By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)

When I spoke to this week’s master in marketing, I was surprised at how seamlessly she had combined her two professional loves, digital marketing and life coaching. I’ll admit to having been skeptical about life coaching in the past, but this conversation changed my mind. As a life coach, she developed a framework she calls the Three See’s — more on that below — that can help any marketer up their game.

Meet the Master

Sheena Hakimian

Senior director of digital consumer marketing at Condé Nast and certified life coach

Fun fact: Sheena’s journey to becoming a life coach began at her favorite NYC restaurant, Piccola Cucina, which led her to taking an eight-month certification course. “The best decision I ever made,” she says.

Lesson 1: Focus on what you can control.

“There’s just so much change,” Hakimian says, in what I would consider a gross understatement at the moment. “From the [shift in traffic patterns] to us not knowing exactly how AI is going to shape our jobs to things going on in the world.”

If you focus on all of that at once, it becomes clutter. (See: my brain.) And all these uncertainties just breed more anxiety. But “how do you build resilience to uncertainty?” Hakimian asks. “It’s by focusing on the things you can control.”

As a marketer, this might look like what your data is telling you, understanding your customer needs, or growing your email lists.

Condé Nast has a very diverse set of brands — Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair are just a few — so Hakimian really took the time this year to “slice and dice. Really understanding different segments of your website and how they respond to different parts of your funnel.”

“We know we can’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy on our website anymore,” she says. So about that slicing and dicing: She did A/B testing within just the politics section of Vanity Fair. And she found that allowing readers one free article before gating the content — i.e., requiring a subscription — led to a 20% increase in subscriptions in their test panels.

Hakimian and her team have taken a lot of time over the last six months to do this testing thoughtfully — because what you do with the data is something that you can control.

Lesson 2: Make your boss’ life easier.

“What [is my boss] talking about that might not be on the KPI sheet?” Hakimian asks. It’s not a rhetorical question: You can’t solve business problems if you don’t know what they are. “The mindset is, I’m here to make my boss’ life easier.”

That doesn’t mean Hakimian doesn’t care about herself — “it just means that I’m …read more