Dive into an enlightening conversation as we discuss embracing ADHD as an entrepreneurial superpower, the transformative role of AI in the future of marketing, and why sidestepping “superstars” can strengthen your company culture. Prepare for practical insights on hiring right, leveraging AI today, and strategies for a booming marketing career.
Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.
- ADHD as an entrepreneurial edge.
- AI’s role in modern marketing.
- Importance of strategy in execution.
- Avoiding ego-driven superstars.
- Fractional CMO benefits for businesses.
Resources:
Connect with Rajat Kapur:
Connect with our hosts:
Quotables:
- 39:53 – And a lot of the people out there that are independent consultants are looking for a community and a home where they can hang out. We want to be that community. And then obviously we have a business to run, right? So if we can help those two get together, that ends up being a really good model. I think of it as like a very high-end boutique recruiting service because we’ll get clients that ask us the craziest thing, they’ll say, well I’m in this industry and I want somebody at this particular thing and they might want this geography. And usually within a week we can find three to five candidates in our community that meet almost all or some of those criteria.
- 47:23 – Josh: And then a few questions I I tend to ask towards the end. If you had to teach something to other marketers, what would it be?
Raj: That’s a great question. There’s a quote that I have adapted from the Art of War that applies directly to marketing. So it is, strategy is the slowest path to victory. Strategy without execution is the slowest path to victory. And tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. That’s straight from that book and it totally applies to marketing. And what I find that happens in the marketing world today is everybody wants a quick ROI. Everybody wants to jump to execution. Everybody wants to get their ads up tomorrow or their social media plan implemented or those emails out as soon as possible. And sometimes it works, but when it doesn’t work, it’s almost always because you haven’t done the strategy work. And the strategy work is never gonna go outta style and it’s never gonna go bad. What does the strategy work? It is who are you, who is your ideal customer target? What are their problems? How do you solve them? What makes you unique? That’s it, right? That’s never gonna go outta style. And so if you think like, you know, in a couple weeks I’m just gonna turn on some Google ads and magically hit the right spot for that decision maker to make that decision, I would tell every marketer to go back to the fundamentals more than they think is comfortable. And that’s almost always the right answer. - 43:01 – Josh: And I guess I wanna understand, how can you work with other agencies or what services can you partner with other agencies? So in other words, what do agencies tend to reach out to you for?
Raj: Yeah, that’s great. So most of the time it’s strategy, right? So most of the time an agency will reach out to us because they’ll say, hey, we’re great at the strategy. We can’t do the execution that this particular company needs. I think they need a fractional CMO and the arrangements that we have there, I call it a boomerang. So if you’re a marketing agency, you already have the relationship and you’re able to bring us into potentially place a fractional CMO, you get the first right of refusal on the execution work. Absolutely right. So we have those successful arrangements already and I’m happy to build more of them. ’cause quite often that marketing agency tries to do the strategy strategic work, but they either can’t find the budget or they don’t have the people and the bandwidth to actually get it done. - 39:08 – And what we basically do is we go out in the world, we meet companies who have hit a growth ceiling. They’ve either gotten rid of their marketing person, they never had a marketing person, they’ve never really invested in marketing and they’re looking to get to that next level. And one of our fractionals can usually come in, help them set a really solid marketing foundation and then be their ongoing marketing leader. But as the name insinuates, it’s on a fraction of their time and a fraction of the budget basis.
- 40:33 – We’ve built a really good community for those fractional CMOs. We provide them tools, templates, we provide them ongoing coaching. We have a regular speaker series where we have people that educate them on either building their own business or building their own or building theirselves as a marketer. And that’s working really well. So I’d say the couple things are, you know, if you’re a marketing in an independent marketing consultant and you’re interested, go to our website, apply to be part of our community. If you have all of those criteria, I’d be happy to talk to you.