The RISE Marketer Community™ momentum is growing! We’ve had such a positive response, a lot of early applications, and many requests to learn more about the community.
If you are considering RISE Marketer Community™ for yourself or a member of your team, we invite you to listen to our interactive information session, hosted by our CEO, and RISE host, Jennifer Zick.
Key Takeaways
- RISE is designed to support mid-level marketers (managers and directors) looking to grow into strategic leadership roles. It provides mentorship, education, and a peer-driven community to help overcome isolation, career stagnation, and lack of senior guidance.
- RISE tackles challenges such as: The fast pace of change in marketing technology, limited access to mentorship and resources within companies, balancing execution and innovation while demonstrating results and navigating career growth and earning a voice at the leadership table.
- RISE’s format is monthly meetings (large group + small cohorts), 24/7 Slack, and access to vetted agency partners.
- We welcome marketers looking to actively participate, be truly open, and have a commitment to their career growth.
- Applications for founding memberships close on January 31, 2025 and our first meeting is February 13, 2025.
Full Transcription
Introduction & Purpose
Jennifer Zick: Welcome, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. We’re gonna let everybody take a moment to roll in, and then we’ll get started. I love that you’re on camera. It’s so wonderful to see your faces. Hello, hello, Hello. We know it takes a couple minutes for Zoom rooms to get fully filled, so we’re just gonna let the waiting room open up and warm up for a couple, and then we’ll kick things off.
So if you want to grab yourself a fresh beverage, get a notebook, get your pen ready for rigorous note taking. Feel free to take a moment to do that right now. And we’ll kick off in just about one minute. So we can stay to the schedule, but also make sure that we leave some time at the end for some Q and A and discussion. So settle in and we’ll get started in just a little bit. And again, if you’re joining us today and you’re currently off camera, I want to invite you to be on camera as we’re going to kind of practice the experience of what a community looks and feels like. But if you are absolutely not prepared to be on camera today, go ahead and take a grace period day off from camera. But if you’re available to join us so we can meet you face to face, we’d love to meet you.
So I’m going to go ahead and just introduce myself and get this party started. So glad that you’re joining us today. I’m Jennifer Zick. I am the founder and CEO of Authentic and also the creator of the RISE Marketer Community, which we’re so excited to explore with you today. This has been a true labor of love and something that’s been on the vision board for several years at Authentic’s. So we’re very excited to bring it to life and thrilled to have this info session.
We’ve had over 75 people register to either be here today to learn about it, live with us, or to watch this recap if they couldn’t be here in person. So we’ve got a lot of interest in the community and we’re so excited about that. So in today’s call, I want to take a little time to walk you through the full structure of what we have planned for RISE, what the process is and the protocol for membership with RISE so you can understand really who we’re targeting to serve in this community and how they’ll participate and then leave some time at the end for some open Q and A.
So please keep your notes handy because if you have a question, I’m not watching the chat during this presentation because I’m actively sharing. So be ready to come on off of mute at the end of the presentation and share your question. It’ll benefit everybody. There’s no dumb questions and you might even spark something for us that we haven’t yet thought about that we need to think about. So please bring your questions. So with that I want to welcome all of the different folks that are in the room with us today.
I know because I looked at the registration notes that in our audience who are here with us live today or who are watching the recap, we have a blend of folks who are connected to Authentic and this RISE community. We have marketers who represent potential members, some of you have already signed up and applied and are here to learn more about what’s to come. We have their champions, so the managers and executives that lead marketing teams want to support those rising stars and help them grow in their role. We have agency owners and leaders who work with marketers across all kinds of industries who want to help their clients be more successful and connected. We have marketing consultants who advise marketing teams and want to bring more resources to their clients.
We have our own Authentic CMOs who are learning about how we’re going to expand our services with the RISE community, and some of them are going to be stepping in as facilitators in this community. So we’re very excited about that. And we’ve got other executive coaches and advisors who work with growing businesses and are always looking for more tools to bring to those clients. So I just want to acknowledge that today we have a mixed audience and I think that’s fantastic. And I’m hoping to give you all some tangible value to walk away with and definitely a deeper understanding of what we’re building in the rise community.
Again, if you’ve just joined us and you’re just coming online, I invite you to be on camera if you’re open to doing that. Because we’re working with this call to really kind of show what a community engagement looks like, what it means to be in a large group, and how we are building high touch connections in this community.
All right, so I want to start first by really pointing to the inspiration for this community. And that comes all the way back to Authentic’s vision and our purpose in the world, which has been our guiding north star since I started this business almost eight years ago. Prior to starting Authentic, just as a little background, I began my career in sales and business development with a light kind of marketing, you know, piece of the pie there, but mostly sales focused. And then I became a sales manager. And then as the company I was working with was growing, I became the head of marketing without a lot of formal training or instruction.
But I had to, you know, learn that role through trial and error and then went on to build the rest of my career as an executive marketing leader. And so I’ve gotten to experience that revenue growth engine from both sides of the sales and marketing coin. I’ve gotten to sit in seats in small, fast growing entrepreneurial businesses as well as large global matrix organizations. And through all those experiences, I collected what I feel like were some puzzle pieces in the world.
And when it came time for me to start a business, I asked myself what would I be passionate about bringing to the world? And it really came down to two things. I wanted to help growing businesses avoid some of the random acts of marketing that I experienced and even did when I was a rising star marketer. Because I was figuring it out through trial and error and getting to the other side of that. Looking back, I’m like, there’s a better way to do this by bringing the wisdom of experience leadership around marketing teams sooner in the process. Secondly, I wanted to create a community of like minded, values driven marketing leaders that would help one another continue learning and growth and, and help each other to love their lives and love their work and make a real impact for our clients and the companies that we serve. So those two guiding principles are really what have inspired Authentic up to this point in our core service, which is fractional Chief Marketing Officer services.
But also as we expand our services to create a community for rising star marketing leaders, we really want to empower marketers to be seen, heard, supported, educated, surrounded by a community of peers and re and resources to help them grow in their role, be successful, grow in their confidence and bring more impact to their businesses. So I just wanted to start there so you can see how this dovetails into everything Authentic has already been doing in the world. And now I want to give you a little bit of overwhelm.
Common Marketing & Business Challenges
All right, this slide was the first ever marketing technology landscape published by Chief Martech in 2011. And when I went back to the archives to pull this up for today’s presentation, I had to rewind my own clock and look at my LinkedIn and be like, where was I in 2011? Well, in 2011 I was a 34 year old director of marketing for a fast growing B2B services company. I had just stepped out of that sales leadership seat into actually building a marketing function. I had no staff, essentially no budget, very limited skills in marketing and the technology around me was starting to explore, explode. And so I had to figure out every single day how to find it. There was no chat GPT either. So like trying to find the answers to the questions every day and, and balance that, you know, kind of being under not having a seat at the executive leadership team, but also having all of the expectations coming from the executive team as to what marketing ought to do.
So that role really put me in that kind of high impact but high pressure seat where I had to balance learning and innovation with execution and demonstrated results all day long.
And here’s the reality now, look at this landscape today. If this doesn’t make you dizzy, then you’ve got a really amazing aptitude for info digestion. Because I look at this and I’m about to have a panic attack. This is the world that marketers live in today, and this is only technology. This has nothing to do with tactics and other tools and approaches.
And so the pressure today, 13 years later, for marketing is the same as it was in 2011, except that things are moving ever more fast and becoming ever more complex. So the landscape is changing around us at warp speed. And we all know AI is bringing a whole new evolution to that change and increasing the pace and impact to our roles in good and challenging ways. And so, more than ever, marketers need each other. Okay, when I first entered the marketing scene 25 years ago, I’m dating myself here, there were like five tools in the marketer’s toolkit. It was not that complicated. It was important work, but it wasn’t that complicated. If you understood creative and content and advertising and trade shows and a few other things, you could do marketing.
Now, today, when young people ask me for advice on their marketing career paths or what they should study, there are thousands of pathways and particular nuanced roles within marketing. And so no marketer, no marketer anymore, has all the answers. There is no such thing as an agency of record that does all the things that you need. We need each other. We need continual learning. We need to know how to tap into other experts who do other things than what we’re good at. And we need to be encouraged that it’s okay to be vulnerable and humble, but hungry and driven. Like, none of us have all the answers. But when we bring a group together of diverse experiences and perspectives with hungry, humble leadership, we can all go further together. So that is really the premise behind RISE. And I just want to emphasize some of the challenges I’ve already spoken into and others.
So here are the real challenges for today’s marketers. We’ve talked about the pace of change. Often companies don’t have established resources for learning and training and development. For marketing team members, there’s not always a direct path to access mentorship and training, especially if you don’t have upper senior level leadership, a CMO or an executive marketer with the been there, done their experience to mentor you internally, you have to find that kind of mentorship outside of your role. We all know that when we sit in our seat day to day in our business, we all struggle with myopia.
We all just get focused on what we’re doing within that role or within our industry or sector. And very quickly we lose touch with all the other strategies and capabilities that are beyond our scope. So we need to constantly be looking outside the walls of our own business. We need to balance, as I said, I struggled with this as a marketing director, innovation and learning and planning for what’s coming with what has to get done today and demonstrated proof of the results that we’re driving. That’s not easy. It’s very common that marketers feel alone on a marketing island. It’s a high pressure, often misunderstood role and a lot of our energy goes into helping explain what the role of marketing is or could be or should be in the business.
So it’s not uncommon to feel lonely in the marketing seat. And then most of us are working to either earn a seat at the leadership table or, or have a real voice at that leadership table. And this is not a poor reflection on business and executive teams. But the reality is that most growing companies that are founder led and sales driven start off with an executive team that looks like a founder or CEO, eventually a CFO, a CEO and a head of sales. And those roles are kind of core roles before marketing gets a seat at the leadership table. And so we need to be able to bring senior level leadership and mentorship to marketers within businesses that don’t yet have a seat at the leadership table. And in a small business, there’s often not a line of visibility to how your career can grow. And in a smaller, less mature business, the executives might be looking for you to evolve your role to bring forward the ideas of how you can contribute in the future. So we want to help marketers understand how they can grow and add more value in their current roles because your companies want to retain you and we want to see you continue to thrive.
And finally, we all know this is true of every business and every person in every role in every business. We all have limited time, money and human energy. So it’s so important that every single day we feel like we are able to focus our energies and our resources toward the highest impact and the best outcomes. So having wise advisors around you and people to riff with on how you use your resources is really helpful.
All right, real quickly, there are also true challenges for business. Now those of you in marketing are going to quickly see that this is, oh, I’ve got u words starting every bullet here. That’s because this is a piece of content I developed previously. So this one is packaged up as if everything aligns. So don’t let that drive your OCD crazy. It already is driving mine crazy. But for businesses and as an owner of a company now, I can really appreciate these real challenges. I talk every day and our sales team talks every day with CEOs and executives of growing businesses. And their frustrations with marketing are usually not with their staff. It’s usually with the lack of understanding between them, their focus on the business strategy and understanding how the execution is happening and how that stitches together to the business strategy.
So they feel frustrated that their marketing tactics aren’t that strategic, that maybe their team members don’t have the right level of experience, but they’re not sure how to upskill them. They’re not confident when they’re setting budgets for the year, that they know what to budget for, what in marketing and where they’re not sure what to measure. Agencies have given them a lot of tactical engagement data, but that’s not helpful for the C suite. So they are looking for insights that are meaningful. They don’t have realistic expectations and they’ll often admit that they’re like, “I don’t know how long I should wait to see the results of this effort or this investment.” But they need that guidance from their marketing team and leadership.
They’re not always confident about the marketing mix, that all the things that they’ve done in the past should be what they’re doing in the future, or that the agencies they’re working with or contractors or partners are necessarily providing the value that they expect. They’re not getting the kind of predictable performance I know. I mean, I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I’ll just raise my own. Like if I had a dollar for every time I heard a CEO say, oh, marketing budgets are unlimited. Just as long as I know that for every dollar that goes in at the top, we get this many dollars out at the bottom within this. Like, if any of us knew that formula and could like execute on it without, you know, any question, we would all be rich and retired by now. But we do have to manage expectations. That’s part of our, part of our responsibility. And a lot of these growth businesses and even large corporate organizations that I’ve been part of, they frankly are underprepared to effectively develop and to retain high, highly productive, modern marketing talent. And so we really want to, as a community, wrap our arms around both the marketers and the struggles that marketers face and their employers and what businesses face as challenges in building strong, high performing marketing teams and leaders.
Overview & Inspiration
All right, so I just gave you all the pain and overwhelm, but there really is a better way. And that’s the inspiration behind RISE. We’ve already proved it out at Authentic and I want to show you what it looks like in Rise and how that translates. I talked about those two guiding pillars that are really the big purpose, the big reason for Authentic, the way that we’ve built it at Authentic is that first of all, all of our CMOs are W2 employees at Authentic. And so they’re all on staff, which allows us to really tightly collaborate and build a community together in house.
So we have what’s called our CMO Mindshare. We bring all of our CMOs across the country together like this in a virtual format once a month. I’m sorry, three times a month. Actually three times a month internally for our Mindshare meeting. And this is where we bring in agency partners to teach us on key topics, where we do breakout cohorts and, and we discuss and solve and share our experiences. And so this is the format we use at Authentic. And we’ve had such richness in this format in terms of our CMOs and why they choose Authentic, why they value being part of our team, how they’re bringing strategic value to the clients that we serve. All of that cross pollination in our Mindshare is what helps us learn and develop and accelerate. Even as CMOs, we can’t stop learning. And so it’s been on my heart for several years to take all the goodness of that Mindshare community and bring it to other marketers. And this is what we’re doing with RISE.
Meeting Format + Agency Concierge
So this is what it looks like. If you’ve looked at the RISE landing page, you’ve probably walked through some of this info already, so forgive me for repeating for you, but we’re going to be bringing the RISE community together as a once a month, 90 minute virtual meeting. Much like this. We’ll start off in this large group environment and we’ll bring in partners and experts and marketing leaders to teach on specific topics. So we’ve got that continual learning component and then we’re going to break out for the bulk of the meeting into our small group dedicated cohorts.
So each cohort is going to be CMO facilitated by one of our employed CMOs at Authentic who were, we’re hand picking the CMOs on our team who have a deep passion for mentorship and development and coaching and facilitation. And each cohort will be made up of six to eight marketers and we’re going to be very thoughtfully building these cohorts to make sure there’s no competitive conflict in the room. But these will be dedicated cohorts, people that you’ll get to know very deeply on this journey and spend time with every single month. But you’ll also have the benefit of this large group experience.
And behind the large group meetings, when we’re not meeting in session, we’ll have a Slack channel that’s available 247 where you can tap the entire community, where you can talk just to your cohort, where we can continue to share resources and experiences so that if you’re hitting a wall or you just need an idea, you’ve got people around you to provide some feedback. And then another really important part of what we’ve developed at Authentic is what we call our ally network of agency partners.
All of our clients have in-house marketers as well as needing a combination of what I call the ninja skills for marketing execution that might not be in house, but you will need on a case by case basis for certain projects or as an augmented part of your team. So whether that’s like search marketing expertise or research or content strategy, whatever that might be. We have curated already at Authentic an agency partner network of more than 30 vetted trusted providers with very specific niche skills. So we can be an on demand resource center for you. There are no markups involved in that community. There’s. We don’t white label those services or upcharge. We don’t have any pass-through costs that hit your business. We simply want to be an agency concierge, if you will, of people who’ve worked with different providers and can recommend the right provider that you might need at the right time.
Membership Criteria & Commitment
All right, so really the community is designed to be interactive and high value. And the way that we create that value is through connection, through helping each other solve challenges, through learning and ongoing education across different kinds of disciplines. In marketing and in doing all of those things, we grow in our roles and we grow in the value of within our careers and in the value we bring to our businesses.
So really quickly, I won’t read these verbatim, but our website does include all these criteria. This community is very specifically designed for, excuse me, rising star marketing leaders. So the way that we’ve defined that is that mid career stage which is usually a marketing manager or a marketing director title.
So this is not a community designed for CMOs. It’s also not a community designed for a marketing intern or coordinator or specialist. This is really designed for those rising star manager and director level marketers who meet the criteria of being in an in house dedicated role. They’re not a contractor or a freelancer or an agency member. They have a marketing specific role. So you’re not the office manager who dabbles in a little bit of marketing. You do have a level of management responsibility and that means you have oversight for either people and or programs and that means you’ve got responsibility for budget and outcomes.
Also, you aspire to grow. I guess I am kind of reading through this, so aspiring to grow into a more strategic executive role. We’re looking for people who are truly willing to be open and honest and humble and vulnerable. Because this is how we all grow. We have to be ready to lay our armor at the door. I remember what it was to be that mid level marketer and even as a CMO and to feel like I had to walk into every meeting in every room and be the smartest marketer and have all the answers and like wear my armor and you know, at least fake it till I make it. This is not that community.
This is a community where we lay our armor at the door. We come in vulnerable, willing to admit what we don’t know so that we can get the education we need to be successful. So that means being humble, genuinely curious and a really important part of our community and our rules of engagement that each member signs off on is that we’re asking for full commitment. Now we know that things come up, sickness, family issues, like the biggest trade show of the year, whatever it might be, you’re probably going to have to miss a few sessions through the year.
But, we’re asking for your full commitment and full participation. This is all about giving and getting value. It takes. The reason that we are making this community focused on that mid level manager and not on early stage marketers is because we want and expect everybody to share value and to receive value. So we want to really create a space where people are deeply engaged, on camera, interactive and really showing up for their peers. That’s how we all create value together. And of course everything in the room is confidential now.
Additional Membership Benefits
Every RISE membership includes what we’ve already talked about, which is that CMO cohort, that large group learning, that agency concierge and that slack for ongoing collaboration. Every member is a recipient of all that value. Authentic has additional ways that we work with and serve clients which we’ll of course always be here for you.
If there are ways we can go deeper in our relationship through our fractional CMO services or 1:1 mentoring or coaching and helping you implement our methodology called Authentic Growth™. If those are things you want to learn about as you’re engaging in our community, we’re always happy to share that with you and your senior leadership team to see if we can help you even further amplify marketing value in your business.
Monthly Meeting Agenda
The Monthly Agenda We’ve spoken a little bit about the 90 minute format. This is how it breaks out. We’re going to hold these meetings very consistently on the second Thursday of every month from 12 to 1:30 central time. So if you have a conflict with that right now, I’m sorry that we don’t have an alternative session time. But we’re trying to make you aware of the expected dates and times well in advance. So hopefully you can clear your calendar and be there with us.
So the format we’ve talked through, this is a really important point. I want to make sure that any, you know, executive leaders and champions in the room feel really comfortable enrolling their marketing leader in our community and knowing that they’re not going to be solicited and poached for another job. While we can’t keep anybody from looking for jobs, we aren’t going to be the community that is a job board. We really are going to maintain a safe environment for the marketers and the companies that are backing them in this community by making sure that our community is not a place for solicitation or business development or spam. It’s not a place to post a job opening for your team or to share your resume if you’re looking for a job. This is a place for learning and growth and development. So we’ll want to make sure that we uphold those expectations.
Membership Pricing
The website provides all of this information on pricing. Our applications for membership are currently open. I’ll walk you through the steps on that. We’ve got two membership pathways. We are currently, just for a limited time up through January 31st, accepting applications for a founding membership. Now this is a half priced offer that comes with your commitment to participating at least for a full year. But for whatever length of time you’re a continual member in our community, you will have forever founder status.
And you know, we know a lot of the pieces that are going to bring value for this community based on our own experiences. But we are going to be listening to our founding members for their feedback on how else we can continue to create more value through this community. So you will have a special seat at our table to help influence and inform how this community grows. So we invite you to consider that option.
And for many others in the community, a monthly membership might make more sense. I’ve already spoken with several marketers who, who know they’re coming up on a parental leave or some other, you know, gap, and they need some flexibility. So that’s a great option as well. All right, we’re almost through all the slides and then we’ll open it up for some Q and A.
Application Process
This is where we’re at in the process of moving toward our initial launch of RISE, which is scheduled for February 13th. Our applications are currently open and you can find those just through our Rise website. And I believe Julia will drop a link into the chat, if she hasn’t already, for that page. January 31st will be the deadline for any founding member applications, after which we’ll change the price on that annual membership and then we’ll be launching.
As I said, our first meeting will be on February 13th. So right now we’re rolling through the steps on the top of the page. We’re reviewing applications as they come through. If they meet our criteria, we’re sending an invitation to join. Then the marketer would accept that invitation, sign off on our rules of engagement, provide the financial information or their financial contact at their company. So we get that all set up in advance. That’s where we stop and do a happy dance, literally. We’re doing a daily team huddle here and, and happy dancing, all the new members joining us. And then you can do a happy dance too, because this is good news.
And then starting in the new year, as we get back, we’re going to start doing the really thoughtful matching of marketers to their cohorts and making sure we don’t have any competitive overlay, making sure you’ve got a dedicated CMO. And as those cohorts come together, we’re going to start making some noise in the world about all the exciting new members that are joining us, the brands they represent. We’ll make sure that you get set up in Slack and connected to one another. We can start some pre conversations there.
And then your CMO cohort leader will be reaching out to set up a 30 minute get to know you one on one. We really want to make sure that we hear from you in advance what you’re hoping to get from this community, learn a little bit about where you’re at with your role, what your company does, so we can be thoughtful guides with you on this journey. And then, of course, we’re all going to show up and kick things off with our cameras on, ready to rock and roll on February 13th. So we’re very excited about that.
All right, folks, that’s all I have in terms of formal content I want to point you to. I mean, I’m hoping you brought some good Q and A. We’ll go through today.
And if there’s something I don’t know because we haven’t thought of it, that’s what happens with new product service launches. We’ll take note and we’ll commit to getting back with some answers as we think these things through. But if after today’s session you have additional questions, you can reach our team at RISE@authenticbrand.com we’ll be watching that mailbox and making sure that we get answers back to you as soon as possible.
