Got Marketing has been going through an identity crisis since Ripple Festival ended
>> Mia Feilman: Most marketing has the shelf life of a trending sound. This is Got Marketing, where we unpack campaigns, marketing news and what actually sticks.
>> Mia Feilman: Hello, friend, and welcome back to Got Marketing. I have been going through a little bit of an identity crisis since Ripple Festival wrapped up a few weeks ago. The future of Ripple Festival is unclear and I'm pretty burnt out. And having these. What do I want to be where I grow up? Uh, thoughts. And decided that I would share them with you and just give you a bit of an insight into the inside of my brain at the moment. So this is what I've been thinking about for the last five years. I've spent a lot of time teaching marketing, not because teaching is better than doing, but because it suited the season of life that I was in. I was a defence partner for 15 years. I had very young kids, I was constantly moving across the country. Teaching gave me a lot of flexibility. But lately I've realised I'm missing something. I'm missing the feeling of being inside the work. Not just teaching campaigns, but building them. Not just explaining strategy, but making strategic decisions with real consequences. Not just talking about marketing, but doing marketing. Because I've realised the thing that gives me the most amount of satisfaction is pointing to something that is now real and tangible and knowing that I helped create that from nothing, from just an idea. So I've been thinking about the way that we package up our expertise and our, uh, knowledge. And it really does fall into three buckets. There's doing where you are executing the work. And most marketers fit into this bucket, right? There's service providers who embed themselves with a brand and they do the marketing. Then there's the thinking where you are helping shape decisions. And this is where a lot of consultants and advisors and strategists sit. And then there's the teaching bucket, where you are transferring knowledge. And for the last five years, most of my business has sat in the teaching bucket with my membership marketing circle, with my online programmes like Campaign Classroom and now your email marketing strategy workshops speaking. And I truly love it, I really do. And it's not going anywhere. But I've realised I've got an itch that teaching alone doesn't quite scratch. I want more doing and more thinking in my life. I want to be part of projects from start to finish and I want to do this even for my existing customers. Something I've been wrestling with is how black and white the online business world can be. There's this narrative that corporate is bad, small business is good, agencies are bad, Freedom is good, consulting is bad, memberships are good, and I really bought into that. Right? But now I'm realising that there's this whole messy middle because some of the smartest, most creative work I've ever done has actually happened inside larger organisations. And some small businesses are incredibly strategic. Likewise, some corporate environments are, uh, bureaucratic nightmares and I want nothing to do with those. So the answer isn't the label, it's not even the size of the business, it's not the industry. The answer is finding the right people with the right problems that I can solve.
I'm embarking on a repositioning exercise to improve my marketing
So what am I actually doing in my little existential crisis? Well, I'm embarking on a little bit of a repositioning exercise because I am very well known at this point for being a marketing trainer and educator. I'm having a lot of conversations, I'm making a lot of phone calls. There is some awkward outreach to people within my community that I know of and there is a lot of what I am calling around and finding out. People often assume that repositioning is a website update. It's not. It's deciding who you want to work with and then actively moving towards them. Now, before you assume that this is very glamorous, let me tell you that I have some very real fears about going on this journey because I run a very sustainable, profitable small business and I've also done consulting before and I know exactly where it can go wrong. So this is what I'm worried about, chasing invoices for weeks. Currently, I get paid in advance before I do anything I am paid. I'm also very worried about being the first thing that is let go of when the budgets get tight or when brands get busy because the marketing is working and they don't, uh, need me anymore. And there's this assumption that marketing is this tap that we can just turn on and off. I'm also quite concerned about getting emails that are marked urgent when they are absolutely not urgent. I'm very worried about being hired as a senior strategist and somehow ending up creating Instagram captions. And I'm, um, extremely concerned about having my ideas diluted to the point where I no longer want to put my name to, to them. And these aren't imaginary fears, they are based on experience.
>> Mia Feilman: If you're listening to this and thinking I need to get my marketing sorted, that's exactly what we do inside Marketing Circle. It's a marketing community for up to 45 women building brands where we focus
>> Mia Feilman: on strategy first, then execution.
>> Mia Feilman: So you're not just Doing more. You're doing the right things.
>> Mia Feilman: I'll, uh, link it in the show notes.
I was approached by an Australian E commerce brand looking to work with me
So at the end of 2024, just as I was coming back from overseas, I was referred to an Australian E commerce brand that had been around for like 10 years, turning over several million dollars of revenue every year. Family owned businesses. I love family owned businesses. I grew up in a family owned business who were looking to work with me for some brand strategy and campaigns. Now, in fairness to this brand, the wife was very upfront in the first meeting that her husband was sceptical. He was a co founder and he was all in with SEO and they paid thousands of dollars a month on SEO and he was a little bit sceptical about brand and brand Personas and email marketing and campaigns. And so I was going to have my work cut out for me. Now, I spent an hour and a half on a zoom call with this brand and then based on what they told me in the zoom call, I went away and spent hours crafting a, um, bespoke proposal for them. And then when I sent the proposal, I was told this is not what they wanted at all. Which was surprising because we had had a conversation. And so then I needed to re quote and go in a different direction with my proposal. And I think you know where this storey is going. The second quote wasn't right either. And at this point I had spent about eight hours, conservatively eight hours without being paid a single dollar. And to this day I have not been paid a single dollar from this brand because we haven't worked together. And so, like, this is a real fear of mine, right, that there is a lot of this upfront work that is required from me and it never gets off the ground and there's, there's a lot of sunk costs. And then what's really ironic about this situation, right, is if you think about it, what was going to be required with this project? Yes, there was going to be doing, yes, there was going to be thinking, but there was also going to be teaching because this brand needed to understand the benefit of brand and brand strategy and owned channels and not just paying thousands of dollars a month to an SEO company, but about the benefit of storytelling and rich personality driven marketing. And so I was going to need to educate them and I probably wasn't going to get paid for it, which is so ironic, right, because this is how I ended up teaching in the first place. So I ran a marketing agency across three states for seven years. The business was called Regani and we were paid by our clients on a retainer to do their marketing every month. And a lot of that was email marketing. We built websites, we did their social media, we did their SEO, we ran campaigns for them. But what happened in that agency, working with small businesses, is that I spent a lot of time teaching marketing because a lot of small businesses don't really understand it and I was not being paid for the teaching component on top of my retainer. I also had to go in and explain and justify why I wanted to do a certain thing that's teaching. So that's when I decided these small businesses don't need someone to do it for them. They need someone to teach them and then someone to do it for them anyway. So that's the irony. The difference now is that I'm not starting from scratch. I'm going into this with my eyes wide open. I'm starting from experience. I also know myself that so much better and what I like doing and what I'm good at doing and what I won't tolerate and what annoys the out of me so that I can be so much more selective. And I am incredibly fortunate that I can pick and choose the clients that I work with. So instead of pretending that these risks that I mentioned before don't exist, I'm going to try designing around them. Um, and here are some examples. I only want to work with brands and industries that I genuinely understand and use. So when I ran an agency, I worked with a lot of financial planners, accountants, lawyers, HR professionals, earth moving equipment, construction, mining. I know nothing about those industries. They don't excite me. And I don't think I was the best person for that job. So I'm not going to be taking projects simply because they can pay. Instead, I'm going to go where I can genuinely understand the product and the service. For example, I used a sleep consultant when my babies were young. And I understand the value of a sleep consultant. And I am obsessed with sleep. I love beautiful interiors. I've, um, just bought a house and I am absolutely obsessed with bougie tiles. So that's where I should be working. My pantry is basically a shrine to mingle seasoning and I eat Greek yoghurt every single day. I understand these categories, I understand these customers, and I understand why people buy. And that makes me infinitely more valuable. So the real goal here is not actually about working with bigger brands. It's about spending more time where I can create the most value. And for me, that's thinking, problem solving and campaign strategy. That's helping businesses become easier to choose in this economy. Another huge driver for me is that I want to spend less time on Instagram. It is not sparking joy for me and I'm very grateful that I have a lease managing Instagram for Campaign Del Mar. But I still do spend a lot of time thinking about Instagram. And I am not a platform marketer. I am a strategic marketer. I am an multi channel integrated marketer. I've spent years teaching marketing online and now I want to spend more time doing marketing in the real world. I don't know exactly where this path leads going back to my around and find out point, but I know that I need to go and scratch this itch and see what it brings. Sometimes the next chapter isn't having a detailed plan. Everything's theoretical until we do it right. Sometimes it's just having a direction and then you start walking.
Got Marketing podcast studio is getting closer to being set up
I will close this episode by giving you a little bit of a podcast studio update because it has been a minute. The podcast studio is absolutely happening. The podcast is absolutely staying as is marketing circle and we are very, very close to setup. So currently I have two microphones, two cameras, the stands, the lights and two armchairs in my house in Cairns. The only things that we are missing is a rug deciding what we're going to do with the wall behind the armchairs. Is it going to be wallpaper? Is it going to be artwork? Is it going to be a bookshelf? Which is frankly the most complicated, expensive option of the three and like a little coffee table. But also I need someone to come in to the current space and pull down all the foam bats off the walls and remove the speakers. So we, uh, are super close, which is very exciting because every time I sit down to record this podcast in Cairns, someone is whipper snippering opposite outside my window. So hopefully in the next month or so we will have the podcast studio set up. All right, I'm going to leave it there. If any of this conversation resonated with you. If you are going through a bit, um, of a career identity crisis, please reach out. Let's have a chat and I look forward to catching you next time.
>> Mia Feilman: Thank you. You listened all the way to the end. If you're enjoying GoT marketing, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's next. Want the backstage pass to Got Marketing?
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>> Mia Feilman: It's the ideal companion to the podcast and it's linked in the show notes. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and one of the best ways to support a small business. You can connect with me, Mia5weilman, um, on LinkedIn and Instagram, and I always welcome your feedback and questions for future episodes.
