Kathleen Booth, SVP of Marketing at Pavilion -- Community is the new Google

Community is very important, and as our guest aptly puts it, communities are the new Google. Therefore, as a business, if you want to be known within a community, you have to build a strong brand for yourself. In this episode of the YouShouldTalkTo podcast, our host Daniel Weiner welcomes Kathleen Booth, SVP of Marketing at Pavilion. They talk about the rise of communities in the last few years, why they are no longer old boys' networks, and why brand affinity is so crucial. Guest-at-a-Glance 💡 Name: Kathleen Booth, SVP of Marketing at Pavilion. 💡 Company: Pavilion 💡 Noteworthy: Kathleen was named by TopRank as one of the 50 Top B2B Marketing Influencers in 2021. She is also the host of The Inbound Success Podcast and an avid LinkedIn creator on topics relating to marketing and entrepreneurship. 💡 Where to find Kathleen: LinkedIn Key Insights ⚡Communities are the new Google. Instead of going to Google for answers, professionals are now turning to their communities. And as Kathleen says, communities are the new Google. She explains, "At the end of every episode, I ask a question to the marketers that I interview. And the question is, 'With digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you personally stay educated and up to date?' [...] Over the last year and a half to two, I would say that 90 plus percent of the time, the answer is that I have a community of peers that I turn to. It could be a Slack community; It could be my LinkedIn connections. But almost everybody has said, 'I rely on other people to keep me educated.' And I think the reason for that is it's just faster, more efficient, and better. The information is vetted by trusted sources. ⚡Make sure you meet the execution team before you sign an external agency. One of the most vital steps in external agency vetting is to meet the execution team. Kathleen says, "I think one of the biggest disconnects that happen with agency experiences is that you talk to somebody who sounds great, and then when you start working with that company, you're handed off to an execution team. And they may or may not be great. So when you're vetting agencies, one of the things I like to say is, 'Who's going to be working day to day on my account? I want to meet with those people before I sign to make sure I'm comfortable that they know what they're doing.'" ⚡True ownership mentality goes a long way. The ownership mindset is one of the most critical traits to look for in an external vendor. Kathleen explains, "To this day, if she would still take on client work, I would work with her again and again. And the reason it made for such a great relationship is that she always approached client engagements with a true ownership mentality. In other words, she wasn't waiting for me to tell her what needed to be done. She was proactively saying, 'Hey, I had an idea. I have a suggestion. I think this would be really good.' She was pushing me sometimes."