It’s not about finding balance but harmony. You’ll never be able to balance all priorities equally, so you just have to find the best way to harmonize all of it.
As a part of my Marketing Strategy Series, I’m talking with fellow marketing pros at the top of their game to give entrepreneurs and marketers an inside look at proven strategies you might also be able to leverage to grow your business or career. Today I had the pleasure of talking with Randa McMinn.
Randa McMinn is Chief Marketing Officer at Reali. For more than two decades, Randa has been blending art and science while developing go-to-market strategies and transforming marketing into a continuous growth driver for start-ups to S&P 500 companies in tech, real estate, financial services, and retail. Randa holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Dallas and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and son.
Thank you for doing this! Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting and what lesson you learned from that?
At the ad agency — my first job — I was going through my first client billing and I saw my billable rate, which was $150 and I thought “Wow!” I’m getting paid $150 an hour! I quickly did the math and realized, “No, I’m actually getting paid $10 an hour.”
It was crushing when reality sunk in, but it was a great introductory lesson into calculating profit margin. It was funny and sad at the same time.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
In 2008, during the economic downturn, I was one of the few at my firm that was actually kept and I was given the opportunity to build a marketing profit center for our portfolio of open-air retail centers. After pitching the business plan to our lead investment group, I was given the funds under one condition: I had to show ROI on a monthly basis.
Tracking and reporting was a challenge for us at the time because we didn’t manage the point of sale for our retailers and digital marketing was just getting started.
I had to get creative, so I started tracking cell phone pings to show how much foot traffic increased at the properties based on specific promotions we were running and also how much of that traffic converted in-store for our retailers.
I believe this was a tipping point in my career where I shifted my focus to a data-centric approach and decided to build muscle around revenue intelligence.
It’s critical for marketers to understand key drivers and the makeup of business revenue and how this changes over time, and most importantly why. This will help you invest in areas that are performing to help drive revenue and reduce the effort in areas that aren’t.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
I would have to say Peggy Sealy, Owner of Prodigy Public Relations Group. She was my first female manager early on in my career, and I’ve admired her leadership qualities, especially as a female leader, ever since.
In addition to being an expert in PR and mastering the hard skills of her craft, Peggy also managed to master the soft skills. She was well-respected among the leadership team and was very attuned to situations around her, which I believe aided in her persuasiveness. Peggy leads with such poise, humility, and empathy and is fully committed to nurturing and supporting her team’s growth. I not only really admire her and put her on a pedestal, but I also use her as a North Star.
I’ll share one quick story. We had a regional account and we were trying to win the national business for one of our existing clients — and this was one of my biggest mistakes, not the funniest!
At the time, we used fax machines, and the client sent over the changes without a cover sheet. It was a shared fax machine, so I grabbed what I thought were all the changes and sent out the release. Lo and behold, the client had added changes to a second page that I didn’t get and I was mortified.
We didn’t win the national account, but Peggy intervened and wholeheartedly fought for me — even though the client was irate. And the good news was, we retracted the release, no stories ran with the wrong information. So nothing happened, but I think just to see Peggy stand by her team was an incredible moment for me to see what true leadership looks like. You lead the group, but you’re one group and as a leader, you take the good and you take the bad.
Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?
First and foremost, give yourself grace. We will never be great at every part of our lives, so stop trying to hit that unachievable target. I recently saw a graphic that resonated with me about how we’re taught to measure success in our professional lives. The graphic showed that we’re taught to measure our professional success by two things: salary and job title. In reality, if you only focus on those two things, burnout and dissatisfaction are inevitable.
A better way to measure your professional success is to look at how you’re dedicating your time in six key areas: mental health, job title, salary, free time, liking what you do, and physical health. The smallest portions of these six areas are actually job title and salary and the largest portion is mental health.
For some reason, I always thought I needed to keep my personal life separated from my professional life, but I think the new working environment since COVID has made that especially difficult.
I think the key takeaway is that it’s not about finding balance but harmony. You’ll never be able to balance all priorities equally, so you just have to find the best way to harmonize all of it.
Consumers have become more jaded and resistant to anything “salesy.” In your industry, where do you see the future of marketing going?
Consumers are super sophisticated and they can do their own research. They can do their own comparisons and so the big takeaway is, you have to be able to clearly show how you’re adding value and reducing pain points for the customer.
With consumer expectations continuing to increase, it will be imperative for marketers to personalize the customer’s experience as much as possible by way of content and channel activation based on where they are in their journey. Personal relevance will be critical for consumers to make the right association and quickly.
In addition to new restrictions around privacy concerns, because we work in real estate and finance we are even more restricted on targeting in order to reduce concerns around discrimination. Due to enhanced restrictions, we have to have a diversified set of marketing channels because traditional digital channels like Google and Facebook are becoming more expensive and less optimized.
What 4 things do you wish someone told you before you started?
- The college you choose matters. I was the first to go to college in my immediate family and the first in my extended family to get a master’s and so I had no idea what the college journey looked like and how that college decision would impact future hiring opportunities. Whether you like it or not, your college is often seen as a status symbol and can open or close doors for you.
- Your resume lives with you for your entire career. It’s really important to be very thoughtful about every job decision you make. I turned down a number of great opportunities because I was looking at the opportunities from a short-term lens.
- Always trust your instincts. As a woman, my instincts are really strong and I’ve actually had physical reactions to interviews that I’ve been in. In one specific example, red flags were flying during an interview process, and I even physically got sick after the final job interview, but I didn’t pay attention to the signs. I ended up accepting the job and later learned what my instincts were trying to warn me about.
- Build a personal board of directors. Surround yourself with mentors who can help you along the way. I think it’s important not just for networking, but to get help making those decisions and to help understand what type of consequences there might be on the other side. Learn from others and their journeys. Most people are so willing to share and to help.
What books, podcasts, documentaries or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?
NPR’s How I Built This podcast with Guy Raz and Marketing Dive, a great aggregator of the latest marketing news. I’m a research junky, so I also subscribe to Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Company content.
One more before we go: If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
The Compassion Movement: I believe compassion is a superpower in the human spirit and that we would be in a better place in this world if we could build a concentrated practice for greater compassion for ourselves and others.
Compassion doesn’t always come naturally to people, so it takes concentrated effort and work. Science has even shown that it can actually improve the physical health and psychological well-being of the person who is being compassionate, so it’s a win-win.
Thank you for sharing your story and so many valuable insights with us today!
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