027: Putting the People and Personality in Professoring and Publishing Marketing Content with Bill Zahn

The Digital Marketing Mentor

William (Bill) Zahn is a clinical professor at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business. He started teaching there five years after finishing his Ph.D. at the same institute. His former professors and department heads have mentored him, and he now mentors his students in the ways of storytelling in marketing and how writing will always need the human element.
Episode Highlights:

• Background
  • William (Bill) Zahn started his marketing career with a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Texas at Austin. After a stint in the workforce, he got his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Houston. Five years after completing the graduate program, he returned as a professor, where he remains today.
• Mentoring
  • When defining a mentor, Bill knows one thing for certain - he doesn’t like to leave it open-ended. If someone requests Bill to mentor them, he wants expectations set up front. How often will we meet? What do you hope to get out of this? He believes a mentor is someone who has been where you want to go and can offer you advice to help you overcome challenges on your path to success.
• Professorship
  • A social media marketing class project had a bit of a plot twist when one of Bill’s students managed to convince Gary Vee to call and be a guest speaker for their class. Bill knows that storytelling is a critical element of good teaching and good marketing. He always tries to find ways to relate a topic to his students' lives so they’ll better remember it. He also knows that AI is here to stay, especially in the world of marketing content creation, but it will always need the human touch because it doesn’t have life experiences to draw upon.

Episode Links:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Books
  • The Go-Giver by Bob Burg
  • The Trusted Advisor by Charles Green
  • Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin

Follow The Digital Marketing Mentor:

• Website and Blog: thedmmentor.com
• Instagram: @thedmmentor
• Linkedin: @thedmmentor
• YouTube: @thedmmentor

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