How My Life Experiences Made Me a Better Marketer
Written by our professional Digital Nomad, David Heiling. (Yes! he lives the life!)
When I work as a marketing consultant for small businesses and startup owners, I am greeted by different people at different stages of their business journey. Some companies have well-established marketing plans with specific marketing dollars used for achieving particular goals. Some expect me to create marketing magic and throw dollar bills in my face to make the problem go away.
I’ve been traveling the world for more than three years now, and you may be surprised at how my life as a digital nomad has allowed me to become a more open, inclusive, tactical, and smart marketer. There’s never been a better time to be a remote worker.
There are two main aspects in which my life experiences have made me a better marketer: friendships and travel. I can trace nearly everything I have learned over the course of three years on how to become a better marketer back to an interaction with a friend, a group of friends, or something I have learned from traveling the world.
Let’s dive right in.
I learned that different people want and need different things
Audience, audience, audience.
In any marketing plan, you need to realize who you are talking to and why they are looking at your website, blog post, white paper, video, or project. If you are hitting the wrong tone, you are missing out on a huge opportunity.
Chances are, you wouldn’t be able to sell an expensive camera drone to the Masai Mara bushmen in Kenya, but offer up some cost-effective tools for gardening or a sustainable way to power their camp, and you’re in without a second thought.
See what I mean? Audience.
When marketing your product or service with client-facing web copy, email blasts, or blog posts, make sure you are writing in a tone and style that will resonate with your target market, or you’ll lose them as fast as a rickshaw takes off in downtown Delhi.
I learned that people use different devices
At the beginning of my digital nomad journey, I met with a Finnish girl named Tiia, who had one small backpack. She had been traveling for about six months when I first met her, and she carried so little.
Her only source of information to the outside world was an iPad. She took that thing everywhere. It could make calls, text, and take photos, really all Tiia needed during her post-high school gap year.
My Australian friend, Sam (also known as Shaggy), carried only a laptop computer complete with a GPS tracking system so he could send his location back home to Mum.
I carry the trifecta. I’m not much for materialistic things, but technology and gadgets are my weak point. Smartphone, tablet, and laptop, I have them all.
The point of this story is that in order to market to all people across your target market effectively, you need to be crafty in how you deliver that message.
Enter the omnichannel customer experience.
Long gone are the days that businesses can expect to optimize their revenue and sales potential by running a single brick-and-mortar storefront. Often, well-established companies have a cache of social media sites, a website, a blog, and mobile applications to go along with their daily or weekly email blasts for an in-depth and consistent marketing plan.
The omnichannel customer experience is made up of multiple and individualized customer touch-points over various channels (social, email, mobile, and more) that seamlessly connect, allowing a customer user experience unlike any other. Customers can pick up where they left off on one channel and pick right back up on another.
Which leads me to my next point:
I learned businesses need multifaceted content creation
Content is still king.
During my time as a remote worker, I’ve met loads of different professionals. I’ve also met a handful of other travelers who found a way to make a living on the road without having a specific career. These people are multifaceted and can do a variety of tasks exceptionally well. I met a guy in India named Stu who had worked as a surf instructor, yoga teacher, English teacher, bus boy, taxi driver, and au pair during his short two-year trip around the world.
People like Stu are crafty, well-rounded, and smart, just like your content strategy should be.
If you are writing a blog post and then screenshotting that blog post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and your email newsletter, you are doing it wrong.
If you are making an hour-long YouTube video on your new product launch and it’s just you and a pair of your chief officers talking about how cool your company is, you are doing it wrong.
Different channels have different recipes for success. Your blog post can be uploaded to Medium or other content-sharing sites verbatim and as-is but will need to be customized for social based on the platform’s specific feel and algorithm.
Don’t be lazy. Don’t copy and paste your content everywhere, throw in one hashtag, and call it a marketing plan. You’re better than that.
Be like Stu.
I learned that quality really is better than quantity
When I was growing up, I had many friends, but I didn’t have any best friends. Many different people would say hello or recognize me in high school, but I was the guy who always got left off the party list.
That all changed when I started traveling the world. You see, when you jump off a bridge in the heart of Africa with someone; come to realizations about life with someone; stand under a freezing ice waterfall in the middle of a tiny island with someone; or explore a continent for the first time with someone, you are bonded forever.
Now I have excellent friends that I can rely on, not just a lot of acquaintances.
The same should go for your marketing content. You don’t want a lot of pieces of microcontent that get 10 hits on your analytics chart; you want a well-researched, thought-provoking, and exciting piece of content that consistently brings traffic and builds awareness.
What’s the point of having 50 pieces of content a week if nobody reads it? What’s the point of having 50 friends if nobody picks up the phone when you call?
I learned it’s past time to promote diversity and inclusivity
I was born in a rural town in Wisconsin without much diversity in the way people looked. I didn’t even leave my home state until I was 23 years old. I moved to Washington state to another small and rural town with many other folks who looked and talked just like me.
I knew there was more. I needed to see more. That’s why I decided to get a remote job I could do anywhere and travel, see other cultures, meet other people, and see the world through my own eyes instead of believing only what I read in the papers or online.
Boy, am I glad I did.
Over the course of the last three years, I have met black folk, Asian folk, British folk, Australian folk, and European folk speaking all different languages. One of my best friends is a Kenyan I met in Zanzibar. I met a Syrian refugee living in Turkey and a Palestinian woman with a terrible passport.
One specific interaction stands out to me more than most. I was in Mostar, Bosnia at the time, and my hostel was made up of a good mix of people. We decided to go out to a pub (pre-COVID, don’t worry). There were eight of us.
German man
Chinese woman
American man (that’s me)
Israeli woman
Argentinian man
French woman
Japanese man
Finnish woman
I realized right then and there that inclusivity and promoting diversity, not only in my marketing plans but also in my life, would be one of my missions. People come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and it’s beautiful.
I learned to make patience and relaxation a priority
I am not a patient person by nature. If someone tells me we’re leaving someone in five minutes and eight minutes comes around, I used to pace around looking at my watch. It was a problem. I wanted to control my life and everything in it to make sure I was using my time the way I wanted to.
That all changed.
I live a lifestyle where a good chunk of my time is spent waiting for planes, trains, and automobiles. I became patient not only with others, but with myself, to not completely break down in a ball of stress and anxiety.
I started living life in the present moment, not worrying about the past or the future, and accepting and appreciating every current moment in perpetuity. Talk about relief. I found myself not working on five things simultaneously. I didn’t need to plan every five minutes of my day anymore.
In turn, this gave me the insight and the time to delve into specific tasks more deeply, and I implore you to do the same. One cursory glance at analytics may give you a jolt of delight or deflate you. But looking at analytics across various platforms and taking a deep dive into the insights the analytics can provide has sparked an Aha! moment for me on more than one occasion.
However important, impressive, or world-shattering your business idea, company, project, or event is, it’s not more important than your personal wellbeing and the wellbeing of others.
Chill out. Relax. Smile. Laugh. Love.
Trust me, your clients, your boss, and your soul will appreciate it.