How I Made it in Marketing

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Claimed

► Tell us about you and your podcast

I'm the Senior Director of Content and Marketing at MECLABS Institute, parent organization of MarketingSherpa. In college, I was a DJ at a 100,000-watt radio station – WRUF-FM Rock 104. And then in the mid-2000s, I co-hosted what we believe to be the first internal podcast at IBM. We also hosted an internal podcast at BEA Systems. The goal of these podcasts was sales enablement.

Since I've been at MarketingSherpa, we've experimented with a few short-run podcasts, and I've been a guest plenty of times. So I understand the value of audio to educate and inspire.

About this podcast...

Marketers are the artisans of commerce. Our palette is ideas. We ply our craft to facilitate choice. To empower every person creating value in the world – sharing their inventions, their service, their good works. And ultimately, to keep a society built on choice functioning.
But also…This is one of the most fun, wildly creative, never-grow-up, 99% boring meetings followed by 1% of sheer creative brilliance, funny-yet-frustrating-yet-fruitful career choices you can make.

Let’s explore the dichotomy.

In this podcast, I talk to marketers and entrepreneurs about the stories behind the greatest lessons in their careers. The goal is to inspire your next great campaign, give you strategies for winning approval on your ideas, and help you navigate the trickiest decisions in your career. The curious, comprehensive style of these interviews allows marketing and business leaders to do what they do best – express themselves to communicate a key lesson.

Listen in as we probe marketing leaders about how they crafted campaigns, built their careers, and what they learned along the way. We’ll get deep, we’ll wring insights form our guests to help you, and we’ll have fun doing it.

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher online course(https://meclabs.com/course/)
 

► Why & how did you start this podcast? 

For more than two decades, MarketingSherpa has served its audience with written case studies. We don't just publish marketing "thought leaders" with opinions. We show marketers and entrepreneurs how their peers actually did it. Real-world examples with results from the trenches of marketing. Our goal is to inform, to instruct, and to inspire.

We did those first two well, but realized an audio podcast would be much more inspirational than a written case study which, while helpful, is fairly dry and straightforward. We made the decision to move forward with this podcast in mid-December, and our first episode was published on January 17, 2022.
 

► How'd you find the time and funding to do this podcast?

Well, this is my day job. MarketingSherpa is a publisher. So instead of publishing two case study-filled written articles per week, we now publish one case study-filled article and one podcast.

We release one episode per week. It takes a long time to find guests. We've received thousands of applications at this point. And really, the hard work is in finding the guest. It's hard to put a specific amount of hours on it, but for each guest we've interviewed I've probably reviewed 50 to 100 applications from marketers and entrepreneurs we didn't interview. With enough time spent digging, all of those people likely had a great story to tell. But since we only publish one podcast a week, we focus on the most entertaining, compelling, humorous, insightful, helpful stories. From there it's writing up an interview outline and doing some background research to make sure I'm ready for the interview, having a 90-minute call with the guest which includes both prep time and recording, getting the podcast edited/produced and transcribed, writing up an article for each episode, then loading it into Buzzsprout for distributed and our CMS for publishing, creating a graphic with the guest, sending an email to our audience, sharing on social media, and of course, letting our guest (and usually their PR team, exec admin, and others) know the episode is live.

It has been very affordable. We use Riverside for recording, Buzzsprout for hosting and distribution, and Studio Podcast Suites for editing/producing the audio.
 

► What do you gain from podcasting?        

First and foremost, our goal is to serve the audience of marketers and entrepreneurs.

Some of the marketers and entrepreneurs we serve will choose to take the free digital marketing course from MarketingSherpa's parent organization, MECLABS Institute, that we mention on the podcast – https://meclabs.com/course/

And some of the people we serve with the free online course will choose to pay MECLABS to help them with their marketing – https://meclabs.com/about/research-services
 

► How does your podcasting process look like? 

I mostly explained this in Question #3. The part I want to highlight is – 80 percent of the work is finding guests that can truly help our audience.

I am a writer, and a key to writing I strongly believe is having something to say in the world. Too many writers and marketers and brands just jump ahead to finding the best way to say it. 80% of writing is research, and 20% of writing is saying it well.

I think the same holds true for podcasting. 80% of my time is spent finding marketers and entrepreneurs who really have something to say. Who are ready to provide an open, transparent look at their career. To share stories they learned from their greatest successes but also their biggest mistakes. To find those stories, we put an application out into the world. Here's an example - https://twitter.com/DanielBurstein/status/1546859512853848066

And then it's a lot of reviewing and back-and-forth to find and hone the best stories. This isn't one of the podcasts where we just hop on and talk. We prepare, prepare, prepare first to make sure there is a clear arch to the podcast that has specific examples backing up each lesson, to make sure we are truly serving and helping the audience. We do this remotely using the Riverside platform.

And then once we record, again remotely through the Riverside platform, then it's a chance to improv, be spontaneous, have a real human conversation. We already have the outline, so I know the specific examples the guest can share that will be helpful to the audience. But reading it off a script would be boring, no one would want to listen. Then it's our chance to have a real fun, engaging, very human conversation around these stories.
 

► How do you market your show?

We send publish it on MarketingSherpa, send it to our email audience, share it through social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), and distributed it to all the podcast readers through Buzzsprout.

Since the episodes are fairly longer – 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes – we also work with the good folks at JAM to publish two- to three-minute summaries of the episodes – https://www.jam.ai/jam/how-i-made-it-in-marketing
 

► What advice would you share with aspiring (new) podcasters?

You have to start with the audience. What can you do to truly serve them? There are so many podcasts in the world, why does the world need yet another podcast? Treat it like a product, even though it is free, and make sure it has a powerful value proposition.

Only once you've made sure you are truly serving others can you focus on yourself. Then you can get into how you will benefit – personal branding, monetization, sponsorships, etc.

Start with what's in it for the other person, and get a really good answer to that question. Only then can you focus on what's in it for you.
 

► Where can we learn more about you & your podcasts?

https://www.marketingsherpa.com/podcast
Daniel.Burstein@MECLABS.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielburstein/
https://twitter.com/DanielBurstein
https://www.facebook.com/daniel.burstein.12/