Bat-Signal Marketing for Creatives with Ilise Benun - a podcast by Mark McGuinness

This week's guest on The 21st Century Creative is Ilise Benun, known as the Marketing Mentor.



Ilise has spent over 30 years helping ‘the creatively self employed’ to succeed in business, and has written seven books and produced over 300 episodes of her Marketing Mentor podcast.







Ilise is an in-demand conference speaker and is the co-founder and host of the Creative Business/Design Entrepreneurship program of HOW Design Live, which is one of the largest annual conferences for creatives anywhere in the world.



And as a consultant and coach she has helped countless creatives get better at the business side of their work, and to achieve professional success that matches their creative talent.







I first met Ilise when I was a speaker at HOW Design Live back in 2012. After that, she engaged me to speak at HOW in Chicago a few years later. We’ve been in touch ever since, and she has interviewed me for her Marketing Mentor podcast, which is a really great show for creatives.



Ilise is someone who is not only very smart and savvy about business, but who also really gets the creative mindset and has a lot of empathy for the things that creatives typically find harder than other people when it comes to running a business.



And crucially, she is very good at pointing creatives to the unique and special advantages they have when it comes to 21st century marketing. One of these is her concept of bat-signal content marketing, which she expands on in this interview.



If you are creatively self-employed in any way, and you would like to be more creative and effective at marketing, then you’ll find plenty of practical wisdom in this conversation.



I also recommend you listen if you kind of know you really should be doing more marketing, but you’re reluctant to do it, or not confident that you’d be good at it. Ilise will show you that it’s a lot more enjoyable and creative than you might imagine…



In the interview Ilise mentions her Marketing Planner and Quick Tips, and you can learn more about her consulting work on her website.



Ilise Benun interview transcript



MARK: Ilise, how did you get started on your creative journey?



ILISE: The short story I’ll give you is that I was fired from my second job out of college after studying Spanish and French in college and not knowing what to do with it. And I had two basic jobs that just came through people I knew. One was in the fashion industry, the other was in the travel industry. I got myself fired from that second one, although I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I just didn’t know how to quit at the time. And I was so angry that I decided I was never working for anyone again.



So this is 1988, I was 27 years old. And I just looked around at all of my friends in New York who were actors and musicians and dancers and painters. And it looked to me like they were really disorganized and I was a little bit more organized. And this was in the time of paper, no computers. And I just thought, ‘I can help these people get organized.’



And so little by little, I just would sit with people, photographers, one comes to mind, and we would just sit and go through all those piles of papers. And at the bottom of everybody’s pile, there was always something that had to do with self-promotion that they weren’t doing. It was uncanny.



And so I thought, ‘This is the real problem.’ The clutter is the obstacle to the real problem, which has something to do with self-promotion. And I felt, because I come from a family of creatives, my mother was a fashion designer and always disorganized and it was in my blood to help people tame those artistic challenges. And so, that’s what I did.



And over the years, it has evolved into me helping creative people.

Further episodes of The 21st Century Creative

Further podcasts by Mark McGuinness

Website of Mark McGuinness