6 Things Becoming a Mom (re)Taught Me About Marketing

Earlier this year I became a mom. These last several months getting to know my daughter - and the new me! - have been so rewarding. And tiring, very tiring. During the late night feedings and hours spent rocking her to sleep, I found my mind wandering and connecting so much of what I was experiencing and learning in this chapter of life to many things that I think about as a marketer. It always amazes me how many parallels can be drawn between our work and personal lives, especially with regards to marketing practices. We just have to slow down and take a moment to connect the dots. 

Well, I started jotting them down, and this article is the result. 

1. Data is Great. Until it Isn’t.

Data can be so valuable when making an informed decision in so many aspects of our lives. Motherhood is no exception. In fact, I had no idea how much data you could collect and track about a newborn! How many minutes did she sleep, what is the humidity and temperature level in the nursery throughout the day, how much did she move in the crib overnight, how many ounces of milk did she drink, how many feedings did she have, you get the idea… It’s easy to go overboard and start tracking EVERYTHING. As a new mom with an anxious temperament, I’ll admit I might have taken this too far (just ask my husband). At least I didn’t export the feeding data to a csv to analyze the breast milk consumption trend over time. Oh wait, yes I did. 

The number of eye rolls I got after reminding my husband to “LOG THE FEED!” is higher than I’d like to admit. At one point, I realized I was spending more time looking at my phone to make sure everything was captured and wasn’t even fully paying attention to her. We needed to balance what was important to track and what wasn’t so we could be more efficient with our time. 

When you’re setting up KPIs for your marketing efforts, there is also a balance. While it is important to develop the infrastructure to be able to capture and measure just about anything, focus on the top 2-3 metrics that really matter. Don’t catch yourself stuck in analysis paralysis, preventing you from spending time actually DOING marketing. 

And sometimes you just have to trust your gut (i.e. mother’s intuition… ;)). There are just some things that can’t be perfectly measured, and that is OK. 

2. Community. Is. Everything. 

Motherhood can feel incredibly lonely, especially during a pandemic! Plus, it is no secret that mothers of all kinds often don’t have easy access to the information or the resources to properly care for themselves during such an incredibly demanding life event. 

Enter your mama tribe. I’m so thankful to my tribe, which consisted of fellow mom friends and amazingly supportive micro-communities for mothers on every stage of their journey built by - I hate to say it - social media influencers (they often have a bad reputation, but this is proof there is some good out there in this channel!). Personally, the benefit of this community was twofold:

1. Without a community and tribe to collaborate with, there wouldn’t be a growing awareness for the improvements needed in our maternal healthcare system. People coming together to voice one opinion is much louder and stronger than an individual. 
2. They GET me, and my struggles. Even if we couldn't physically be together, I felt less lonely.

Building a community for your customers and prospects can also be a game-changer, not only for your brand but for the entire movement you’re a part of. While the list of benefits can go on and on (gathering insights on your target audience, feature requests to inform product roadmap, generate new sales leads, brand awareness), perhaps the biggest reason to do it right now is to make your champion, especially in this digital-first world, feel less lonely. 

3. Your customers’ needs are always changing.

My Instagram feed looks a lot different now than it did a year ago. I'm in a new season of life with entirely new struggles... and Google searches. Which means the ads I’m seeing have also changed. Who knew there were so many places to buy baby sunglasses?! 

This was such a great reminder that, much like in our personal lives, our professional lives ebb and flow. Our needs are constantly changing. This past year is a perfect example. After being thrust into a remote work situation, suddenly everyone needed to equip their homes with faster internet, a proper desk and chair, a web camera, software to support them, and more. Many marketing teams quickly reacted by providing more educational content or product access for free for those that were hardest hit by the pandemic. 

As marketers, we need to pay attention to the actions our users are taking (e.g. visiting your website, engaging with your product, using a competitor) to inform how we market to them. My example with Instagram ads for baby sunglasses, while grossly oversimplified, is a pretty straightforward B2C approach —> a consumer is researching a similar product to what I sell, so I want to pay to have ads of my product show up on their feed. In B2B it can be harder to detect when a collective pain is strong enough to need your product or service when there are 6-7 stakeholders in the buying process. We can use intent signals, but is it really helping you identify when your prospect or customer needs change or that they are in market at all (great article on that here)? Talking to customers and prospects 1:1 is fantastic, but how do you scale that? 

4. Following a framework is helpful, but any framework will do.

Sleep training is a dicey topic (something I was thankful Emily Oster did such a great job analyzing various studies on this and other parenting topics in her book, Cribsheet!). There are multiple different ways to go about sleep training or sleep conditioning. I must have read 156 blog posts about how to ensure your baby will sleep and found several different templates and frameworks to follow. How do I know which one to use?

My belief is that it doesn’t matter. Following a framework is incredibly helpful, but the actual framework you use is less important as long as it serves your needs. Consistency is what matters. If you’re bouncing between one framework or another, you aren’t giving you or your team(s) a chance to really commit to a way of thinking. While there is no shortage of frameworks to choose from (for example, a quick google search on ‘leadership framework’ shows 724 million results), pick one, get everyone on board and utilizing it, and move on. 

5. Find your go-to stories (and photos).

As a new mom, you’re going to be asked… like a lot… for photoes and how your baby is doing. Given the myriad of things bouncing around the brain of a new mom, I found it was helpful to have a few go-to responses and photos in my proverbial back pocket. “She is X weeks, she just started X (smiling, rolling over), here is a recent photo!” Friends and family were often looking for these updates since very few people were able to meet her, an unfortunate result of the COVID pandemic that continues to impact our day-to-day. 

It reinforced the concept of having 2-3 customer stories or key product use cases ready to go as part of your sales pitch or narrative. While your sales team members may not be dealing with sleep-deprived-new-mom brain fog, they’ll be happy they’ve filed them away in an easy-to-access place in their brain. Having these sound bites at their fingertips to repeat also means a consistent message to the market - win-win!

Better yet, finding a way to scale the sharing of updates and pictures with a shared photo album (I had even thought about a blog!) made my life even easier! I didn’t have to worry if all family members know about the latest stats or if they saw the latest super cute photo of her first smile. A very similar approach to the process of 1) finding your audience —> 2) figuring out the best narrative and use cases to talk about —> 3) getting it in front of that audience. Which leads me to my last point…

6. Make some noise and you’ll get attention.

Babies cry. A lot. And moms, unfortunate as it is, are programmed to HATE hearing their babies cry. So, guess what? We attend to every cry. 

While your prospects are not programmed to immediately be attracted to what you have to say, you have to say something or they won’t even know you exist. Be silly. Write about becoming a mom (ha!). Just find a way to relate to your audience and start getting that message, webinar, blog post, email, ad, landing page, event, you name it, in front of them. I promise you’ll learn something. 

---

Thanks to my daughter for (re)teaching and reminding me about my role as a marketer. 

What parallels to marketing do you find in your daily life?