soap boxI find myself a bit too often promising to get off my soapbox as soon as I make one last point about the evolution of marketing. There is a fine line between passionate and obnoxious and I’m fairly certain I cross it on a daily basis.

Despite my best efforts I just can’t help it and the reason why began almost three decades ago when I decided I wanted to buy and sell companies at the age of eight. I vividly remember pushing the clothes in my closet to the side as the space magically transformed into my office. I chose marketing as my career path in high school and never regretted it until two years ago.

After spending six years at a small healthcare provider doing very little marketing I found myself turning 30 and feeling as though I had lost touch. The bulk of my marketing experience was before I graduated college. I was concerned that if I didn’t return to traditional marketing my degree would become irrelevant and marketing doors would be closed for me.

I joined a large, healthcare IT company in the role of product marketing manager and was thrilled to finally experience corporate life. It took a year for the new job honeymoon to wear off until I began to experience complete frustration for the first time with this profession called marketing. Blasting customers repeated sales messaging felt inconsiderate and ineffective. I was unable to get excited about a 15% open rate and a 7% click through rate because let’s be real – that’s a 85% failure rate. To top it all off I had sales folks telling me my campaigns sucked yet demanding more of them.

That’s when I began down this path of discovering and learning exactly what marketing 2.0 is all about. Now that I not only understand it but have the opportunity to put it into practice, my passion for the profession of marketing has returned. There are several fantastic thought leaders in the space today who I’ve learned quite a bit from personally.  My unique perspective is from one in the weeds, doing the work and learning from trial and error. I hope to share this learning experience with you along the way and spread the love of a new way of marketing that builds a connection with the customer, balances sales messaging with education and ultimately generates leads.