What’s possible as a content creator? If you don’t want to be a  CMO or VP of marketing, how high can you rise? Amanda Natividad joined us for the 403rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast and shared her thoughts about how writers can carve out a role as an individual contributor and what that looks like. She also talked about research, growing an online audience and how not to add to the social media noise. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

SparkToro

Amanda’s Website

The Brian Kurtz episode Rob mentioned

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Building an online platform on social media where you can share your thoughts has become an important part of a lot of copywriter’s businesses. A platform like this can be a source of leads as well as a place to grow your influence and share your thoughts. Whether you do it on Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram or somewhere else, it’s more important than ever. And when you do it right, your platform can be a launch pad for all kinds of things—including a writing position where you get to not only do the work you love, but define the way you do it.

Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And for today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira Hug and I talked with content creator and VP of Marketing at SparkToro, Amanda Natividad. Amanda landed her position by posting great content online and interacting with others on her chosen platform—Twitter. We talked about that as well as how content creators might create individual contributor roles for themselves, how to research using a tool like SparkToro, the platform Amanda would probably choose today if she were starting over and a lot more. This is a great interview with lots of insights. So stick around…

Before we jump in with Amanda…

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And with that, let’s go to our interview with Amanda Natividad.

Kira Hug: Well, let’s start with your story. I’d love to hear how you ended up as the VP of Marketing at SparkToro and how you got there.

Amanda Natividad: Yeah. This could be too long of a story. Let’s see. Go for the whole hour.

Rob Marsh: Let’s make sure we talk about the test kitchen, all of it.

Amanda Natividad: It all started when I was born. No, I’m kidding. No, let’s see. Here, I’ll try to do my best here. You would think at this point I would be good at this, but I’m not. So here we go. I’ll say I was a marketer like in the trenches for what, at least eight years or so before I ever started publishing online, like under my own name, here are my marketing thoughts. Here are my thoughts and work. And once I decided to do that, I was basically all in. Like I kind of just tend to be the kind of person where I’m either in or out. There’s no in between. Right. So when I decided to do it, I really went all in. I went all in on writing Twitter threads. Eventually started a personal site and a personal newsletter and then grew that and then slowly expanded onto LinkedIn and stuff. Along this journey, one of my marketing heroes, Rand Fishkin, followed me back, which of course meant that I was mortified instantly and was like, well, now I can’t tweet anymore. I think I closed the app for the day and was like, I think I’m done, guys. I got to be quiet now. 

No. What actually happened there was I obviously did become more self-conscious but in the best way possible because I really then was like, why would Rand Fishkin follow me back? He doesn’t need my marketing advice. He already knows how to do this. It really made me double down on conveying my perspective, my experiences because then I thought, well, he doesn’t. Rand Fishkin isn’t following me because he doesn’t know how to do marketing and thus wants to learn how to do it, right? He followed me because he wants to hear my perspective on marketing, my perspective on the world of work, my perspective on food, right? So in a weird way, it kind of allowed me to be more myself online. And then we ended up becoming friends, met up for lunch with his wife, Geraldine Deruiter, and we were all just fast friends. For me, it felt like meeting old friends for the first time in real life, right? Even though, I mean, I had never interacted with Geraldine online, very rarely interacted with Rand. And it was definitely one of those people who, when I followed his work, I never commented on it. For the longest time, I was like, oh, he doesn’t want to hear from me. I was just like, cool. What a cool guy. I would move on with my day. 

I ended up joining SparkToro. I actually originally joined with the title Marketing Architect. This was initially a very intentional choice because I’m an individual contributor, but at the same time operating at a level higher than coordinator, analyst, marketer, or even director, right? And kind of wanted this unique title to reflect the uniqueness of my role as a high-level individual contributor, but also as somebody who, because we’re a startup of three people. Inevitably, part of my job involves customer support and involves being a product manager, right? All these things that are not really what marketing is. So we wanted it to be inclusive of like a marketing architect that we saw was somebody who would build the foundation of a marketing team. 

And then —and I’m saying this because you asked about how did you become VP of Marketing—after my first year, after doing this great work, I knew I wanted to stay and was getting more invitations to speak at conferences, was pitching myself more. And ultimately I felt like, and even being right on, having previously been on the side of being an event organizer, was being honest with myself and realizing, you know what? I actually worry that the term marketing architect isn’t helping me as much as we thought it would, right? Like just really being honest with ourselves. Like it sounds, I think the ethos of it is great. I stand by the ethos of it, but it’s not a real title or a real known title, right? You hear that and you’re like, oh, what’s that? That sounds like a thing you made up. And it was, right? But then we had to really think through, you know, is this making the point we think it is, right? Like, is this actually helping me? And then I ultimately was like, you know, event organizers, conference organizers, podcast hosts, right? Like, they don’t really care about our own, you know, internal buzzwords, right? Like, And ultimately, a lot of these conferences, they’re like, we just want to know who you are. Like, what is that, right? So then I was like, hey, can we just change my title to VP Marketing? And then Rand and Casey were like, yeah, you can do whatever you want.

Rob Marsh: They seem pretty easy going. I want to dive into this idea though, marketing architect. You wrote something a couple of months ago, I think to your own newsletter, where you talked about as marketers, our ability to create these individual contributor type roles, where we define how we contribute to a company and the kind of work that we want to do. Would you share that idea just a little bit or go a little bit deeper in that? Because I think there’s this massive opportunity for people who have been content writers or copywriters and they use the word “just” in front of their titles. I’m “just” a copywriter. I’m “just” a marketer, but what we do is so much bigger. And I think you laid it out really well as you start talking about that idea.

Amanda Natividad: Yeah. I appreciate that. I mean, it’s funny because the notion of a high-level individual contributor isn’t really new, right? I mean, we see a lot in more tech or product-oriented roles.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, IBM will have somebody who’s getting paid a lot of money to just sit in an office and think, right?

Amanda Natividad: Right. Oh, totally, right? And you have like software engineers or software architects, p