🛠️ The Power of Community to Your Marketing Career Growth

What up, marketers. Welcome another 1-1-1 edition of Adam’s Letter. Thank you to the 916 marketers who use this newsletter to earn more and further their careers. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please join us!

Author’s Note: I had a meeting this week with a reader who asked me, “What’s the point of the newsletter? You never have a CTA or ask for the audience. What do you hope to gain?”

The truth? Just DOING THIS is what I hope to gain. I absolutely love writing the newsletter each week and want to continue to do it. To do so, I need to continue growing the audience and helping as many people as I can.

So, if you’ve ever enjoyed or learned even one thing from this newsletter, then here’s my ask: share it with one person you know who will benefit. That’s it. And thanks for reading!

Big Idea:

I came to an important realization recently.

I need community.

Specifically, I need other marketers and business leaders in my life who share my values and are also on the quest to build something bigger than themselves.

Not exactly rocket science. But I’m not sure I would’ve agreed with the statement that “I need community” even just a few weeks ago.

Recently, I’ve found myself in some situations where I needed to talk through ideas and issues I was struggling with personally and professionally. My mind ran to a few close friends who I know view the world the same way I do and who understand my circumstances in a way few others can.

Being able to talk, joke around, and strategize with these folks gave me a renewed appreciation for how much my community has advanced my career (and my life) - even if I don’t always give it credit for doing so.

Here’s how I built such an incredible community:

Strategy:

“Community” is a term that gets thrown around a ton.

Here’s how I define community: it’s composed of the people who I can lower my defenses around.

That’s it. My community is composed of a few key people who know me on a fairly intimate level and who I don’t posture for or pretend around. They know my true thoughts, habits, feelings, ideas, and aspirations.

It didn’t always used to be this way, though. It’s taken me 8-10 years to develop this sort of community.

Stop Thinking Transactionally

This is way harder than it seems.

Many of us are trained to think in terms of transactions. We’re marketers! Our job is to match people with products and help them transact.

That said, this can create a very dangerous POV when it extends to how we view the people around us. I’ve been the beneficiary of many mentors and friends who gained nothing from pouring into me. Thankfully they didn’t view our relationship in terms of what they could get from me. To them, relationship > transaction.

Pursue Intentional Relationships

I am very grateful to have some incredibly consistent friends. People who will reach out, call, and follow up even when I fail to do so.

The common thread among all of these friends? I intentionally pursued them.

Some were colleagues or bosses in early jobs. Others were community leaders in one of my previous stops. Some were even classmates in college!

At some point, we had a connection that required work and effort to harvest the fruitful relationship we enjoy today.

Young marketers sometimes believe they simply need to ask someone to mentor them in order to establish this kind of connection. That’s fine, but it only works as long as you build trust and foster a connection with the person over time (and it takes a long time to build real authentic relationships).

Follow Up

I talked about friends who follow up even when I don’t.

Here’s what happens when those people take that step: they earn my loyalty for life.

Just seeing the reality of their interest makes me bound to them in a way that is difficult to describe.

I want to see them win.
I want the best for them.
I’ll take action to make that happen however I can.

It can be easy to view people as data or trends who fit in a certain category or classification in your next strategy deck.

Push against this tendency!

Think about the individuals who exist in your community. Find special and unique ways to connect with them even when they don’t seem to have time. Pretend you’re running a Surprise and Delight campaign for your personal network.

Example:

So many folks have been an active and generous part of my community recently. I wouldn’t want to list some without naming them all. But, I need to highlight just a few.

In addition to many who reached out to check in like John, Scott, Gene, Andrew and Sarah, two others have made a massive impression on me recently.

Tim and Kenny are two friends who I’ve known for over a decade now. Both have their own careers and busy lives with families. Yet both have made remaining connected a priority.

Tim jumped in to help me with specific challenges I was having in my business. He’s been an enormous help.

Kenny has scheduled (and rescheduled) connection meetings and has been a huge source of encouragement and motivation to me when I get worn down by the reality of our businesses.

Neither necessarily received much from me immediately. But they both take the time to build up and encourage. I’m extremely grateful for them.

So thank you to all of my community. I genuinely wouldn’t be where I am without you. If YOU don’t have a community you can be real with - make that your priority in 2024. You won’t regret it.