The Marketing Meetup

The Marketing Meetup is a community of over 8130 marketers in 13 locations around the world which holds 120 events per year. It is a fantastic collection of marketers looking to learn about their field in a friendly, open, inclusive and positive environment.

It’s an energetic space filled with good ideas and human beings over job titles, not heavy sales. They also have pizza and free beer. 😉

The last event I attended with The Marketing Meetup was on September 17th, 2019. There were two main speakers – Hannah Anderson, the Co-Founder of Social Chain and Nicola Bray, the Founder of Maze Media. I am grateful to have been able to hear Hannah and Nicola speak and went home that night feeling very inspired and with new ideas on how I could develop my own business.

Key take-aways:

From Hannah – The People First Approach. What does this mean? People are just that: people, with real problems. There is always a human being on the receiving end of the marketing message. This is an important perspective to consider as a marketer in order to maximise the efficiency of any campaign. Hannah explained how Social Chain became successful, by simply listening to the customers online, their real problems and by creating tailored and creative campaigns to target them directly. An example of this, was their campaign with BoohooMAN. Their collaboration with the brand and a tailored campaign approach led to BoohooMAN’s biggest day in their sales history. A few others and I were blown away by the simplicity of Hannah’s explanation of this real campaign example.

From Nicola – General advice to the 20-something me. Nicola had a different approach to her talk. She chose to think about what advice she would give herself in her early 20’s:

• Be brave

• Be a failure

• Be patient

• Be different

• Be balanced

• Be curious

• Leave cheesy/overused buzzwords at the door – Like “leverage synergies, strategic fit and 360-degree solution”, amongst other examples. Keep it simple. Keep it effective.

• Be positive

• Be honest

• Be you.

She also touched on the fact that a Rolls Royce car takes 6 months to build and a Toyota takes 13 hours, which highlights the fact that masterful pieces of work that are worthwhile having, take consistent effort and time to be built. Rome really wasn’t built in a day!

From this event I met some great people: including entrepreneurs building health businesses, B2B contacts and general friends who love the industry like I do. The organisers are great too! Also, did I mention free pizza and beer?

To conclude, these events are always providing me with endless value, new connections and inspiration at the start of my career. I’m very excited to be attending the next event on the 15th of October, and I look forward to further stepping up my professional development. 😊

Dan Halsall - Manchester Airport Group.