27: Erin Blaskie: Startup marketing, in-house vs freelance

Erin Blaskie is Ottawa's best known brand marketer. She’s spent 12+ years running her own marketing agency but she’s also spent 5+ years in-house leading marketing. She’s uniquely positioned to give you insights on the good and the ugly of both sides of startup marketing.

Show Notes

Today we are joined by the powerful Erin Blaskie. Erin is currently a fractional CMO advising startups and scaleups, currently working with Jamieson Law, Ridgebase, Heirlume and Staffy. 

Before going back to freelance, Erin spent 4 years leading marketing teams at Fellow, a SaaS platform for meeting productivity as well as L-SPARK, a SaaS accelerator. 

But Erin’s start in marketing goes further than that. in 2004 she launched a virtual assistant business (one of the firsts) and later pivoted that to a marketing agency where she worked with brands like Disney, Microsoft, Ford, she’s worked with Hollywood actors, authors and speakers helping them craft their brands. 

She runs a no fluff-tactical newsletter with 10k+ subscribers, she has a huge Twitter audience topping 36k.

She’s a TEDx speaker, her writting’s been featured in Forbes, entrepreneur, adweek and the wall street journal.

She’s also a post grad intructor, an entrepreneur mentor and a mental health advocate. 

Holly shit, Erin, how do you find time to appear on podcasts with all the stuff you have going on haha?

Here are the questions our listeners submitted!

Freelancing

What do you wish someone would have prepared you for before starting your digital marketing career?

I would especially love to learn her tips on setting expectations and boundaries with clients in her freelance/agency work. 

Do you feel like you’re more sales than marketer? Do you spend more hours working freelance? more than startup?

All things being equal, do you think that as a freelancer, you can learn faster? more clients, more projects, more breadth of problems and tools.

Startup in-house
Curious what Erin would say about which marketing roles/functions are better to hire in-house versus hiring freelance.

What are some of the biggest tactical marketing mistakes you see startups make? I say tactical because I think the de facto answer is based on not having a strategy in place.  

What are the best marketing strategies for early stage companies when budgets are sparse?

Show notes
Check out Erin's site.

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

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