Marketing Masterclass, a course for marketing leaders, by marketing leaders
The responsibilities of a manager, especially a marketing manager, can be quite challenging.
For starters, everything you and your team do will be seen by your customers, prospects, potential employees, and proud moms. On top of it, the management is going to have high expectations of you because the company’s runway and success depend on your team doing well.
From setting guidelines and goals for your team to hiring the right people and ensuring that each team member’s creative efforts are aligned to organizational objectives, the weight on the shoulders of a marketing manager can get too much. If this sounds like something you’ve been struggling with, we have just the thing for you:
Introducing to you our new “Marketing Masterclass”
If you’re a team lead, a novice manager, or someone who wants to be a manager someday, Marketing Masterclass is just what you need to get you up to speed.
Composed of 15 lessons packed with takeaways, the course gives you condensed wisdom from industry-leading marketing experts. Ranging from general marketing topics like allocating a budget, best practices when it comes to hiring, and identifying the right KPIs, to more content and product-centric marketing topics like strategy building and message distribution across go-to-market teams, this course will enable you to handle any marketing or managerial curveball thrown at you—fast.
And there’s nothing that can help you make that transition compared to the practical wisdom of individuals at the forefront of contemporary marketing. That’s why we’ve roped in marketing leaders who’ve been there and done that to teach you. The best part? Just like all the other courses in Freshworks Academy, the Marketing Masterclass is completely free.
Meet your instructors
- Colin Campbell – Director of Marketing at Sales Hacker
With over 10 years of marketing experience, Colin believes that marketing, if done right, should feel like giving a gift.
- Eric Keating – VP of Marketing at Appcues
Eric is known for building efficient demand-generation functions, telling compelling stories, and fostering high-performance teams. He has been in the field for 17 years.
- Jill Soley – Best-selling author of Beyond Product
Having launched or grown storied innovative products like Adobe Creative Cloud for over 16 years, Jill embraces a collaborative, customer-focused approach to product and marketing management.
- Russ Somers – VP of Marketing at TrustRadius
With over 20 years of experience with brands like TrendKite and solarDesign Inc, Russ’s expertise lies in combining strategic vision with analytical insight with a focus on execution.
- Wes Bush – Best-selling author of Product-Led Growth
A best-selling author with over 9 years of marketing and teaching experience, Wes believes the days of hiding your product behind closed doors are gone—and it’s time to lead with your product.
- Janani Dwarakanath – Head of Product Marketing, Freshworks
With over a decade of brand and product marketing experience, Janani considers herself to be ‘the voice of the product in the market and the market in the product’. Prior to Freshworks, she was heading brands for Asia Pacific at Cognizant Technology Solutions.
A note from our team
We worked round-the-clock for the past few weeks to curate this course and make it available to all the marketers within our company. Then, we asked them what their best takeaways from the course were. Here is a sample of what they told us:
#1: Focus on channels that work
In this day and age when starting a business has become so easy, there is cut-throat competition across all marketing channels. In an attempt to establish our brand’s presence across all channels, it can be tempting to distribute your marketing budget across all of them. But this would be doing more harm than good.
Whether your budget is $100 or $100,000, investing it in new channels just for the sake of it will not drive growth.
Wes Bush, the author of Product-Led Growth, says, “There will always be one marketing channel that works for your company and it’s important that you identify the channel that does really well, build metrics around it and double down your resources on it.”
So, pick a channel that makes sense for your brand and if it works really well for you, consider hiring a specialist to own that particular channel. As you scale up, you can then experiment with extending your reach into other channels.
#2: Don’t outsource your hiring
When you go from being an individual contributor in marketing who works on many cool campaigns to managing a hot team of marketers, it is almost like a change in career. Suddenly, the team’s successes and failures become your successes and failures. That’s why it’s important to focus a lot of your energy on hiring and assembling a kick-ass team.
Given that hiring is one of the core functions in our capacities as marketing managers, it’s important that we do it ourselves and not outsource it.
Colin Campbell, Director of Marketing at Sales Hacker, says, “When hiring, don’t rely on your recruiter or a job-posting to do the recruitment for you. As a marketing manager, you need to be hand-to-hand doing that part of your job.”
#3: Internal marketing is important too
When other teams in your company like sales, product, and design are not aligned with the messaging you’ve finalized for your company or product, customers are going to see you as a fledgling company that doesn’t know what it stands for yet. Therefore, constant communication and collaboration with internal teams are just as necessary as educating customers. Internal marketing is just as important as external marketing.
Jill Soley says, “Your employees are not paying attention to what you have to say as much as you do, just like your customers, so you have to repeatedly broadcast the message.”
In addition to repeating the message, she also lays emphasis on the consistency of the message being broadcasted. Similar to how your customers might get confused with mixed messaging, your employees are also prone to getting distracted or even forgetting your message.
As a good practice, Jill recommends that you maintain a repository, like an internal website or even Slack, where you post important internal messages. This also lets your employees bookmark the pages and revisit them later in case they were occupied at the time of your internal campaign.
This are a few of the takeaways our people learned from the Marketing Masterclass. So, what are you waiting for? Take the Marketing Masterclass course by enrolling in Freshworks Academy today, and tell us what you learned from it! If you are already a part of Freshworks Academy, you can take the course here.
