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The Marketing Meetup regularly hosts guest speakers, including industry leaders like Mark Ritson and Rory Sutherland, who share their knowledge with the community. Joe also has his own podcast, Humans Come First, and runs an agency called Empath Marketing, as well as being involved with other projects such as Humans of Healthcare, The Marketing Academy, and the Cambridge University Accelerator.

Joe has been a guest on various podcasts and platforms, including Everyone Hates Marketers, The Next Web, Marketing Week, Fiverr Webinar Series, and Freelancer Magazine. He has also been a guest lecturer at several universities and has participated in panel discussions, including at Cambridge University Judge Business School and Innocent Smoothies Internal Motivation talks.

Welcome Joe!

1) What did you feel was missing in the networking environment that The Marketing Meetup fulfills?

I’m not necessarily comfortable saying that these things didn’t exist before the Marketing Meetup came along because I think The Marketing Meetup is actually a remarkably simple concept; folks come together and look after each other. They come to have a nice time, they come to listen to high quality speakers, eat pizza and drink beer. And I don’t necessarily say any of these concepts were missing before, but focus on the simplicity of a great human connection possibly encouraged the way that we do it which is with thoughtfulness, inclusivity and that spirit of elevating one another. I think we’ve put it together in such a way where people seem to like the combination that we’ve ended up with. We put it together in a different way, packaged it up and then we’ve probably been quite lucky over the past few years that people have decided to engage with it. I would never claim us to be innovators, we’re just a team that has our hearts in the right place and try to help people, and that’s been a really nice recipe for success.

2) How do you personally communicate with your audience so they feel connected to The Marketing Meetup community?

So there’s two ways to answer this question. How do I personally communicate with folks? I try to make myself as available as possible, with the caveat that I have a social battery. I am an introvert, and even though I speak about this topic, a lot of people say ‘no, you’re not’. My social skills have forced me to be a really effective community builder because there’s a really strong realisation, and this is the second part, that my personal communications matter a lot, but also they don’t matter at all because the definition of a great community is one where folks come together. And instead of having a central point of communication that is broadcasting to the community, there’s all these connections going on in the community themselves so people are chatting with one another. And so I would say, rather than communication mattering from me so much, the thing that we have done as a central point of The Marketing Meetup is to establish a culture. A culture for those conversations, and the culture for those communications which lays out an expectation for how everyone communicates with each other. So the communication that we do is reinforcing those cultural expectations, those listening, saying hello, being positively lovely, elevating, being inclusive, being kind, all of these things that fundamentally mean that when people have conversations with each other it’s done in the spirit of the community.

3) How do you keep your content fresh so that marketers come back for more?

I would probably push back on the idea of freshness because I would say that ‘fresh’ is less interesting than the word ‘useful’ which means to say that I don’t think that we spend a lot of time focusing on the flashy, we spend a lot of time focusing on the practical, the stuff which actually impacts marketer’s day-to-day life, that brings them together and says I recognise this challenge and here’s a solution to these things and the way that you do can do it. We show up and listen to what people are saying, whether that’s on LinkedIn or in our events or in conversations. I think it’s easy to fall into a narrative of what the the industry wants you to be talking about. Actually, the thing that really matters is that we’re helping people on a day-to-day practical level, giving them advice and sharing and exposing them to experts that they wouldn’t do otherwise. So for us, it’s really a sense of not necessarily keeping things fresh, but just keeping things practical and relatable and grounded. When we do all those things then people say, yeah cool, I recognise that problem and here’s a solution and let’s engage in that stuff. So that’s really the methodology if I was to point to anything in particular.

4) The Marketing Meetup was initially localised in the UK, how do you uphold community values when you expanded internationally?

Well, I’ll go back to the simplicity of what’s missing in the networking environment which I would say the things that we point to are not necessarily cultural values in the sense that they are UK specific. They’re human values, being kind, looking after each other, listening, saying hello, speaking to ‘nervousness’, speaking to ‘excitement’. These are human emotions that take place across cultures. They don’t just take place across the UK. So by pointing to these things and communicating them through values and behaviours, I’d like to think that we’re dialed into something which is greater than just a UK centric community. Of course there are variations that we need to be aware of throughout the world. I mean, for one I’m aware that we go 110% with kindness, and maybe some other cultures aren’t necessarily aware or enthusiastic around that in a corporate context, but for the most part people generally just want to have a nice time with each other, meet nice people and have a nice time. And I’d like to think that The Marketing Meetup speaks to that while also having some practical use in their day-to-day lives.

5) What ingredients make a great marketing event?

It depends on what type of marketing event you want to run. So for example I attended MAD/Fest. It’s a very, very different style of event to the events that The Marketing Meetup run. So MAD/Fest is 12,000 people over three days. The Marketing Meetup is pizza and beer for two hours and an evening for 50 to 60 people. So the situations between those two things are very, very different. For MAD/Fest, if you’re looking to get 12,000 people through the door over three days, the logistics are going to be super important. Whereas for The Marketing Meetup, stuff like intimacy, that sense that you are welcome into this space is going to be really important. For MAD/Fest it may be stuff like sponsor experiences especially high on the list because that’s part of the model. But for us, the sponsor experience is really important but so is the attendee experience. Not that the attendee experience isn’t important at MAD/Fest. So what we’re speaking to is what kind of event do you want to run? You can run a great event of it’s type, and it could be a horrible event for other people. But whatever you do, you make a conscious choice of the event that you would like to run and then you take time for some real thought around each of the stages and interactions that someone would have when interacting with your event. So at The Marketing Meetup we really care about signage. We really care about how people come into the room. We care about the floor of the room. We care about the speaker quality, how people are introduced, the vibe in the room on the night. These are all things that we’ve thought about and placed a spin on our positioning, or our positively loveliness. Those things matter to us but they may not necessarily matter to another event. So I’ll go back to that first piece of advice that I mentioned which is decide the type of event that you want to run before you go and decide what a great marketing event is.

6) What benefits can attendees gain from being part of The Marketing Meetup community and how can they contribute?

So the benefits are that you meet other marketers, you have a lovely time, you learn about marketing, and you create an environment where you are valued. We try to create a place where people are valued for their humanity, and not their job title or their budget. We care about you for you and that’s the environment that we want to create. You can contribute by coming along to one of the events, by sponsoring the events, by speaking at one of the events. There are lots and lots of different ways that you can get involved in The Marketing Meetup community, and folks are very welcome to seek us out. One last recommendation would just be to get on the newsletter. This is the central place where you can find out all the latest on The Marketing Meetup.

Brilliant, thanks Joe. Great to hear more about the inner workings of The Marketing Meetup. Best of luck with all your upcoming events.