Tuesday 2¢: Four Tips for Marketers on Day One

Ian Truscott reflects on his first few days at censhare as Global VP of Marketing and pulls together some advice from his peers for marketers starting out in a new role.

  1. chevron left iconTuesday 2¢: Four Tips for Marketers on Day One
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Ian TruscottJune 19, 2018
  • Digital Marketing
  • Content Marketing

Welcome to the Tuesday 2¢. It’s Tuesday, the weekend is a distant memory and it’s time to let off some steam and give our 2 cents on a hot industry topic. This week Ian Truscott reflects on his first few days at censhare as Global VP of Marketing and pulls together some advice from his peers for marketers starting out in a new role.


This week I am writing this from Stockholm, as we celebrate one year of the establishment of our Northern European office, covering the Benelux and Nordic countries. As I chat to the team, partners and my colleagues, some of whom are new to censhare, it’s reminded me of starting out, of my own first days of joining censhare. And so today’s Tuesday 2 cents is a little more reflective than the usual rant, as I share some thoughts on starting anew.

So, as a marketer, new into your role, where do you get started?

You can rush into the new gig, jump onto the hamster wheel and start running and yes, the first 90 days can dictate the next few years of your career, so you need to deliver. But, at the same time, this moment, of being new to a business, is going to be a special and unique opportunity to view the task ahead from an outside-in perspective.

I have experience as a consultant and the value of an outside-in perspective, and you’re only going to have this clarity very early in your tenure – before you get pulled into the fabric of the business – so use this time wisely to take a slightly impassionate perspective of what you have and what you need.

That’s my advice. But over at Rockstar CMO (a publication which we sponsor) this question has been posed to the folks they have interviewed – they ask:

“The curtain pulls back, you step out on the stage of your new marketing gig – what do you open with?”

In response, I really like this advice from Darren Guarnaccia, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lytics, whose interview highlights the importance of the story you are going to tell:

"The story. It makes everything better. A powerful story and point of view helps you recruit the right people to your mission, informs what data you need, and the kind of tools you'll want to use. It creates alignment, and motivation like nothing else."

I frequently mention one of my content marketing mentors, Robert Rose, (bestselling author and Chief Strategy Officer at the Content Marketing Institute) in this blog. When asked this question, his advice was to focus on the customer, and in the new age of content marketing being useful this might not come as surprise, but it’s something which does not always come so naturally to marketing leaders:

"That minimum viability and hustle can be overrated. We will take our time and do fewer, more interesting, and creative things instead of a million mediocre things. We will fail from time to time, but we will fail together as a team. And, perhaps most importantly, that our focus is to deliver value first to our customers, before we extract value from them."

Ted Rubin, one of the most interesting and popular CMOs on Twitter (according to Say Media, Forbes and Leadtail), has a different approach however. If you are familiar with his work, he emphasizes the value of relationships and suggests that you start there:

" 'Return on Relationship' is the key. Relationships are like muscle tissue, the more you engage them, the stronger and more valuable they become."

So there you have it. When starting a new marketing gig, here are four pieces of advice for you:

  • Use your freshness to take an outside-in approach
  • Focus on the story you want to tell
  • Identify what will be useful to customers
  • Build great internal and external relationships

A slightly different style of article this week, but hopefully something which you or maybe a new colleague or peer might find useful.

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Ian Truscott
Ian Truscott has a passion for creating ART (Awareness, Revenue and Trust) for B2B software companies as a marketing leader and is a censhare alumni. Wanting to connect a like minded community and share something useful, he founded Rockstar CMO, a monthly digital publication, and is currently helping B2B companies create ART at appropingo.

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