5 Ways Being a Father Has Made Me a Better Marketer

On May 17, 2017, at 4:54pm, my amazing wife gave birth to our first child and love of our lives, Jackson. We have gone through just about every emotion imaginable over the first few weeks of his life, from hearts so full it feels like they will explode, to exasperated fear that we have no idea what we’re doing.

But things are going well, overall. And one thing I can say for sure is that this little dude is teaching me a ton. Learning how to be a father, first and foremost. But a lot of the lessons I’m learning from being Jackson’s father are translatable to other areas of life. I mean, going from a fully selfish individual to being responsible for someone else’s life is a pretty big life change.

Here are just a few marketing skills I’ve recently enhanced as a bi-product of being a father…

1. Patience: When your little one won’t stop crying at 3am and all you want to do is close your eyes for, just like a few seconds, it’s really a sink or swim moment for your patience skills. And while one-year-ago-me would have cringed at the thought of only sleeping in two-hour chunks every night, never having a peaceful meal, and getting interrupted every few minutes when I try to play video games (or write blogs, haha), I am getting better every day at maintaining peace and patience in the midst of someone who requires a lot of my time. Marketing, too, requires patience. Too many times, I’ve made quick decisions after just a few days of data. Whether you are a marketer for retail, e-commerce, or CPG (especially CPG), patience is a virtue when testing new campaigns or products. When you jump the gun, you risk an incomplete or ineffective insight.

2. Responsiveness: I’m learning that some of Jackson’s crying is him just being fussy and doesn’t require me to jump out of my seat. And then there are the cries that do, indeed, mean I need to pop up and make something happen. As a counterpoint to patience, responsiveness is required more than ever as a modern marketer. With online marketing campaigns that can be manipulated at a moment’s notice and competitors who are constantly optimizing, it’s more critical than ever to be able to mobilize a responsive strategic adjustment at-the-ready. I like to think that I’ve always been someone who moves quickly, but I think I just leveled-up.

3. Perspective: Look, I live in scorching, arid desert of Las Vegas. As such, I like to keep my home air conditioning set to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. My infant son? Not so much. Anytime my son cries, I have to think about it from his perspective. Why so sad, buddy? Hungry? Dirty diaper? Tired? Cold? Bored? When it comes to marketing your business or products, you have to think about things from the perspective of your customer or client. And unless you have an amazing, enterprise-wide data solution at your fingertips, odds are, you don’t have everything you need to fill in all the gaps in your customer’s decision journey. So think about why the click-thru-rate on that last email was so low; why the conversion rate on your product page has been steadily declining over the last few months; why your engagement on Facebook isn’t what it used to be. Get out from behind the cloak of your business and put your customer’s shoes on for a change. You might uncover something important!

4. Test & Learn: With my newborn, every moment feels like a test and learn opportunity. Does he prefer to be burped over my shoulder or across my knee? Should I change him before or after he eats to get him back to sleep quickly? If I put a little more pressure on his stomach, will it help alleviate his, uh, pressure? It’s the same with marketing, especially with a nimble business. If you control the digital marketing for your company, Google AdWords alone offers you endless test and learn opportunities to keep even the most cautious leader excited for the next experiment. The key, however, is to make sure you are recording and archiving these tests so that a week, a month, or a year from now, when upper management asks why you made that change or when you are guiding your team on your business’s best practices, you’ll have the experiment in your back pocket to reference.

5. Acceptance: Look, at the end of the day, there is going to be frustration. He is going to cry. He is going to get upset. He is going to change plans. And that’s okay. Because every time something bad happens that he doesn’t like, we learn. Next time, we’ll do a better job of covering him with a blanket when the air conditioning comes on (now set to 78 degrees instead of my blissful 65). We’ll do a better job of feeding him before he starts crying inconsolably. We’ll do a better job of changing his diaper quickly when he, uh, dirties them. And it’s the same with marketing. Sometimes, things are crappy. The best-laid plans don’t go as expected. It happens to the best! It seems cliche these days, but we all need to understand the importance of failure. As long as you walk away smarter than you were before the “failure,” you should consider it a win.

Did I miss any fatherly marketing skills? Leave your thoughts in the comments!