right now might be in between jobs and want a full time gig. And that is, that’s absolutely okay, I get wanting that stability. Don’t underestimate the power of freelancing and being able to earn some of that income for yourself and using the skills of, you know, driving revenue, controlling costs, those being really attractive skills when you flip back into a full time role.
Kenny Soto 0:31
Hey there, you are listening to the people Digital Marketing Podcast, the number one resource for marketers who want to impress their boss and eventually become their boss become the CMO. And you just heard a clip from Jacqueline Mullen, Jacqueline has mentored close to 1000. Marketers throughout her entire career across her time teaching at General Assembly, speaking for us sees masters of marketing science program and building her own marketing teams. Professionally, she has spent the past 15 years writing the digital wave, first starting off in content marketing and organic, social and business to consumer before switching to business to business SAS company. Now, her fourth startup, Jacqueline loves her place as Head of Marketing for the loops, and AI platforms improving customer experience, so she handles every aspect of the company’s marketing. On this episode, we talk about what it means to be a good marketer, especially as we’re entering and getting closer into winning 24. We talk about the skills needed to be successful in your first role as a marketing leader, the basics of b2b marketing strategy, how freelancing and freelancing experience translates to management skills, and much more. So if you’re interested in being a marketing leader one day, and learning from someone who’s mentored more than 1000, marketers, this interview with Jacyln Mullen is for you know, for further ado, let’s tune in to my conversation with Jaclyn. How are you, Jaclyn?
Jaclyn Mullen 2:08
I’m doing good.
Kenny Soto 2:09
I’m excited for what the rest of this year holds for the world digital marketing. And since this is a marketing podcast, I’m going to be asking you a lot of questions around the same topic. But before I go into any specifics, I just want to get a lay of the land of who you are, as a professional, get more context about you and your story. So my first question for you, Jacqueline, is how did you get into the world of marketing?
Jaclyn Mullen 2:32
That’s a really great question. I mean, it does date back to high school, even there was an organization called deca, which I belong to, and DECA was really great. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do fashion marketing. I was I was a singer, dancer, you know, songwriter. At that time, I wasn’t sure if I was going to go into music, business and do marketing there. But I think very early on from high school, having had that opportunity to participate in that club gave me you know, this idea of marketing is the four P’s people product, price promotion. And from there, you know, Kenny, what really happened was that just the rise of technology accelerated what was possible across marketing. And so I’ve always been in this space, pretty much in every single role that I’ve been in, be it part time work, or you know, full time while paid work. But it really does start back to wanting to do something creative, but also be able to earn a living, essentially, yeah. Yeah, finding that right balance is important, especially because you want to make sure that your job is exciting, but at the same time practical. When it comes to what you’re currently doing today. Can you give the listeners more context? Absolutely. So I’m a head of marketing today for a startup, which essentially means that I joined at a you know, Director executive level, but pretty much have to do everything from the ground up as if it at that individual contributor level. So we’re talking email marketing, we’re talking, you know, our social media marketing, we’re talking even sometimes coming up with our assets that we need to create a first sales enablement, and then building out the team around me building out those processes so that when we hit a certain tipping point, in revenue, I can be able to say, Okay, here’s exactly who I need to bring on now for this department in this role and function that’s vital to us growing our customers. And there’s a lot of growth marketing that’s involved. I know that terms being used a lot, Kenny so we can talk about that and dig into it further. But I’ll preface everything with your wrap everything with just saying my company provides AI for CX teams, customer experience teams and so it’s a really exciting time to be that head of marketing, who’s you know, got their hands involved in everything and is looking at
Jaclyn Mullen 5:00
At All right, what marketing levers are working so that when the time comes, I have the right SOPs in place and the ability to hire marketers and build my team out.
Kenny Soto 5:10
My next question comes from the context, some of the listeners probably already noticed that they listen to past episodes, but I don’t want to assume that they know. I was the first marketing hire at a b2b startup, I got fired. And I’ll be transparent as to why I wasn’t ready for the position. And I think one of the hesitations I have for even attempting, playing out like sending out feelers saying, Hey, maybe I want to try this out again, is, I don’t know, what is that clear inflection point, because I don’t feel like I’ll ever be 100% Ready for the role. But I’d like to be more prepared. What are the skills that you developed, that you believe helped you, prior to even applying for the role? What essential skills you believe the listeners should have? If they ever want to become the first full time marketing hire potential leader for a startup?
Jaclyn Mullen 6:07
This is a really great question. And I don’t want to give like a super long answer, but I think context really helps, right? So for me, I graduated from college way before all this digital stuff took place, and actually did business development for about two years, right for a payroll company. The reason why I’m sharing that is I worked for very small business, but I was able to get a lot of responsibility. So I wasn’t just, you know, calling on clients and selling them, our materials, I got involved in planning the trade show, coming up with the collateral for the trade show, you know, working on what started to be sent emails back then. And I knew that selling payroll solutions and insurance, if you if you go back to what I said I wanted to do in high school was not what my North Star was. And I wanted to get back into more of the creative aspects of creating campaigns, connecting with people. So I actually freelanced for a little bit, it was not popular, I actually quit a full time paying job back when freelancing wasn’t even as popular as it is today to start freelancing. And you might be asking yourself, Well, what did you do to start freelancing, I started freelancing specific to email marketing, and social organic social media marketing. That opened up doors for me to actually, you know, be a solopreneur for a period of time in LA. And I think that that solopreneur ship and that freelancing, were what allowed me to now flash forward come into head of marketing roles for b2b companies, and be able to be, you know, successful, right? And success, as defined as being tenacious. And you know, every single day, just cleaning the slate. What happened yesterday happened yesterday, but like, Today’s a new day, there’s new opportunity. How do I have that learning mindset? How do you have that grit, but then also having been self employed and having had to bring revenue in? How do you quantify and understand if I do X, Y, and Z actions, what money will come as a result of it? So I know that some people listening right now might be in between jobs and want a full time gig. And that is, that’s absolutely okay, I get wanting that stability. Don’t underestimate the power of freelancing, and being able to earn some of that income for yourself. And using the skills of, you know, driving revenue, controlling costs, those being really attractive skills, when you flip back into a full time role.
Kenny Soto 8:48
What I’m what I’m hearing here is, it’s a duality, maybe that’s the right word. But there’s two specific skills. One is just general business chops, where you may not get that from a marketing coordinator slash associate role. So just understanding Hey, with the budget that you have, you got to make sure that you’re bringing in more than what you’re what you’re spending. So there’s that. And then the second thing, which what I’m hearing from how you started your freelancing career is, at the very least having one to two if not three, core skills, that you can say, here are my strengths, you’re not going to find this basket of strengths with another candidate. That coupled with business knowledge makes you the perfect leader for marketing. Would you say that’s a good summary?
Jaclyn Mullen 9:35
Kenny, you’re hired? Absolutely. I mean, I the other piece of this too, with the business knowledge is, it’s not always using budget constraints too. It’s being resourceful. And I think that any marketer that’s listening in this day and age I remember when I was actually self employed, having friends that went out, and they invested by way of their credit cards in these $20,000 automation systems, and They’re like, this is going to make my business and I went with all the freemium tools, I went with MailChimp, I went with like, anything free, I could get my hands on, companies want you to be resourceful. They certainly want you to be, and they want you to understand going back to this tipping point, at what point do I need to switch from that? Free, here’s that level that this free resource can get me to towards now I gotta like turn on the firepower. Right. And so it is a juggling act where that business acumen comes in most definitely.
Kenny Soto 10:32
One thing that I’m also noticing from doing these podcasts episodes is that there’s obviously a need for you to stay up to date as a marketer with all of the tactics, platforms, tools, etc. But none of those things matter if you’re not strong with creating the right strategy and being able to adapt these strategies. So as a marketer is progressing through their career, how do they, one, start creating a habit and or executing on? Here’s a marketing strategy, here’s a set of frameworks I use to come to this conclusion on how we can execute on this plan. And then to I would say, let’s, before we even go into that, can you describe what a marketing strategy is? And then we’ll go into how do you get better at making those strategies?
Jaclyn Mullen 11:27
Yeah, I mean, I think this complements what you were just sharing about that business acumen really, really well. Tactics are like, hey, activities and actions that we can take, and you can take tactics, you can make that happen till the cows come home, we need to be on tick tock, we need to be on LinkedIn, we need to post you know, three times per day or per week on LinkedIn, we need to send out an email once per week, the strategy is, who are we sending this to? What segment of customer? Is it that we’re sending this to? What is their pain point? Or what is the solution that we provide that we solve for them? And why do they care? Right? And then strategy also brings into effect. It’s not just like, how many touch points or activities do we need to have before that customer starts, that potential customer starts to like, pay attention to us and come into our team? How many of those, you know, cohorts of customers do we need to have going at any one given time across that rhythm of touchpoints, so that we start to see that revenue come back in. And I just had this experience with my last two direct reports. They were amazing hires that came into the team. And we’re like, always ready to go and hit the publish button or jump into execution. And I would pull back and I would look at maybe some of our copy, I would look at, you know, articles that we were sending out, we did a lot of leading from the company, you should upgrade to this product. And I’d be like, but why the strategy really anchors into why is this relevant for this particular customer? How is this even different than what already exists in the marketplace? strategy helps you as a marketer, understand why your product is a need to have not a nice to have.
Kenny Soto 13:17
And with that context in mind, what’s your recommendation for marketers to get better? Is there any other questions that you consider for yourself?
Jaclyn Mullen 13:28
So this is actually an exercise I have my current team doing, which are STRS, believe it or not, I mean, we start looking at GE, to reviews of some of the companies that were prospecting. And we look to see what are people saying they dislike about this company? And that starts to give you some understanding, if you’re if you’re marketing is a matter of getting people at top of funnel or nurturing them and moving them along, you know, what are some of the hangups that they have with your competitors right now? And how do you speak to how you’re different and help them solve that. So I think looking at gathering customer data, talking to customers, getting as close as you can to a customer now if you’re a job seeker, you might be like, how am I supposed to find customers for company that I’m aspiring to go work for, but you can get a lot of really great data on Reddit. On LinkedIn, if you type in if you go to peep the company’s pages. I’ve seen a lot of companies that I’m prospecting where they’re their customers are writing about them on LinkedIn, some positive, some negative. So all of this data exists. It’s just a matter of the means with which you go about it. Once you understand what are my customers afraid of? What are they hopeful for? What are they really trying to get out their core, then you can set the campaigns then you can set the tactics then you can set what differentiates you and the frequency. But you’ll you’ll see marketers Over and over on LinkedIn, say you’ve got to talk to the customers first. That may not always be a physical conversation, go to some of these places where that data is being shared. And you can absorb it. Twitter is another great one too.
Kenny Soto 15:12
Yeah, I was gonna mention Twitter. And then if the listener right now is marketing, a b2c company, YouTube comments is a goldmine. I haven’t found a tool that helps me scrape comments on YouTube yet, I’m pretty sure there’s one that is out there. But if you just go, for example, you’re selling a b2c budgeting app, go to the reviews of other YouTubers looking at other budgeting apps that you’re competing with. And just read the comments and even look at the video, the comments will show you content, ideas, pain points to put in your overall messaging, and just things to use as part of like your swipe file in the future. So I’m glad that you mentioned that. You also in in talking about marketing, I feel like there’s this overall question around what is the goal of a campaign or the goal of a team, etc. This brings to mind the magic question of what’s the most important metric. And obviously, it’s always a blend, it always depends. And there’s, there’s all these externalities involved. But when it comes to revenue, specifically is that always like the number one goal of a marketing team? Hey there, if you’re enjoying this episode, and you’re a first time listener, when I hit the Follow button, my goal with each of these episodes is to introduce a new marketing concept, or dive deeper into one so that you can become a better digital marketer. Hopefully, through these episodes, you join me on this journey, the path to CMO. So I’d love it if you subscribed. Thanks for listening so far.
Jaclyn Mullen 16:58
This is a great question. And I think going back to what you had said about what’s going to show that I have business acumen versus just like the ability to execute marketing strategies. So we could say, hey, marketers need to get traffic to a website. But is it relevant traffic? Is it quality traffic? It’s not always a volume thing. It could be a quality thing. What is your conversion rate on that traffic? Now we’re starting to get a little bit more into some of these funnel things that show, you know, are we driving the right people to our site? And not only conversion rate, but how quickly are they converting over a period of time, to your point about the revenue, most companies these days are going to say marketing’s not responsible for 50% of the revenue or you know, 40%. But we are going to give you a goal, we’re going to want to see that the campaign’s that you’re putting out and the actions that you are implementing number one do result in in some inbound, right. And you’re typically it really depends on the company, the size, how long they’ve been in the market for what what sort of tools and marketing mix they have going for them. But most b2b companies are going to say hey, marketing’s responsible for 20 to 30% of the revenue. The other side of that coin Kenny is you start looking at if you have a sales team, or even product lead growth, how quickly are people going from I visiting your site to I’m actually interested in having a conversation or signing up for your free trial to actually implementing that free trial or you know, starting to move along to that meeting to becoming a paying customer. That’s the other side of this coin here where people say marketing is tied to revenue, it’s really wound up or tied up in pipeline velocity, and what’s happening on the sales side. So you’ve got to be looking at not just volume of traffic or impressions, these things that we looked at when I first started out in digital, you got to be looking at what’s my conversion rate, if I’m driving the right traffic to a site or a landing page, how much of my pipeline is coming from inbound marketing efforts, which really speaks to blogging, you know, what you’re doing across social, maybe even some email marketing, driving some word of mouth marketing? And then on the sales side of things, how are the activities that we’re doing to drive brand awareness, increasing pipeline velocity on the sales side? And I know a lot of that sounds like if you’re coming from b2c, like I did music industry, it sounds like, oh, it seems very cut and dry. It’s actually really fun. The best part about all of this is the fact that every single day, you’re putting on a different hat to try to understand where’s the leaky bucket? How do I use my creativity? To figure out if I need to do more on the LinkedIn side, maybe my contents not resonating. Maybe it’s my targeting and segmentation. I have to go after a different group of customers. So it really can be exhilarating and fun. b2b provides a lot of opportunities for people.
Kenny Soto 20:08
You mentioned, sales velocity. And there’s also revenue, which we just talked about, are there any other metrics, besides from those two to end conversion rate that you think the listeners should also keep in mind as they go throughout their daily work?
Jaclyn Mullen 20:25
Yeah, I would say right now, there’s been this industry shift from lead gen, you know, and looking at, hey, these are the number of leads I got, these are the number of MQLs, I got to what we call, like demand gen. And if you haven’t already followed, you know, refine labs, they really are like a leading voice on this idea of demand generation and demand creation. And what you’re looking at, as I mentioned, is sure, you know, are we getting marketing qualified leads, but more so, you know, sales qualified leads, are we getting people who come to our site, interact with like three to four pages of our content? If we have webinar events and things that are going, are they participating in those things, and usually, it’s looking at a couple of different touchpoints together, versus single isolated, you know, hey, this is how many people came to the website, and how many people signed up for the demo form, starting to think of your marketing as an orchestra. And when you look at it, that way, you’re gonna get these demand signals that maybe you hadn’t previously paid attention to, or understood, like I said, raising their hand coming to your site, you know, typically, like how much word of mouth about your brand, that’s a big, big demand creation signal that starts to pop up lavenders. A great example of this, if you pop on LinkedIn, in any given day, you see companies and other people talking about your brand. That means that you’re creating great demand. And as a byproduct of that, you will start to see that pipeline velocity, and those relevant prospects coming in across your marketing funnel.
Kenny Soto 22:07
I’ve heard very recently, and I’m pretty sure people have been talking about this way before I discovered it myself. But I’ve been hearing on LinkedIn more and more, that it’s important for marketers at all stages of their career to understand the fundamentals of the business that they’re working in. Because even if you have a revenue target, you need to understand how is that revenue made? Among other things? When it comes to understanding the fundamentals of a business? What are some things marketers should look at when they’re trying to get that better understanding? Yeah,
Jaclyn Mullen 22:45
and the first and foremost, that goes back to that resourcefulness. Right? Everything has a trade off. So cost per acquisition cost per lead. I mean, that is a metric that regardless of your size, especially when you get at the CMO level, the board is going to ask you, you know, what is our cost per acquisition? Is it staying flat? Is it going up? Is it going down? If it’s going up? What are the margins on that? What’s like our payback period? Understanding, hey, if it costs me $50, to get a customer, what’s my average contract value? How much revenue do we get from a customer at the end of the day, and at least at its basic form, being able to say, this is how much, you know, margin, we have not taking into account the operating expenses and all that stuff with the business. But I think it really helps. This is why they say marketing and sales alignment is so key, you can’t have marketing going out there and suggesting all of these tactics, and you know, functions, and the costs start to go up and up and up. I mean, I think the biggest cost sometimes Kenny, even for marketing teams is like more people. It’s why I’m an IC right now. Right? So every single time you add somebody on your team, that can get factored into, hey, this is how much it costs for us to acquire customer. Now, when you layer in advertising, or platforms that you need to help you create the marketing, all of those little costs start to go up. So really being able to understand marketing costs this, you know, one customer that signs up on average equates to this, what’s that break in between? And that will at least help you get some of the basics and fundamentals going so you can shift your thinking towards what’s the ROI, every single time we deploy, you know, marketing initiatives and across how many of these touchpoints does it take to convert a customer? What is that actual cost at the end of the day?
Kenny Soto 24:48
Among all of the experiences you’ve had at different organizations? Are there any common marketing challenges you’re seeing across those experiences even at your current company?
Jaclyn Mullen 25:00
I mean, everybody’s vying for attention. And I think that’s always going to be the case, right? You’ve got new platforms and mediums that pop up. If you think about how much more time we’re spending on our mobile phones, for a while the sweetheart was Tik Tok, or all these b2b companies were like, do we need to be on LinkedIn? No, now you need to be on Tik Tok. And so you’re always trying to keep the attention of your customer. But I think at a more tangible level, what it boils down to is relevancy. And what I taught digital marketing, I love this example. And I hope this helps everybody career wise, if I’m a size 10 shoe, which I am, and I go to Google to look for shoes, I don’t want to see ads for size seven, I don’t want to see ads for a size four, if I’m looking for a running shoe, I don’t care about a hiking shoe, I certainly don’t care about a snowboarding shoe. So if you can use that to always pull back and say it’s not just attention, it’s Relevancy is our messaging. And our product really aligned with what our customer is looking for, or needs at this point in time. Now, here’s the other side. The other way that this gets smoothed out a little bit across the entire spectrum, people usually build their products and their companies with this is the future state that we’re taking our customer to in mind, but you got to give the customer what they want, not necessarily what they need, right? Bring them in, help them get what they want. And then this is where to you are saying like, what are some of the other revenue opportunities longer down the line, this is where an upsell opportunity comes in, or cross sell opportunity comes in, or even just retaining the customer. What I started to understand and Simon Sinek brought this up Kenny, how adoption occurs across products. There’s like this curve chart that everybody could go look up early innovators, you know, early early adopters, regular adopters, Lagarde, the same thing happens with our marketing, some some segment of the population, they say 20 to 30% is like that might be generous, ready to buy right now, everybody else is researching. And some of those people might be ready to buy your product 10 months from now, some of them might come to you two years from now, it’s not, you know, a sprint, it really is a marathon, it it starts with you got to be relevant, gotta gotta gotta be relevant. You have to be patient, right? And at the same time, with those two things, you also have to keep it moving very quickly.
Kenny Soto 27:41
Absolutely. To what degree has courage been a key factor in your career growth?
Jaclyn Mullen 27:51
For me, the fact that I was self employed, can speak a little bit to, you know, the way I look at courage. It’s like, I never want to say what if, what if I didn’t do this, or what the what if this could go wrong, I always am of the mind set that you take an action. And whatever is meant to be is meant to be and you’re going to learn what you need to learn and then be able to leverage those things moving forward. As a mentor, and a manager, where I’ve seen courage become really critical in people on my team is pushing everybody outside of labeling themselves. I’m not good at content marketing, or I can never be good at making videos, right? That’s just not my personality. If you can lean into courage and push yourself a little bit doesn’t mean that you have to do that particular aspect of marketing forever. But what you’re trying to do right now is like go up a series of steps. And at the CMO level, you’re not down here doing every single thing, but you have an understanding of how all those things work. So the more you can push yourself outside of your comfort zone, disregard those labels of I’m not good at this. I’m not a creative type, I’m not analytical, I’ll never be good with the numbers. Courage allows you to remove those absolutes from your vocabulary. And it allows you to test a couple of different things and gain learnings that again, are going to differentiate you in the market as a job seeker and eventually as a manager as well.
Kenny Soto 29:26
I’m pretty sure some of the listeners already know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. But if you haven’t done so, I recommend going to his YouTube channel and just scrolling all the way to Daily V. Number one, if you can compare and contrast his early content just as early business content not even as one content to what he’s doing today. You can see a clear difference. That difference that didn’t happen overnight. It happened more than seven years. Now maybe eight years. He’s doing this. Whatever you’re doing, even with this podcast that I’m doing You’re going to suck first 100 times you do it, just get through that number, the way I always think it is like what is the threshold of me being somewhat incompetent in this skill until I start getting better at can see those improvements over time. It always depends on the person always depends on the skill you’re trying to learn. But you’re never going to pass that threshold until you start. That’s the most important. And if you have to start and then do 10 things and never publish it, but at least you did that, then you can publish the 11th be have to commit to getting started, for sure.
Jaclyn Mullen 30:30
I love that. I really that really resonates
Kenny Soto 30:33
when it comes to job seeking specifically. And this might be job synching for an internal role, or it could be for a freelance gig. How do you factor in networking as a tactic? And how do you make it so that it’s not so? gimmicky? salesy icky, I don’t want to use that word, but that’s the word that comes to my mind. What do you do to effectively network?
Jaclyn Mullen 30:57
What I mean, I’m a people person. So I think it’s taken me a long time and that courage to be able to say, what’s the worst that’s gonna happen? Somebody’s not going to answer my message or ignore me, like, you know, people are so busy that they’re not sitting here judging anybody that’s reaching out and raising their hand to network or connect, right, closed mouths don’t get fed. In that same spirit, I think on the flip side, if you’re a little bit more shy and hesitant to network, or you’re still finessing those skills, number one, it’s okay to be persistent. I had somebody reach out to me that wants to connect with me. And they messaged me two or three times, and I’ve just been so darn busy that they were like, look, you know, I’m graduating from my master’s program. I’m in your field, I, you know, worked for this company that I they knew would be relevant to me. Could we just meet for 20 minutes, I think, quantifying how much time you’re looking to meet with somebody making it personal. On the opposite side, Kenny, I’ve had people say to me, I want to, you know, talk to you about how you’re able to build out your consulting business. That’s a very large conversation that unfortunately, I don’t have time to share right now. You know what I mean? If I would, I could. But I really think at the end of the day with networking, it’s, again, thinking about, this is a long term game. So you know, your first outreach to somebody may not even be asking to meet up with them or to have coffee, it might just be to connect with them learn a little bit more about, are they posting on LinkedIn? Are they not? What do they post about understanding what a day in their life is like, and then following back up with them one or two, maybe three times and it could be by that second or third time where you’re like, hey, I would actually like to know, if you ever have 10 to 15 minutes, 20 minutes max, like, can we hop on a zoom or a phone call? To me, everybody’s receptive to that. It’s just a matter of understanding that networking is sort of similar to dating where you’re not going to propose on the first date. So in this day and age, I’m talking only about online networking. offline networking is very different. Just understand that like that first outreach is to get familiar, you know, name and face, to reach out. And then it is a long term play, where you want to start to build conversations into everybody can commit to messaging with you and connecting over social much more than they can connect, maybe commit to like a 2030 minute zoom. But eventually, people will get there, once they get to know you, it helps to bring in, you know, relevant industry or like some specificity. I remember when I first started networking online, I was trying to network with other entrepreneurs. And I’d be like, can we just meet for 30 minutes, I want to know how you got to be like a million dollar business owner. And one of my dear friends would push back and be like, what specifically? Are you trying to learn and understand? So get specific as well in an in what you want as a result of connecting with that person?
Kenny Soto 34:01
I love that. Sometimes the specificity that is the key variable there. And if you don’t have it, then what’s the point of someone even responding to that you know, that they’re not available? So with all this being said, you have shared a ton of great information and advice on this episode. My last question for you, Jacqueline is hypothetical. If you had access to the time machine, you can go back in the past about 10 years knowing everything you know, right now. How would you specifically accelerate the speed of your career?
Jaclyn Mullen 34:32
Gosh, that’s a great question. Um, it goes, I think in hand with that courage piece. I did do some outreach back in the day, like one of my companies I wanted to work for was MTV. I would you know, back then 10 years ago, a lot of this video stuff was not that far off. Podcasting was not that far off. What I would have done is doubled down on my own content and had either the YouTube channel or the podcast, because those are the things Kenny that I talked about 10 years ago. And here we are, and they’re not in existence, right. And so for anybody that you know, is looking to build that thought, leadership and grow their network, I think creating your own content and building your own brand, is a really great way to go about it. And the byproducts of that people knowing who you are people when they see you on a YouTube channel, or like because I see them there audit, they automatically elevate your expertise. That’s That’s what what I would have done. And with that, here’s the marketer that’s tied to revenue goals had a ebook or some sort of like side passive income stream, that I could say, Hey, I still want to work for startups. And I love working for startups. But on the side, I make this money to.
Kenny Soto 35:53
Absolutely, no, I love that. And thanks for sharing that, because that’s a great segue into me talking about, like, personal example, that way, the listener can see that it’s, it’s tangible. I’m not just listening, asking these questions and not taking in the advice myself. I suffer from impostor syndrome. But one thing that I’ve noticed, and what’s helped me push through it is that feeling is necessary for you to create good work, you want to constantly question whether or not you’re the right person to say something, but then you want to say it anyway. Because the act of saying it will one get you feedback, so you can say it better than the next time. It will also help you understand what it is you’re actually trying to say. Anyway, I find that through this podcast through writing, sometimes I don’t even publish that in writing. But through those two avenues, my thinking gets better around business, not just marketing in and of itself. I help myself retain information by writing down what I learned each week. And through these exercises, as a quick example, for the listener, what I plan on doing with this podcast and monetize it isn’t necessarily just affiliate marketing, but at the same time, finding a way to Pacus package all the insights from the podcast into a course. So if you are discovering the podcast at any point in time, and you don’t want to go through more than 100 interviews to learn the same stuff, I’m just going to organize curate put, in my own words, all the information that’s been provided by all these experts, such as Jacqueline into a nice course they can, that can be consumed asynchronously. And that’s one of many examples of how even you the listener can take a blog, can take a newsletter can take a tick tock profile that you’re creating, and find ways to package that regurgitate reorganize a thought leadership content that you’re creating into something else. This is just one of many examples. But that’s that’s the path I’m taking. So I’m glad you brought that up, Jacqueline, because it is important to know that you just got to get started. And when you get started, you get better over time. Yeah,
Jaclyn Mullen 37:58
absolutely don’t don’t want to have the regrets of hindsight. But also again, trust that whatever choice you do make, it’s going to serve you and that particular moment in time. And one of my favorite sayings is more will be revealed. So
Kenny Soto 38:12
that’s, that’s very true. My favorite saying is pain is information. Sometimes you got to fail to learn, is it unavoidable. But once you go through that pain, you’ll get better, you’ll learn how to avoid avoid it. And even if you can avoid it, the next time, you will have experienced enough to know hey, it’s not the end of the world. It sucks still, but it’s not the end. Now, with all that being said, Jacqueline, if anyone wants to connect with you online, where can they go to say hi,
Jaclyn Mullen 38:39
LinkedIn for sure. Yeah, so you know, I’m a startup marketer. I’m also a mom to a 14 month old, which means send me a message, follow up with me. But I do love to connect with others and be that warm, like, Hey, you will get accepted, we will connect at some point in time, keep going for it type of voice on LinkedIn.
Kenny Soto 39:00
Thank you so much, Jacqueline, for your time today. And thank you to you the listener for being a listener to this podcast. And I always have the same request at the end of each episode. If you haven’t done so already, please like and subscribe to this podcast. And if you have a coworker who you think would benefit from listening to this podcast, please share it with them so that we can all learn about digital marketing together. And as always, I hope everyone has a great week. On the next episode of the people Digital Marketing podcast, I will have Alexis Scott. Alexis is the founder of verbatim a digital marketing agency as well as the fairy job mom, a consultancy focused on helping professionals become quote unquote, eternally employable. Very similar to this conversation I had with Jacqueline, where it’s mainly focused on how to do the job well how to be a good marketer once we have the job. Alexis helps us learn how to get the job If and how to become eternally employable, how to make sure your marketing resume works, how to make sure that you get a marketing job with no prior experience, how to find unposted jobs, and much more. So if you enjoyed this episode with Jacqueline Mullen, you will definitely enjoy listening to Episode 138 next week with Alexa Scott. And as always, thanks again for listening. And see you next week.