A Day in the Marketing Life

I realized today that it had been a while since I'd actually blogged about Marketing. Not cool. So I decided to keep track of what I did today. First of all today was ABI's traditional work at home day. We all try and telecommute on Wednesdays - we don't schedule our company meetings though many of us do outside meetings and phone calls on Wednesdays. Whenever I have a video to edit I schedule it for Wednesdays. So when working at home I will admit - I split my time between my home office and my livingroom or deck.

Today started out with a breakfast with Jo Miller, who is the monthly columnist for the ABI newsletter. Her column is must read for every woman in business who is looking to advance. Jo's going to be moving in a few months and I wanted to be sure we had a strategy so the column was covered during the move and that Jo felt comfortable with the plan. We'll be having some guest columnists cover while she's away which makes us both feel good.

After the meeting I came home and hit the phones. I did calls with several co-workers and finished negotiations on a co-marketing agreement. The co-worker calls moved forward several projects and helped me update my to do list for the coming weeks - I have a naming/branding project; a schedule update for a research project launch; a new speaking engagement to record in my tracking materials and a reporter to followup with.

I also spent the morning doing some pitches to reporters. I subscribe to a service where 3 times a day I see a listing of what reporters are writing about and are looking for contributions. The requests range from ideas for gifts (don't laugh - we got included in an article on conference gift bags) to casting calls for reality shows (they never seem to want 40 something women marketers for reality tv). Today I did a pitch for including our research in an article on work/life balance and an article on what people should do after a job interview. Yesterday, in fact, one of my pitches worked and I completed an interview on tips for launching a newsletter. Pitching takes a little time but the investment is worth it - it can result in an article on the organization or at the very least it creates awareness of the Institute at various organizations.

This afternoon I worked on a variety of projects. We finished the postcard for promoting our upcoming Women of Vision Awards (if you want some to give out at your company drop me a line). Alex, our designer, and I also worked on two projects - the new GHC powerpoint template and a redesign of our newsletter Partners visual. I emailed with the artist who does the GHC covers on a new project to make sure it was moving forward. I worked on research for a new press release; edited documents for co-workers; worked with our webmaster on a problem on the site: worked on editing a piece of collateral for updating; selected quotes from our GHC research to use in the collateral; designed a form and worked on updating my 2010 goals to get ready for a meeting tomorrow.

Looking at this list, I realized the thing they never taught in business school - that marketing is all about being able to multitask and move things ahead. It feels great when a project is completed, but you always know you have to move on to the next project quickly. So a course on juggling would not be a bad thing to include in B-School curriculums.