Transcription
If I was learning marketing for the first time, this is the exact step-by-step plan I would follow to build a seven-figure career all over again. I used to be a shy kid from Canada who could barely speak up at the dinner table. Now today, I've made millions from my writing and ideas, and I've coached marketers at brands like Shopify and AWS. But none of that came from just pure talent or even from working harder than everyone else. What I did was think like a CMO from day one by doing these six things.
First up is to narrow down the big abstract world of marketing. You have to pick your game. Performance marketing or growth marketing. This is how Adobe became a multi-billion dollar empire. So Adobe had a problem. They were selling Creative Suite. Great, the industry standard for designers, photographers, video editors, like the whole creative world. But they were selling it the way software had always been sold. One big upfront purchase every year of a few years hoping customers would just come back and renew. Product was dominant here. The revenue was a little unpredictable and a whole generation of smaller creators couldn't afford the entry price. So, they never became Adobe customers at all.
So, Adobe made a decision that terrified a lot of people internally. They killed the one-time purchase model and moved everything to a monthly subscription. Always updated and accessible to anyone who could afford basically a coffee a day. Now, existing customers did not like this. There was a public backlash for a short period. The stock even dropped. I mean, it looked like disaster. Then something happened. Recurring revenue stabilized the business in a way that it had never been before. Suddenly, smaller studios and freelancers who couldn't afford the old model were able to start subscribing. And the customer base exploded. Adobe went from a company that made most of its money from infrequent big purchases to one of the most financially stable software businesses on the planet. That's the difference between performance marketing and growth marketing.
Performance marketing is about making what you already have work better, which is great. Conversion rates, the cost of acquiring a new customer, the ads, the copy running across your funnel. Growth marketing is about expanding what's possible. So, new channels, new audiences, new revenue models. Both performance and growth marketing are necessary and they work together. But the game that worked for Adobe was growth marketing here. A fundamental change to how the business generated demand and revenue. Most beginner marketers end up in performance roles because basically that's where entry-level jobs commonly are. And that's fine. But if you only ever think in performance terms, you'll always be optimizing someone else's vision instead of shaping one of your own. Think like a CMO and distinguish growth from performance. Before you start any marketing task, ask yourself one question. Am I here to make something existing work better, or am I here to build something that doesn't exist yet? Performance or growth. Know which one you're doing? And you'll know exactly how to think about it.
The second thing I'd learn is how to use AI like a strategist. Using AI to write faster is the lowest value thing you can do with AI, and it will frustrate you. Here is what to do instead. When AI first exploded, the advice was pretty simple. Use it to write faster, produce more content, generate a lot of options, and a lot of marketers did exactly that. But then their companies looked around and said, "Well, if the tool does 75% of the writing, why do we need as many writers?" A lot of people lost their jobs in that first wave. But here's what happened next. The businesses that replaced everyone with AI started getting really generic output, slop, forgettable content, copy that sounded like everyone else's copy because it was trained on everyone else's copy. And those businesses started coming back, not for people who could type faster, but for marketers who could think, who could stress test a position, who could model and predict what would happen two steps after going to market. Now, that's the shift. The marketers who survived and thrived and are still doing so weren't the ones who used AI the most. They were and are the ones who use it for actual business problems, not wordsmithing. CMOs know the greatest use of AI isn't production. It's pressure testing. Most marketers fail not because the execution was slow or even bad, which AI is supposed to solve, but because the thinking behind it was just not challenged. AI gives you this incredible thinking partner who will challenge you every time if you ask it the right questions. So the question is not can AI write this for me but AI where does this fall apart? So as someone just getting started in the marketing world upload your work to AI describe who you're selling to and ask it to find every place a real customer would tune out in your copy. That one habit will make your marketing stronger than anything else on this list.
Now that you know how to think with AI, there's one specific place that thinking needs to show up. How people find you in the first place. The third thing I'd learn is the new SEO. SEO used to be the best way to make a business famous, but now it's something else entirely. Back in 2018, Google released this update, the Medic Update, that nobody saw coming. Businesses that had spent years and years doing exactly what Google told them to do, woke up one day just buried in search results, just overnight, no warning. And as anyone who's worked in search knows, if you want to hide a dead body, you put it on page two of Google. No one will find it. So this update killed a lot of businesses. It hurt ours and it hurt our friends. The lesson everyone took away was don't build on rented land. But then they kept building on rented land, just different land. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, wherever the algorithm was paying out that quarter.
Now, we're in a new version of that same moment. Buyers are asking AI, like ChatGPT, questions that Google was never really good at answering, and AI is answering them directly without sending anyone to your website. Now, here's how you can take advantage of that like a CMO. A whole new discipline has emerged called Answer Engine Optimization. Where Search Engine Optimization or SEO was about getting Google the search engine to rank your page, Answer Engine Optimization is about getting AI answer tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity to cite you as the source of truth in chats. So the currency has shifted from traffic to citation. Most marketers are still optimizing only for the old one. Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube are where most major AI tools are pulling their answers from right now. Those are platforms with structured, referenceable content. Your job is to create content that those systems want to cite, not content that just gets clicks. Content that gets referenced and cited. The same way you used to ask, "Will Google rank this?" you now need to ask, "Will AI cite this?" It's basically the new SEO. The new question to ask about every piece of content you create is this: referenceable. Not just sharable, not just viral, not even just engaging. Referenceable. Would an AI chatbot pull this as a credible source when my ICP asks it a question? If not, don't make a rookie mistake and just create it anyway.
Knowing where visibility comes from is only useful if you have something worth being visible for. Now, that's where specialization comes in. The fourth thing I would do is pick one part of marketing and go all in on that. Everyone says new marketers should be generalists, but this is fast becoming the way to become replaceable. Take HubSpot. They did not try to win at marketing. They invented a whole category. Along with Moz, they defined what inbound marketing meant. They wrote the book on it, built tools and certifications around it, and became the first name anyone thought of when they heard that phrase. Now, they did not do that by being good at everything. They did it by owning one thing so completely that the category and the company became synonymous. Now think about what that looks like at the individual marketer level. April Dunford is the most respected positioning authority on the planet serving enterprise B2B tech. Very narrow, very specialized and very successful. Dave Ghart has gone narrow on founder marketing. Basically the marketers you know are all specialists, including me. Now, most new marketers spread themselves across every channel because someone told them to be adaptable. Learn social, learn email, learn paid ads, learn search, and they end up being, you know, slightly okay at all of it, which means they're interchangeable. If everyone knows the same things, you're basically a walking AI tool. You can be prompted and replaced. The marketers who build real leverage pick one thing and go so deep on that one thing that people start citing their frameworks. Not their company's frameworks, theirs. It can be as specific as scripting videos or capturing attention on social media or owning outreach on LinkedIn so completely that your approach gets shared in group chats you've never even been in. That is a career moat. And here's what most people miss about specialization. You don't have to wait to be an absolute expert to start building that moat. You can start a newsletter today sharing what you're learning as you learn it. Not pretending to be the authority, being the person who is figuring it out in public. Do that every week for three years and you will be the recognized voice in your specific corner of marketing. The broader you are, typically the more forgettable. The more specific you are, the more promotable. The narrower your specialty, the louder your signal. Pick the one thing you want to be known for, not just the one thing you can do, and start creating a public record of how you think about it. That record compounds in a way that job titles just never do and won't anymore.
But narrow expertise only compounds if people can actually find it. Now, that's not about content, it's about distribution. The fifth thing I'd learn is what I call owning the ecosystem. The brands that win aren't the ones with the best content. They're the ones whose message ends up everywhere their customer already is. Tim Hortons is a coffee chain here in Canada, and it's not the best coffee, not the fanciest brand, but try sitting in a cold arena at 5 in the morning watching your kid's hockey practice without a Tim Hortons cup in your hand. It feels wrong, like something's missing. And that feeling is not accidental. Tim Hortons sponsors hockey leagues across the country. Their logo is on jerseys. Their name is inside the rink. They didn't get into your morning ritual by having like better captions. They got there by embedding themselves into the ecosystem where their customer, you, already was. Now, Nike does the same thing on a bigger scale. They don't win because they write better copy. Ultimately, they win because they're inside the conversation before the conversation starts. Athlete partnerships, league sponsorships, designer collaborations, community platforms, every one of those is a distribution decision. It's not a content decision. They're not asking how to make a better post. They're asking how we become part of the identity of the person who buys or should buy from us. Now, most junior marketers never think this way because they're basically handed a channel and told to make it perform. But the head of marketing at a company is always thinking at least one level above that. Not what do we say necessarily, but where does it need to live for the right person to feel it at the right moment. Stop asking how do I improve this post and start asking how do we embed ourselves into our customers' lives? Those are very different questions at different levels of thinking. Now, you don't have to answer the second one out loud in every meeting, but you have to be the person in the room who's asking it.
The sixth thing I would learn, and the one that almost nobody teaches, is how not to be boring. The greatest cheat code to be a great marketer is stop being boring. We were brought in to write emails for this scheduling tool called Doodle. Now, their existing emails were getting very few replies. Technically, they were correct and professionally written, but they were completely invisible. So, we wrote something that was quite different. Emails that were unusual enough that people didn't know what to make of them. They were completely unboring. Now, some Doodle users read these emails and then they reached out and said, "Oh, we love these." Others reached out to support for Doodle to say, "I hate these." Now, the support team was furious with us about the volume of replies, but the head of marketing was thrilled because the conversion rates had skyrocketed. The emails worked not because they were just creative for creativity's sake, but because they were willing to take a position. They had a point of view. They said something that could be disagreed with, which meant they said something real. And in a world where most marketing sounds like it was written by a committee trying not to offend anyone, saying something real is remarkable. The most common mistake in marketing isn't saying the wrong thing. It's saying nothing. Nothing worth remembering. If a line came easily, well, it probably sounded like everything else. If it's the kind of thing a boardroom came up with by consensus, it's boring. Cut it. Listen to how your actual customers describe their actual problems and use those words. Not because it's clever, but because nothing a committee invents will ever be as interesting as what a real customer says out loud when they're frustrated. Now, here's the reframe that will change how you think about this. Instead of asking, "How do I make this more creative?" Ask, "What would make this completely forgettable?" And then do the opposite. Generic language, no point of view, avoiding all tension. Once you can see what boring looks like, not being boring gets a lot easier for any brand.
You just saw the roadmap I'd follow to build a high-income marketing career from zero. But if you don't know what to study, you'll move fast in the wrong direction. So, watch this next where I'll show you the 12 books that can make you smarter than 98% of marketers.