Welcome to 4Q2024: What It Means For Your Marketing and Your Life

► The Actionable Marketing Guide Newsletter Is Changing

Why The AMG Newsletter Is Pivoting

As I discussed in my last Actionable Marketing Guide Newsletter,
I decided to pivot to focus on my fiction writing. I’ve dreamed of doing this since I was eight years old.
In addition, I spent over five years taking writing courses three times a year after work and at least one summer writing intensive workshop.

During this period, I woke up at the ungodly hour of 6:00 am and wrote for an hour before going to my marketing jobs. I often edited my writing on my bus ride to work.

How The Actionable Marketing Guide Newsletter Will Change

The Actionable Marketing Guide Newsletter will remain a personal letter written by me No AI or other non-humans involved!

The newsletter will provide you with the following interesting and helpful information based on my life and perspective as a born and bred New Yorker with over two decades of top-level marketing experience. It will include:

• My perspective on what’s happening in New York and the broader world. It will focus on why and how this matters for you as a marketer.
  As I have done since I started writing the Actionable Marketing Column for ClickZ in 2003, it will include Actionable Marketing Tips
  to apply these lessons to your specific marketing needs.
• Insights learned from writing fiction. You can apply these findings to the breadth of your marketing. These will also provide Actionable Content Marketing Tips to show you how to use these insights.
• Heidi Cohen’s Bookshelf. This section will discuss books that I’m reading and why they’re important to your marketing and your life. Where appropriate, they’ll include Actionable Marketing Tips.
• Other surprise elements to be added later.

► Major Marketing Trends: US Elections

Like the US, roughly half of the democratic countries in the world had or are planning to have elections in 2024.

Having studied political science as an undergraduate, I believe that getting all qualified voters registered to show up to exercise this important right is a form of marketing. Instead of selling products, political candidates, regardless of level or party, must persuade voters to choose them.

The implications of not voting are that you support whoever wins each specific election and its impact on your life and financial situation. President Richard Nixon referred to these people as the “Great Silent Majority.” If you live in the US, I hope that you aren’t a member of this group since there are important issues on the ballot this year.

They include:

• Living in a democracy OR a dictatorship.
• Having a law-abiding, experienced president under the age of 70 OR a 77-year-old former president guilty of falsifying business records and sexual assault.
• Having access to reproductive freedom, including birth control, the ability to get an abortion, the ability to be treated for and survive a miscarriage, and access to the full range of IVF treatments OR restrictive women’s reproductive rights and healthcare.
• Improving immigration laws allowing dreamers and others living in the US a path to citizenship, including improved border control and benefits for US border employees OR inhumane treatment of people at the US’s southern border.
• Improving gun control laws to save lives, especially school-age children OR allowing easy access to military-grade weapons.
• Having access to high-quality medical care regardless of your medical history and/or ability to pay for it OR restricted healthcare based on pre-existing conditions or age.
• Creating and implementing regulations for Supreme Court Justices OR allowing Justices to be swayed by donors with deep pockets.

Major US elections yield high, diverse marketing spends by a wide range of candidates. When my father published a local weekly in Queens (New York City), election years translated to higher revenues.

Since then, the current media landscape has exponentially changed and grown, requiring more complex, cross-functional approaches to getting people registered to vote and then ensuring that they either vote by mail or in person.

► Writing: How To Improve Your Content Marketing

As I discussed, last June, I decided to test pivoting to focus on writing fiction.

What Heidi Cohen Did This Summer

To revive my fictional writing skills, I took a local writing course and attended free writing workshops at Bryant Park and various branches of the New York Public Library.

In addition, I participated in July’s Camp NaNoWriMo (aka: National Novel Writing Month.)
NaNoWriMo originally started in November 1999 with 21 participants and has grown to over 400,000 global participants in 2023 who commit to writing 50,000 words in November. They’ve also added Camp Sessions in April and July.

I participated in July’s Camp NaNoWriMo and ambitiously set my goal to write 50,000 words by July 31st. I chose to expand the short story I wrote in the June workshop into a novel by adding related characters and plot lines.

In addition, I increased my daily reading of fiction and books on writing skills taking advantage of my New York Public Library card.

Heidi Cohen’s Summer Writing Results

As I explained above, my husband’s health was my top focus this summer. Despite that, I made strong progress towards my goals.

Study Writing Results

• I attended all of the classes and workshops except when either my husband or I was sick.

Writing Study Results:

• June 2024: I wrote a short story from scratch and workshopped it twice. I wrote 17,969 words. In addition, I outlined the characters and related plot points for July’s Camp NaNoWriMo. Writing the initial short story directly on my computer, I discovered that I could generate more words faster because the words flowed directly from my brain to my keyboard.
• July 2024: Despite my husband’s medical needs, I wrote 22,495 words by hand during July. This allowed me to think about and make conscious choices about what I was writing. I learned to write wherever I was.

  Being a poor typist, my biggest challenge was transcribing my handwritten content into typed format. My techie husband suggested I dictate my writing into Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, Word and I had translation problems, resulting in poor-quality output. Finally, my husband figured out how to scan my handwritten content and extract the text without typos or spelling errors using ChatGPT.

  Disclaimer: I wrote all of my fiction without AI help except for the transcription and typo corrections. I edited my content since it’s a human function.

• All Summer: I journaled on a sporadic basis. Since I do this by hand in a composition notebook with grid lines, I don’t have a word or page count.

Reading results:

I read at least one book per week. Depending on the length and subject of the material, I often read more than one book. To get the most out of each book as a writer, I reread each book. In addition, I used Post-its and made pencil markings. I wanted to keep a record of my reading, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Actionable Writing Tips

• Build your writing muscles by free writing or journaling. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron calls this “Morning Pages.” It’s the act of writing whatever comes into your mind for a set period of time or pages. It’s a brain dump. Many people do this religiously every morning to reconnect with their inner thoughts. Some creatives shred or burn these pages.
• Make time to write. Put your tush in the chair and put words on the page. Close down your devices to remove distractions. To create a writing habit, always have paper and a writing tool, a voice app on your phone, and/or another writing option with you.
• Test different writing options to determine what works best for you. Some people need other things going on or music to concentrate on their writing. While some, like me, need quiet to focus and think.

I journal on grid-lined composition notebooks that I buy at Staples during their back-to-school sales. I write with a cheap, clear plastic BIC pen since it helps me to write faster. For pieces like this newsletter and other writing, I draft an outline and type it directly onto a computer with Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

Please know how much I appreciate your continued readership. It means a lot to me and has kept me producing this newsletter.