Get High at Work!

Tag: pitch

  • Time

    Building on one of the most important aspects of our Digital Marketing Demo Night on Thursday, I need to emphasize the importance of time, mainly how fast it passes, both in the macro and micro.

    In the macro, guess what? It’s spring. How’d that happen? We get busy. We plan each week in minute detail, and plan each weekend with wild abandon so we make sure we don’t get in bed on Sunday night and wonder what we did with our weekend. There’s basketball season (Final Four tonight! Go Duke!), football season, high school & middle school soccer season, and now spring break. And before you know it, you’ll be making Memorial Day weekend plans.

    Time passes really, really fast, especially when you have children. It’s shocking sometimes. This summer, we will celebrate TEN YEARS since that glorious day we made it back to Atlanta after a harrowing 46 hour global jaunt with our two newly adopted children. They were 3. Now they’re 13. And I’ve been told too many times to count that the next 5 years will go even faster. How is that possible?

    In the micro, we experienced how fast five minutes passes in harsh reality on Thursday night as our digital marketing class brought its 10 weeks to a conclusion. No fewer than 8 of the students looked at me in horror and said “Wha…? Really??” when I interjected with “one minute!” Five minutes is a really long pitch, but for these new marketers, it was like snapping your fingers.

    I asked afterwards how many had practiced their presentations beforehand: six out of 17 had actually said the words and walked through their slides before Thursday night, meaning those six had experienced how fast time passes when you’re up in front of 50 people presenting the work that you created.

    Others were very prepared. On at least 3 occasions, when I said “one minute”, the presenters looked at me and quietly said, “that’s ok,” and clicked to their “Thank you / Q&A” slide. Boom.

    Whatever you’re doing, if you’re going to be timed, you would do well to practice before the real deal. Now, how do we practice being people, so we don’t run out of time?

  • DGM2 Digital Demo Day

    With only two sessions remaining before our Final Presentations in the Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, tonight we’ll be doing a rapid fire three hour review of the last 9 weeks. The final projects that the 18 future marketers have to complete consist of a full digital marketing strategy document (less than 10 pages) and a stand up presentation (less than 5 minutes) with slides to the class. I’ve positioned this presentation as a pitch of a digital marketing campaign to the “board of directors”, which will be the rest of the class, and anyone else who wants to attend.

    That’s right, this is a demo day for our new digital marketers, and you’re invited. We’ll have beer, food, great company, and 18 short but fantastic presentations.

    Here’s what we’ve covered in since the last week in January, and what we’re thoroughly reviewing tonight.

    • Your Brand – where everything starts. What do you stand for? Why are you even in business? How will you treat your customers, users, employees?
    • Measuring & Metrics – there are certain metrics that any SaaS company must keep a close eye on. What does your business need to measure when it comes to digital marketing?
    • The Marketing Funnel – everybody’s got a marketing funnel. Does yours end with email subscribers, customers, users? What kind of exposure do you need to bring enough visitors to your website so your conversion rate and average order amount brings you your revenue goal?
    • Owned Content – what’s in your content arsenal – blogs, video, images, technical data – and how will you publish that content?
    • Paid Content / Ads – Where are your customers? That’s where you should be buying ads, but how do you know where they are? Facebook? Google? Twitter? Find out through small experiments, then stomp on the gas.
    • The Marketing Calendar – every marketer’s best friend. If you’re going to market with content, and we all do, whether we know it or not, then we must have a content marketing calendar. It’s as simple as a spreadsheet.

    So join us from 630 – 930 on Thursday April 2, at General Assembly at Ponce City Market. Yes, free beer, but you might also find your next great marketer. Either way, you’ll get a solid dose of what new marketers are learning.