In this episode194 of The Teacher Career Coach Podcast, Elizabeth chats with Jaclyn Mullen, Head of Marketing at The Loops. With a dynamic background in startups and digital marketing education, Jaclyn brings deep expertise in B2B and B2C marketing.
Jaclyn shares her journey from teaching adult learners to leading marketing teams at startups, highlighting how educators’ skills like communication, leadership, and adaptability translate perfectly to marketing roles.
Our conversation covers the evolving marketing landscape, including AI, and offers practical tips for teachers interested in making the leap. Jaclyn encourages building a portfolio through personal projects or volunteering, embracing lifelong learning, and being kind to yourself during the transition.
Join us today to discuss all things marketing, education and more!
Find Jaclyn on Linkedin.
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Mentioned in the episode:
- Sign up for 7 days of free access to Orchard
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- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth: [00:01:00] welcome back everyone to the Teacher Career Coach podcast. Today i’m super excited to have Jaclyn Mullen with us, and Jaclyn is the head of Marketing at the Loops. Welcome, Jaclyn.
Jaclyn: Elizabeth, thank you for having me. Hello, everybody at TCC Podcast.
Elizabeth: Thank you and I’m so excited to get started. We love to kick these off by hearing about your teaching experience, and I’m just especially curious, you know, we have a lot of traditional educator educators and K through 12, we’ve had some who teach higher education and you kind of have a unique, uh, experience in the classroom.
So can you tell us a little bit about your experience?
Jaclyn: Yeah, I think, um, of all those you mentioned, I, that box wasn’t checked, so I did adult learning and instruction. So you can think of this as, you know, continuing education in. A formal container from the standpoint of you’re getting a certificate or a credential, but you are an adult learner. You have either decided not to go the route of college and are looking to get some hands-on, project-based learning skills, or you have gone the route of college, maybe even working for a company.
And so, yeah, I taught, I wanna say Elizabeth, it was close to, maybe at this point it would be like 700 people, that fit under that profile.
Elizabeth: Wow. And so what were you
teaching them about?
Jaclyn: Yeah, that’s a great question. digital marketing and even digital marketing can be broken out into, there were workshops that I taught that honed in on a [00:03:00] specific aspect of digital marketing. So how do you start to create content marketing, or how do you understand search engine optimization and SEO.
To actual 10 to 12 week programs where there were capstone projects. And so you’re covering multiple aspects of building a marketing strategy and then executing it and creating a campaign and getting that feedback and putting a little bit of investment behind the campaign. so that that’s what the subject matter encompassed.
And then, you know, there were aspects of entrepreneurship. ’cause I did have my own, you know, small agency, years ago there have been aspects of teaching, branding. So there’s just so many things. Like you hear digital marketing, but underneath the hood there were a lot of different, you know, modules and, and facets to how marketing works.
Even like business fundamentals fell into that too.
Elizabeth: well, I can’t wait to dive in a bit more, especially how you were speaking about digital marketing and how [00:04:00] just so many things fall under that umbrella. So we’ll get into that in a bit. But tell us about the moment where you kind of transitioned out of that teaching role and, and
why you left.
Jaclyn: Yeah, I mean, let me share with you first, like when I was younger, I was a creative and I always said to myself, you know, at some point. When I hit a certain level of career success, I wanna go back. I wanna teach, I love connecting with people. had that vision for myself. I was like a camp counselor, you know, in college.
And I was just like, I love being able to get people together and to help them, you know, acquire new skills and kind of learn and stay curious. Right? So, flash forward to when I had my digital marketing agency. Um, one of the things that we were taught by a lot of successful entrepreneurs that I followed is you can only go so far having a, you know, one-to-one business model.
So you have a subset of customers that pay you every month to deliver the services. They’re like, if [00:05:00] you wanna be able to scale your business, you know, think about launching a course or teaching. And that was like my stepping stone from practitioner into teacher. And it just so happened that what worked is at that time, a lot of business models were like, we don’t want somebody that’s got like a PhD in marketing.
We actually want somebody that has learned how to build these things. You know, hands up. So. Once a teacher, always a teacher. You know, even, even now, what happened was, um, in, in working for and becoming a teacher, you sort of are like the air traffic control where you can see everything and you understand everything.
But there’s that yearning to be able to like do what the students are doing and get back into the experimentation and the coming up with campaigns. And it just so happened that. That teaching experience was a really great stepping stone to go work for startups. And so a role opened up at a startup where they were [00:06:00] actually trying to attract people that needed to learn to be able to get jobs.
And it was almost like this perfect convergence of the skills that I had and acquired the desire that I started to have to get back into the tactical day to day. that’s what opened the door for me to kind of say, okay, teaching’s gonna be on hold, and now I’m gonna jump back into leveraging my teaching skills for the purposes of building somebody’s business essentially.
Elizabeth: Thank you for sharing all of that. And I love that aspect about how they were looking for teachers who really had that hands-on experience and knowledge to be in the classroom teaching and, and now you’re head of marketing and so you’ve worked your way up to this position. Can you tell us a little bit about what a head of marketing
does?
Jaclyn: What doesn’t a head of marketing do? I mean, I will preface this by saying, depending upon what size of company you work for, some heads [00:07:00] of marketing are, you know, pretty strategic and they’re totally responsible for. You know, setting the goals, overseeing the team, you know, managing the budget, working with vendors and tho and those are a aspects of my role today, but at a startup, you know, typically ahead of marketing is also down there executing with the teams.
So coming up with campaigns, you know, running a variety of different tests, connecting with customers, taking like sales calls, setting up the booth at the trade show. Anything that you could possibly think of as it pertains to marketing is pretty much in my scope. That’s why I drink a lot of, you know, coffee.
I will say that because again, as somebody that’s come from that education realm. What’s allowed me to kind of handle all these many moving parts, because it is not for the faint of heart and it is not for everybody, is that it’s like the ongoing learning. You know, no [00:08:00] two days are ever the same.
Your skillset doesn’t just you, you gain mastery, Elizabeth, but it’s like while you might gain mastery in one area, AI is a prime example. Something new comes in and totally disrupts. What you eat, breathe and sleep as an expert. And now you have to like relearn again how to use those things. even with, with my job right now, I’m starting to look at where can we apply AI to our workflows?
How do I get my arms around ai? How do I, do I use it for design? Do I use it for copy creation? So yeah, it’s never a dull day.
Elizabeth: I like how you mentioned that lifelong learning, because that I think is something that teachers are very familiar with and the fact that every day is different. And so marketing could be a very attractive field to get into because [00:09:00] they’re used to that busy day to day work and busy to learn for learning something new each time, each day. And so you’ve mentioned, you touched on AI a little bit. Is there anything you wanna share with us about maybe how the marketing field is changing in
relation to that?
Jaclyn: Yeah, I mean, number one, what’s helpful to understand and draw parallels between, you know. Education as a pathway and career and marketing as a pathway and career in education. You have your administration, right? And so your administration are telling you like, here’s the goals that we have this year for the district, or here’s the curriculum, right?
here’s what we’re seeing happen across the government, the marketplace, the funding, whatever it might be. Same exact thing in a business except instead of the administration. You have your executives, you know, your board, your C-suite, and you are that facilitator, you know, in marketing.
Hey, what do I have to deliver to in this [00:10:00] case, instead of learners, my end users and, and end users, um, or an audience are learning themselves about, you know, a product, uh, that you provide, a problem that they have, that your product solves. So there’s a lot of like different, you know, parallels there between putting on that teacher hat to now how do I transfer these skills over to a marketing hat.
But you get things top down. So typically, you know, I am, I’m told like, Hey, we, we have this much budget, or we have this much headcount, or we have this much bandwidth. It’s up to me as that practitioner to assess where’s the greatest need that we have in the business? What have we tried before to solve these problems?
That’s worked really well. What’s a problem that seems to have followed us that we haven’t been able to solve yet. And it’s my job to be able to figure out, you know, how do I use AI to fix those [00:11:00] things? How do I learn more about ai? And almost, drawing another parallel with education, you know, there’s going to be different layers of familiarity.
So like for me, I just put on that teacher cap and I’m like. Layer one for me is to just even understand how AI functions. And if I can grasp a general understanding of that, then the next thing is, okay, how can I apply it to the domain of marketing? But I can’t skip that first step. Right? So I hope that helps for anybody that’s listening.
Elizabeth: And speaking of some of these skills, you know, you spoke about problem solving. Are there any skills either that you recall from when you were teaching or just that you think of educators in general that would be really valuable to marketers
and marketing roles?
Jaclyn: I think if we even just take off the marketing, like I know I’m a marketer, but the first thing that I always bring on to into my [00:12:00] organization, and it goes back to setting, setting the classroom culture. I had a wonderful teacher who coached me, who, who her area of expertise was actually. Instructional design, you know, education.
And so she was like, Hey, you’re coming in with all of this marketing savvy, but here’s how adults learn. You know, adults learn by you first establishing the classroom culture, let’s, let’s all create values. I bring that into my teams, right? Like, let’s establish our team culture, right? Number one, you have a voice.
On this team, I am not the expert. I don’t know everything. Right? Number two, we have a culture of learning. So there is no stupid questions. I’d rather you ask questions than not ask questions on number three, we don’t make any hard and fast assumptions. You know, assume good intent across everybody here, but know that we do have to like work with attention to detail and care.
So I think for [00:13:00] teachers, yeah, establishing, bringing in, that’s a leadership. Role, Elizabeth, that’s like a leadership skill. There’s a lot of EQ and leadership skills that teachers can translate from a classroom into a business. Now you can start to build on, you know, the marketing skills, right? marketing, communication.
You know, I think teachers, because you’re used to commanding. A room for lack, there of a better word. Typically, you might skew stronger on your public speaking or your presenting, right? managing deadlines, project timelines. In an AI driven world, you still need, you know, stakeholder management and communicating.
Who’s responsible for what and when is this gonna be done by? And kind of keeping the team, you know, in line and organized around that. And then last but not least, you know, I think as teachers, um, depending upon like what subject matter you’ve been teaching in, [00:14:00] again, you can pick an area across marketing that either you, yourself wanna become more knowledgeable in, or you can say there are a couple of areas across marketing that I’m interested in, and we’re able to like, recognize the patterns and how if I affect this area of marketing, it can also impact this area of marketing and then this area of marketing too.
And we’re really good at being able to execute on that. Create that story and that narration, and then do that with a strong attention to detail and a strong sense of urgency. So I think all of those things are transferable from the classroom.
Elizabeth: I love that you brought up the part about. the community and the trust as a first step. And it just is reminding me from being back in the classroom where every morning we would start with a community circle, you know, and, and, and just building those relationships as the foundation for everything.
So as, as we hear about these transferable skills, [00:15:00] um, I’m just glad that you brought that one up to think of as top of mind because sometimes we don’t. We think of those things as just kind of second nature, but really they are, like you said, a, a leadership skill and a
very valuable skill.
Jaclyn: And you’re making me think of one more thing too that I think is important to emphasize here. We’re in a time and in a day and age where what we did last year, like 60%, maybe even 50% of that works, 50% is all new. What we call greenfield and what teachers and educators are really good at. Not staying stuck in status quo.
I feel like if you’ve been in education, you have an interest in learning yourself. So taking initiative, um, you can’t wait for a company to say, Hey, we’re going to give you a stipend to go and gain this certification, this skill, and close this gap. You have to be the one that’s like, Hey, I see. [00:16:00] X technology or X area as an area of opportunity for us, and you almost wanna lead the charge independently to go get those skills and then pipe that information back to your team and again, create a culture.
Maybe company wide of continuous learning. And the last little bit I’ll add on is that we work because everybody was forced to almost go remote with the pandemic. I’ve always worked remote Elizabeth, but like I feel like even bringing the skills of fostering collaboration in a remote environment is something I also don’t want educators to gloss over because it is very hard to align people.
You might write one thing and somebody else interprets it another way, but a teacher’s gonna be like. Hey Tommy, that wasn’t a clear message. Let’s work on, you know, how we can effectively communicate remotely asynchronously, given their experience teaching. You know, during the pandemic,
[00:17:00]
Elizabeth: and just how, you mentioned how 50, 60% of things are different. even seeing that in the job search too, about how people go about. About networking, about applying, and so that, you’re right, that things are constantly moving and changing and in and in that aspect. when teachers or educators or administrators look into these different marketing roles, they’re seeing a lot of things, you know, product marketing, demand gen, brand marketing, how would you share a little bit about those and how, as an entry level marketer, how would you go about kind of your learning if
you’re interested?
Jaclyn: Yeah, I mean, number one, I think this to even add another filter too, it really depends on whether you’re trying to go into what we call B2C market. Which is business to customers or B2B marketing, [00:18:00] business to business. Right. Um, when you are go like, so business to customer examples would be like skincare products, fitness products, maybe even ed tech products and courses and things of that nature.
Learning toys. Right? Whereas B2B is, you know, you might be selling services, you might be selling a software, brand in B2C. Is very, very, very important because there’s, there’s, there tends to be a little bit more competition, right? E especially, ’cause you’re talking about a price point where, you know, the average consumer product, you think about what you can buy at, you know, Amazon or a store online, you’re looking at 20 to $30.
So the brand is going to be the difference between you paying $5, between you paying $50, right? And brand is really built around, you know, how do people think about us? How do they feel? You know, how do they trust us? it can be as much about aesthetics and what your site [00:19:00] looks like, as much as it is about the tone of your content.
Now, that does carry over to B2B. But what you’ll find is in B2B, you know, your executive team is like, show me how this is quantifiable. Show me how this is gonna get us. ROI, right? And so brand is perceived as being a little bit more soft, to quantify in that B2B side, even though if you think about it, the people that, that, the companies that win business, win business because reputation, trust, you know, perceived.
Leadership and, and expertise in their field. So even brand, you wanna think about it in these two buckets, right? B2C versus B2B On the digital marketing side, I. There’s a lot to unpack, right? Because I, if you can go look up something called the digital marketing tree. It is, at least at this juncture, about seven or eight years old, but it’s going to show you just how many [00:20:00] touchpoints there are across digital marketing alone.
You’ve got website, you’ve got email, you’ve got ads in PPC, you’ve got search engine optimization. Now we could even add in ai. Each product marketing, like you were saying, product marketing in the B2B world is how much should we charge? You know, what is our, what is our unique differentiator, right? How are we different than the existing?
Solutions that are in the market, how do we make our product sticky? Product marketing in and of itself can totally depend on, can somebody sign up on your website and get a free trial of your product, or does your sales team need to be involved and still they’ll go head to head with another company.
How did they stand out against that other company? Especially if they’re existing in the market and you’re like a new brand new startup. Right? So that’s really where you start to see product, get into user behavior, user analytics, [00:21:00] stickiness, referral, flywheels. One area that I think teachers might be well versed in is on the customer marketing.
Because that’s very much like relationship based. That does exist within B2C and B2B. How do we start to build testimonials and case studies and show like, Hey, on the B2C side, here’s how somebody’s using your product and loving it, and create a campaign around that. On the B2B side, like, here’s the problem they were trying to solve.
They couldn’t before. Here’s how they can solve it now with our solution, here’s the results that we got. So I would encourage everybody to look into, you know, customer marketing. ’cause there will be some AI involved as far as the output, Elizabeth, but that too is like another domain of marketing. That you may not know about.
Product marketing is a little bit more competitive. brand marketing, as I mentioned, is going to be a little bit more well received, for lack of a better word, on that B2C [00:22:00] side. And then I think, you know, it, it really boils down to speaking to those transferable skills. And, customer marketing might be a great entry point for a lot of teachers right now.
Elizabeth: And with customer marketing, is there a job title? Is it, is it maybe customer marketing is? Associate or what should those who are interested
kind of look into?
Jaclyn: Yeah, you’ll see customer marketing not associate necessarily. It might, it, it, I’ve even just seen it as like customer marketing. Um, customer marketing and advocacy. Customer marketing lead. I think the biggest thing that I’m thinking about sitting here today is. If you haven’t, ha, how do you start to speak to maybe some marketing experience you have had in the classroom?
If you want some sort of bridge, what’s really key is maybe test launch something as a soft little test, whether it’s like your own Instagram account, your own thought leadership from LinkedIn. Start [00:23:00] to put content out there and then track and quantify that and you can use that to show. Hey, I maybe haven’t been a marketer for three years, but here’s an example of how I used AI to help me craft an idea to start a Instagram account, or, you know, my LinkedIn thought leadership.
Here’s how I was consistent with it for 90 days here. How I, I, here’s how I went from zero to, you know, X. Like you have to, you have to build your own portfolio in and of a sense if you haven’t had those skills before.
Elizabeth: Oh, I love that idea. And especially in an age where social media is so prevalent, you know, I think a lot of us are doing that. But the additional part, the important part, how you mentioned quantify it, what is the data showing and what a great way, ’cause that is kind of one of the stumbling blocks about someone hasn’t been in marketing, how are they going to start to show? those skills to be
able to transfer over.
Jaclyn: [00:24:00] Volunteering. I would say if you can get in, you know, think of things on a short term basis, you can’t do it forever. Right. But if you can get involved either at your school, if you’re currently listening and you’re looking to leave school, um, is there an afterschool club? Is there a nonprofit in the area that you can volunteer for for 90 days?
One of my first clients was Habitat for Humanity. I did all my work for them in kind, which means free, but it was the fact that I was helping them build like a template and a structure that they could replicate, and I was getting that reference in return. So don’t be afraid to set some time boxes around something like that.
But you, in this day and age, with this type of job search, with this many candidates in the market, you are going to have to, um, put some skin in the game. Maybe it’s even just building your own little portfolio and, and website, but you do have to stand out that way by skill acquisition.
Elizabeth: That makes sense. And thank you so much for sharing everything today. I’ve learned so [00:25:00] much from you and I can’t wait for the audience to listen. And we love to kind of wrap these up by hearing about what you’ve learned about yourself during this process from you, how you learned about marketing. You taught it, now you’re ahead of marketing.
Jaclyn: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s vulnerable is that I, you know, we can be our own worst critic and enemy, so I never, it’s like in the moment as I’m acquiring all these skills, there’s that little subconscious voice that’s like, you know, you should know more, you should be doing this faster. But as I look back and have that hindsight.
And the amount of things that I’ve been able to learn just by way of the internet, I’m like, I have a lot more self-compassion. Right. And I think that’s the key. When you’re trying to make a change, it is a challenge. So, you know, pay attention to what’s, what’s your subconscious voice saying? I’ve had to really work on saying to my subconscious voice like.
Be nice to Jaclyn, right? [00:26:00] And, um, you’re never gonna know everything. I think that’s the other thing. It’s like, I’m not gonna be an expert in overnight, but I do acquire the right skills. I’ve gotta play the long-term game. And so that’s, that’s it. And have fun. I, early on everything was like so serious, Elizabeth.
I was like, oh my God, don’t call me when I’m trying to learn something. And now I’m like, okay. Relax, have some fun with this. It’s not like, you know, we’re human beings, not human doings.
Elizabeth: I love to hear that. And Jaclyn, thank you again so much for your time.
Jaclyn: No. Thanks for having me. Great to talk to everybody. Hope it was of help.
