12 Must-Read Bits of Wisdom From 12 Trusted Marketers

"My industry is too boring."

"Our product isn't sexy enough."

"We're too small for anyone to care."

Enough with the excuses.

If you're serious about growing your business, it's time that you let go of what you think is slowing you down, and focus on what can be done to improve today. 

Aware that motivation is often hard to come by, we decided to gather and serve up the best bits of advice we could come by to help you get the marketing wheels in motion. 

Below you'll find a list of insights from brilliant marketers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Ann Handley, and Jay Baer on a range of topics from idea generation to building a community. Dig in. 

1. Gary Vaynerchuk on listening to your community:

"I spend an obnoxious, heavy amount of time listening to my community. Last night, right before bed, instead of consuming stuff as the normal marketplace does, I was reading the comments that a lot of you left for me in yesterday's episode. It is more interesting to me to understand what people are looking for from me. I'm consuming my community, which I think is me repaying what you're paying me with, which is your attention. I'm giving you back my attention." (Source: The #AskGaryVee Show)

2. Seth Godin on leadership:

"Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there.  People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going." (Source: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us)

3. Ann Handley on making mistakes:

"Typos happen, of course. And keep in mind that a robot spellchecker can't catch all of them. Consider this alarming blunder in a recipe printed in The Pasta Bible, issued by Penguin Australia in 2010: the book recommended seasoning a dish of tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto with “salt and freshly ground black people,” according to a news story in the Guardian. No recall was made of the books in circulation, but the publisher destroyed the remaining 7,000 printed copies, at a cost of $20,000.1” (Source: Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide for Creating Ridiculously Good Content)

4. Lee Oden on empathy:

"You have to empathize with your target audience in three ways: how they discover information, their preferences for consumption - which drills down into channels, devices, and content - and what motivates them to take action." (Source: Convince and Convert)

5. Mike Volpe on earning attention:

"No one wakes up in the morning thinking they want to see an ad or get yet another email in their inbox, so your job as a marketer is to be more relevant and more remarkable than anyone else in your space.” (Source: Selling Your SaaS) 

6. Brian Clark on headlines:

"Headlines are the the first thing that people will see, and often, unfortunately, the last thing they see of your content because a shockingly large amount of people will be scanning Twitter or scanning their e-mail inbox or RSS feed reader. You basically live or die by the headline. So if you don’t grab them there, you've lost. This is why headlines are so important." (Source: Experian) 

7. Jay Baer on idea generation:

"I find that most of my ideas for posts come when I'm explaining something to a client or potential client on the phone. At least twice a week I find myself saying 'hey, I should write a blog post about that.'" (Source: IMPACT)

8. Justine Jordan on bootstrapping:

"Our internal motto is 'product before revenue.' Our number one goal is making a great product that our customers love. The fact that our founders are so involved in the day-to-day is great, as so much of the product innovation comes from them. They had that original vision and built something to scratch their own itch. We continue to build upon something our customers love and the revenue follows." (Source: Selling Your SaaS) 

9. Hiten Shah on hard work:

"In one of my failed startups, a colleague said to me, ‘I kept waiting for some sort of magic to happen.’ The reality is that with a startup, you can’t sit around waiting for magic to happen - you have to just work your ass off instead. Talk to customers, build your product, get feedback, then do it all over again. It’s a cycle, and it’s hard work, and it definitely doesn’t involve magic.” (Source: LogoMaker) 

10. Kevan Lee on creativity:

"Creativity comes to me every morning in my cocoon of an office with the lights low and the world asleep. If it catches me at other times of the day, I’ll stick it in a notebook and politely ask it to wait for morning." (Source: Canva) 

11. Marissa Mayer on burnout:

"I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you're giving up that makes you resentful." (Source: Entrepreneur) 

12. Marcus Sheridan on being a writer:

"I think it's important to realize that we're all communicators, even if we're not necessarily writers. This basically means it's critical that we look for ways to get our message across. For some, this means writing. For others, this means video. And for others, it means finding someone who can interview you, draw out the information, and then put it in text or video form." (Source: IMPACT)