The Skills That Make a Marketer Indispensable

It Starts With You, Not With Tactics

How would you like to make yourself indispensable? It means your value is so high that people cannot even think about not having you on their team. That is the goal. Not employable. Not useful. Indispensable.

And by the way, I am still developing. I am still in evolution. I am by no means at the top of the game where I want to be. That matters, because you have to stay humble and you have to know that you don't know. The moment you start feeling like you already know everything is the moment you start going downhill.

So what is the path that brought me here, the one that can take you to your own level? It starts with your being. Your foundation. Who you are and how you operate in the game of life. That determines what buildings you can build. The central part, the most important part of all your dreams and goals, is you.

Daily Learning: You Have a Coach in Your Hands

I do not let a day go by without learning, still today. And there has never been a better moment for it. We are living in an era of artificial intelligence where coaching is at our fingertips, unlimited. Coaching is an industry somewhere around six and a half billion dollars a year. People pay for coaching services.

Meanwhile, you have a coach in your hands, aka ChatGPT. You can ask questions, engage, interact, get data, get information, and get yourself trained and educated. There is no excuse anymore. Daily learning is not optional if you want to be indispensable.

Reverse Engineer, Then Think Outside the Box

You have to be able to study what other people, other brands, other businesses are doing successfully. Not so you can plagiarize it. So it can inspire you to do your own and get things rolling without analysis paralysis.

Here is one example. Google "Facebook ad library" and the first link that shows up is the ad library. I can go in there and search for my own brand, NaturalSlim. Say you have your own weight loss company and you want to see what Manuel is doing. You click on NaturalSlim and you can see exactly what we are running. All the ads, the videos, the images, the graphics, the calls to action, the copy, even the landing pages. The whole entire thing. That is reverse engineering. A real marketer spends time looking at what other companies are doing in the game.

But reverse engineering only works in combination with thinking outside the box. You look at what other brands are doing, then you create your own version, one that is different, one that makes you stand out. With NaturalSlim, we are not just a weight loss company. We are a service. We deliver consultations, and we deliver them for free. Buy our products, and the consultations cost you nothing. That is what makes us different. Don't do what everybody else is doing. That is not going to take you very far.

Opportunity Seeking: Waves Come and Waves Go

Things come and things go. A master's degree from college will not serve you tomorrow. You have to stay current and keep learning about what is happening today.

YouTube in 2006 was the biggest opportunity in the internet world, and not only the internet world, the business world. Today it is still a big deal, but it is not as easy to break through. Same with social media. Same with Amazon: it was easy to build a brand there in 2012, 2013, no competition, so much traffic that you would magically start selling right away. Not the same thing today. Opportunities come and they go.

One of my best friends and partners, Mr. Tom Cummins, says once in a lifetime opportunities come every 7 days. That is an absolute fact. They are always present. But if your eyes are closed, you are going to miss them while other people are catching that wave. What is the opportunity right now? AI. Tools like ChatGPT are making it easier to write a book, create content, do social media, be a copywriter, even build a marketing agency. Jump all over it, dominate that game, and next year we go looking for the next one.

Extrovert, Competitor, Data Driven

You can't be a marketer behind closed doors. A marketer is obsessed with communication. They are out there looking for collaborations, connections, talking to others, invading other people's spaces, comfortable being themselves. If you can't do that, maybe marketing is not your game, and maybe you should be the employee of a marketer whose direction you can follow.

Then there is competitive spirit. I hate losing more than I love winning. I have been like that since I was a kid playing tennis at age seven. I broke rackets. I threw my Nintendo against the wall when I lost. I am not saying be a bad example. But that spirit means you keep going until you win. You don't just give up. You persist until you accomplish growth, expansion, accomplishment.

And you have to be data driven. Stop being romantic about what you think your audience likes and use the data they are giving you. If you made a video you think is the best you have ever done and nobody watches it, don't be romantic about it. If another video, one where you thought you looked terrible, takes off, operate on that. When you get romantic, you keep spending money on a campaign or a creative or a landing page that is not working because you feel it is the best thing ever done. That leads to failure.

Marketing Never Sleeps, and Neither Does a Hall of Famer

Never go to sleep. Not literally, because sleep matters and when you don't sleep well you don't produce. But marketing does not sleep. It is 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. It does not wait for you to come back to work, and it is not a 9 to 5, Monday through Friday thing. That is not what built me. I built my universe Monday through Sunday. As long as I was awake, I was working, creating, directing, adjusting, correcting. My best marketers don't really have a schedule, because they understand that at 8 at night and at 6 in the morning, people are still trying to buy. And when everyone else takes days off during the holidays, you should be paying the most attention, because that is when people get into the mindset of spending.

Be like a Hall of Famer. In marketing you are going to fail a lot. Many ads, many images, many campaigns and landing pages and whole strategies are going into the garbage because they didn't work. But when you get those few campaigns that win, those few strategies that hit home, you scale those to the end of the world.

Be communication obsessed. I covered this in episode 17, the block or buy philosophy: you hit your audience over and over until they either block you or buy from you. If you worry you are bothering people too much, this is not your game. Be results obsessed: keep going despite every failure until the campaign makes money, until the leads come in at the right cost, until the videos go viral. And last but not least, be creative. An entrepreneur is an artist. You pretend to be a business person, but in reality you have the ability to create, and the best entrepreneurs are incredible creatives. Combine all these elements, and your probabilities of winning skyrocket.