This is my episode. Yes, I’m the host of this podcast and creator of the Marketers in PJs community. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Emily Bezak, freelance writer, editor, and marketing consultant, Founder of Emily Bezak Writes. With nearly 15 years combined experience in marketing management and freelance writing, as well as an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, I know my way around a marketing department to say the least. You can read more about my work, subscribe to my monthly newsletter, and read my blog at EmilyBezak.com.

It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for since I first started planning this podcast: my own marketing mistake is here. After only a year of marketing experience and two semesters of b-school under my belt, I landed a Director of Marketing role at a fashion startup in Pittsburgh. I was on Cloud 9 and then some launching a blog, live-tweeting during Project Runway episodes, and managing a close-to-zero marketing budget to create a new way of consigning designer clothing and accessories before TheRealReel became, well, real. 

Learn how to question your employer or manager about what marketing goals you’re responsible for and take full ownership of your deliverables and results. Nothing is usual, and everything is suspect. And if you really want the big marketing job, you have to deal with the big consequences and do the work.

Creative Director of TEDxPittsburgh and freelance graphic designer, Sara Lee Coffey is the introverted mastermind behind my own branding and new website design at Emily Bezak Writes. Sara’s work has been featured in the marketing of many of Pittsburgh’s most recognizable nonprofits, startups, and social justice organizations, including the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Ascender, and Flexable Childcare.  

My chat with Sara uncovers something that is very personal for her: She’s an introvert. When you think of a marketer, you may think of an overly-bubbly salesperson or influencer making Instagram Reels and moderating Clubhouse rooms daily. Despite years of experience and a portfolio filled with rockstar companies, Sara has found it difficult to take her own advice and market herself as an expert in her field and her own services. I’m so thankful she comes out of her shell to share this important topic with us.

Learn how to overcome insecurity and introverted tendencies to authentically market yourself as an expert and earn what you deserve. Proving just because you’re soft-spoken and shy doesn’t mean you can’t be a great marketer.

Chris Martin, Owner of Atlas Marketing and Host of The Building PA Podcast, operates two offices in his Pennsylvania-based construction marketing agency. With extensive experience in public relations and communications for companies in construction, industrial, healthcare, and others, Chris knows how to manage a brand from start to finish and then some.

On this episode of Marketers in PJs: The Podcast, Chris shares two marketing mistakes that involve a media blunder when managing the spokesperson of PennDOT and a dreaded mistake in proofing a pricy print piece for a new client early in his company’s decade-plus history. He shares how he owned the print mistake and covered the reprint expenses despite his modest revenue stream in the early days of his firm and instituted a new process inspired by the United States Armed Forces that his company still uses for each marketing piece today.

Learn how to own your mistakes with class, implement process improvements for your marketing team, and keep your reputation intact whether you're managing a marketing budget of triple-digits or six. 

Former marketing and brand director at sporty companies like GNC and DICK’s Sporting Goods, Zack Duncan is a cool dude to know in marketing. After a midlife crisis at 30, Zack opened his own digital marketing agency with absolutely no plan and no clients lined up before quitting his job. 

Today, he continues to run his firm, Root & Branch, from the third floor of his family home, providing local and technical SEO services, digital marketing campaigns, and Google product implementation, training, and support. Zack is also the Executive in Residence for Digital Marketing at the University of Pittsburgh’s College of Business Administration. So I guess you could say, he’s a bit of an expert. Right?

Early in his career - although still pretty high up in the food chain at DICK’s Sporting Goods - Zack made the cringiest marketing mistake of the season. He sent a snarky email in the heat of the moment, and it went even worse than you can imagine. Listen to this episode to learn how he was able to save face and learn from his mistake, as well as a few tips on how to avoid this particularly awful mistake in your own career.

Meredith Felton is the Product Marketing & Content Strategy Manager at Jetpack Workflow, a B2B SaaS startup headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A lover of creating, organizing, and befriending, she's found her home and passion in product marketing, with a long and winding road to get there. She recently created her own job description and title, negotiating for exactly what she wanted to do with her career and fill in gaps that she saw in her organization after a critical team member left for a new opportunity. Meredith is also a client of mine.

Our conversation with Meredith includes a handful of marketing mistake examples that all fall under one common theme: Not asking the right questions. In one particular story, Meredith is a brand new marketing specialist at UPMC after an admittedly-short career in secondary English education and sales. Meredith’s education background made her believe she needed to have all the answers and get everything correct herself. No sharing notes! When she missed an annoyingly-simple typo on a postcard for Medicare enrollees, she got the wake-up call she needed to share her work, ask for help, and become the wealth of marketing knowledge she is today.

Learn how to manage projects better by asking questions and reaching out to peers for help. Remember you don’t know everything, and it’s totally okay! 

With a shiny new corporate job at Citizens Bank, Sarah Peduzzi has a few lessons learned up her sleeve to share. After spending most of her 10+ years experience working for agencies including LunaMetrics (now Bounteous), Level Agency, and BarkleyREI, Sarah has mastered paid media and digital marketing. Most recently, she’s the outgoing Director of Marketing at Jetpack Workflow, a B2B SaaS startup headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a former client of mine.

In this episode, Sarah and I discuss a mistake she made with a client’s budget that still makes her queasy thinking about it. Costing her client thousands of dollars much faster than planned, Sarah was sure she was fired from her job as she prepared to deliver the bad news to her agency’s higher education client. 

Learn how to turn a marketing mistake into a learning experience for you and your team, create a tool to help prevent the mistake in the future, and always, always, always triple-check your zeros when it comes to someone else’s money.

Heather Cherry is a fellow freelance copywriter and marketing consultant based in Butler, Pennsylvania, where she lives and works with her husband and son. Her work has been published in Forbes and SELF Magazine. In September 2020, she self-published her first book titled Market Your A$$ Off: Simple Strategy for Smart Business Marketing.

In this episode, Heather shares about her experience marketing her own consulting and copywriting services as a new mom and entrepreneur. Instead of finding a niche, sticking to what she does best, and only focusing on channels that serve her, she went on every channel to do everything under the sun for any client. Growth at all costs. And she ended up not enjoying her work, defeating one of the most common reasons for going into business for yourself.

Learn how to refine your marketing message to exactly what services you want to offer and how you want to work in your own business or organization. Being everywhere, doing everything, and helping everyone gets you nowhere and burned out fast. 

Erica Gordon is a freelance writer, editor, and educator with extensive experience in digital content and higher education and is based in the Bucks County suburbs outside of Philadelphia. After teaching Business Communications at Temple University for four years, Erica has funneled her free time into her blog HotMessOnAHealthQuest.com where she chronicles her personal journey through infertility and IVF, making better health decisions for herself, and focusing on overall wellness. 

In this conversation with Erica, we discuss our mutual passion for storytelling and the sometimes-overused buzzword: authenticity. When she first started her healthy living journey as a doTERRA consultant, she created social media channels without a strategy or content plan. Instead of leading from experience true to herself, she did what she thought she was ‘supposed’ to do with a lot to be desired in her content and in her passion to keep posting.

Learn how to dig deep into your story to tell better, more authentic stories to create true fans and build the side hustle brand of your dreams. It’s not just about being present; it’s about your actual presence and what you fill with the space you take.

The Season 1 Finale of Marketers in PJs: The Podcast is here, and it’s really good. For those short-form content lovers and TL;DR enthusiasts, here’s the cliff notes of my first-ever podcast season. I talk to marketers of all disciplines about their deepest, darkes marketing mistakes with all the gory details. And more importantly, we cover how to overcome the mistake and make it right, as well as how to avoid the mistake in the future. 

With snippets and sound bytes of the most interesting parts of this season, listen to this mashup after you make your own marketing mistake or to find out whether or not you should listen to the rest of this season. I hope you learn something new and stop-by for more seasons to come.

Interviews in this season include:

• Victoria Snyder - Founder of Self-Care Senorita
• Zack Duncan - Founder of Root & Branch and Executive in Residence of Digital Marketing at University of Pittsburgh College of Business Administration
• Chris Martin - Founder and Owner of Atlas Marketing and Host of The Building PA Podcast
• Sarah Peduzzi - Mission Lead of Student Lending at Citizens Bank and freelance digital marketing consultant
• Heather Cherry - Freelance Copywriter and Editor at Heather Cherry Consulting Co. and author of Market Your A$$ Off: Simple Strategy for Smart Business Marketing 
• Meredith Felton - Product Marketing and Content Strategy Manager at Jetpack Workflow
• Sara Lee Coffey - Creative Director of TEDxPittsburgh and freelance graphic designer
• Erica Gordon - Freelance Editor, Writer, and Educator and Founder of HotMessOnAHealthQuest.com
• Emily Bezak - Founder of Emily Bezak Writes, Creator of the Marketers in PJs community, and Host of Marketers in PJs: The Podcast

Victoria Snyder is the Founder of Self-Care Senorita and a 3x Telly award-winning film producer and a diversity, equity, and inclusion activist and educator with over a decade of experience. As an advocate for mothers, the Latinx community, and entrepreneurs, Tori is a true lady boss with grit and grace for days. She is also the recipient of Pittsburgh Magazine’s 40 Under 40 in 2019.

Tori started Self-Care Senorita as a lifestyle blog in 2019. Today, she creates self-care subscription boxes sourced from local and minority-owned/BIPOC businesses in southwestern Pennsylvania. In addition to her business, she sits on a number of boards and offers consulting services and community events to local small businesses and entrepreneurs. Her Facebook Group, Self-Care Senoritas, has over 1,400 active members and continues to grow each day.

Not a marketer by profession or education, Tori learned quickly that she needed to market herself and her business to help spread the word about her mission and products. As her business has exploded throughout the pandemic, she has increased her marketing efforts and sophistication. Unfortunately, her biggest mistake has been trying to do it all herself while not asking for help. As a result, her first email newsletter only went to approximately 300 subscribers out of her list of thousands, and she still isn’t sure why. 

In this episode, you’ll learn how Tori navigates her marketing efforts and how she has learned to ask for help from experts when she needs it most.