Off To School Again – Being a Lifetime Student of Marketing and Technology

I’m writing this on Saturday while John is packing for a trip to Chandler, Arizona.  We’re on our way to the Infusionsoft University next week – need to keep up with the changes in marketing and technology!

We love traveling. And you can never get too much school.

You can call us nerds, egg-heads, geeks, whatever; but we enjoy going to classes and learning new things, particularly marketing band technology.

There is currently much controversy about whether a college education is a good investment for a young person.  We’ve heard the arguments and we  agree with some of them, but we still encouraged our kids to get at least a bachelor’s degree. We think it teaches as much about self-discipline and working within a system as it does about the subject matter, and the doors it opens are still worth the investment.  It also helps a young person build up a trusted network of contacts within their chosen field and start building relationships.

John and I both have Master’s degrees.  (John’s in Business, mine in Adult Education.) While this is not specifically about marketing OR aviation, we’ve found the background really helps us put things into perspective and sets us apart from other people in aviation and marketing who don’t have the deep understanding of business informs our discussions with clients about how product pricing affects long-term financial projections, or how an investment in marketing affects the bottom line.  The education background is helpful to our clients because we truly believe that educating customers should be a function of great marketing.

We try to attend two major classes or seminars each year, in addition to aviation conventions. We can’t learn everything there is to know, but we carefully choose one business or marketing topic that has changed a lot in the last year, and one technology topic that has changed a lot (or that we feel holds the most value for our clients.)

We chose Infusionsoft because ALL of our clients have expressed a lot of interest in marketing automation – no matter how brilliantly designed a marketing campaign may be, it won’t work if our clients are too busy to execute it well.  Automating as many steps as possible frees up their time for sales tasks that require a personal touch.

While we love online webinars and books (we each read about a book a month, on a wide variety of topics)

We like to attend them on-site when we can.  The reason?

• Going somewhere forces us out of our routine.  Meeting different people, eating different food, sleeping in a different bed causes a shift in our perception so that we look back at our own business (and our clients’ businesses!) from a different perspective, at least for a week.
• Interacting with people in a room brings unexpected ideas and connections for collaborations.  We’ve met people at seminars that we’ve subsequently introduced to our clients, creating mutually profitable new relationships.

Looking forward to sharing more great ideas when we get back! .