I’ve been working in digital marketing for almost seven years now. While I’ve (hopefully) got many years ahead of me, there’s a lot that I’ve learned already.
There is nothing I won’t do for good content, which is why I’m baring my soul and revealing all of the mistakes I’ve made in my marketing career. Then I’ve artfully fashioned them into 5 tips, so you can be a better marketer than I ever was!
1. Find Your Niche - But Don’t Be Married To It
At the start of your marketing career, you’re most likely to be a generalist. Maybe you’ll get an internship doing a mix of growth marketing, which involves a little bit of everything, from PR to search engine marketing (SEM). Maybe you’ll start out in events marketing for a startup, which doesn't just involve setting up and hosting the events, but sending out emails and creating post-event content like blog posts and YouTube videos.
If you’re really really good at one particular thing, you might refine your career path and become a specialist, like an Email Marketing Specialist, Paid Media Manager, SEO Manager, B2B Marketing Manager…
If climbing the ladder is what you want, you need to know more than just your niche. If you’ve got your eye on a Head/Director of Marketing role in the future, you need to know at least a little bit about how everything under that role works. Otherwise you’ll find yourself making unreasonable requests of your team and misunderstanding results.
You may have heard the advice ‘aim to be the dumbest person in any room’, and that’s good advice. But that doesn’t mean ‘be dumb’! If you have an opportunity to learn about things outside of - but complementary to - your niche, don’t miss out on the opportunity to pick up more digital marketing skills.
For example, if you’re working on content strategy, understanding CRM and product marketing are incredibly useful. Or if you’re in social media marketing, knowing how paid social works will help you collaborate better. Having a wide range of skills makes life easier in the beginning of your career, and also helps you to grow.
2. Cultivate Strong Project Management Skills
An easy trap to fall into is to be a great ‘ideas person’, but fail to get any of your ideas off the ground. Marketing is art and science, and you need both. If you’ve only cultivated your artistic side and ignored the science, you’re going to have a hard time!
Here are some of the signs that you’re ‘just’ an ideas person:
Your favorite type of meeting is a brainstorming session
You can describe the concept of a project like it’s the plot of your favorite movie, but you can’t remember the launch date off the top of your head
While working on the project, you often find small things going wrong, like running out of budget or running out of time
As soon as the thing is launched, you glance briefly at the results and then move on to the next thing
This isn’t good, but it is common in creative industries. (This is also me. I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.) If you want to grow in your career, you’re going to need to get around this. Here’s what you can do
Let the tools do the work for you
Most companies will have project management tools like Jira, ClickUp, or Monday. Learn how to use these tools and use them well! Having one main source of truth for your project cuts down on misunderstandings, makes information and assets easier to find, and saves you scrambling around for answers.
Image from: monday.com
Find a process and stick to it
Once you’ve found a process for doing anything, stick to it! Whether that’s launching an eBook, building a new landing page, revamping your email nurturing campaigns, or creating a YouTube documentary. Giving yourself a simple formula to follow will make creating content/campaigns much more manageable. This also helps greatly with time planning and sizing - which I’ll get to in Point 3.
Once you have structures in place for different projects, refined and perfected over time, you don’t have to spend too much time on project management. You just have to line up the dominos and watch everything fall into place.
Plan retrospectives
Maybe you’re in a fast-paced environment and feel the pressure to already be knee-deep in the next project as soon as one ends, but aim to make retrospectives part of the formula for your projects.
Understanding what went well and you should do more or, or what went wrong and how to avoid it next time, is critical. Even if you’re not particularly interested in it, others in your marketing team might have things they want to share. This is an opportunity for the designer to say ‘hey, next time, can I have a proper brief so I don’t have to do the work twice?’
3. Be Slow to Say Yes
Everyone wants to be a ‘yes’ person, and to get on well with others and be seen as a team player etc etc. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten into trouble because I immediately said yes to a request or a project, then realized halfway through I didn’t have the time or resources that I needed.
The key word here is sizing, which I somehow didn’t know in marketing terms until I was already 5 years into my career!
Going back to Point 2, if you’ve nailed your project management skills and you know exactly what the formula is for launching a particular project, you can give better estimates.
For example, this might be your process for creating a new whitepaper:
Brainstorm ideas with team (2 days)
Create and send surveys (2 weeks)
Analyze results (1 week)
Copywriting and proofreading (2 weeks)
Design and formatting (1 week)
Landing page creation (3 days)
So next time leadership tells you ‘we need a new whitepaper in 2 weeks time,’ instead of saying yes and then dissolving into a puddle of panic later, you can negotiate. Instead of immediately saying yes, you can say, ‘To do it properly takes about two months. But if we recycle old designs and are happy collecting fewer responses, I can get it down to one and a half.’
Remember, you’re not causing friction by saying ‘no’ or asking for more time. It’s just good marketing strategy to know what you’re capable of and what’s unrealistic.
4. Learn Office Politics
Now I know what you’re thinking. Office politics bad. And it’s true that they can lead to uncomfortable, sometimes even toxic situations. This isn’t because office politics are inherently bad, but because sometimes people are bad.
Office politics is essentially just the relationships you have with the people around you. There’s no avoiding the fact that in some of your interpersonal relationships at work you have more power, and in others you have less.
Being good at office politics doesn’t make you a manipulative monster. It makes you a better collaborator, it protects your boundaries and workload, and helps you to be a better team leader. You’ll be better equipped to ask for favors when you need them, to deliver bad news with minimal negative consequences, to negotiate timelines, and even push for promotions.
This is important for anyone trying to climb the corporate ladder, but it’s important for any marketer, because our roles are so cross functional. You need a lot of help from a lot of different people, and a lot of other people are going to be knocking on your door asking for ‘some of your marketing magic.’ Being good at office politics helps you navigate all of that, whilst getting the job done and staying sane while you’re doing it.
There’s a great article on why office politics aren’t inherently evil from Harvard Business Review, in case you’re not convinced!
5. Get AI literate
AI isn’t something you can avoid in your marketing career and neither is it something you should come to fully depend on. Whether you’re a huge fan of AI or you’re still wary of it, you have to at least understand the rules.
For example, AI automation tools like Zapier and Make have been around for a while, and are considered reliable and time-saving. These will become more and more prevalent for digital marketing professionals as we move into a more AI-centric world. Imagine, you’ve buried your head in the sand on AI, and then find that your dream job relies on automation tools you’ve never used before.
Image from: Make
On the flip side, if you go too far and use AI tools in place of doing anything for yourself, you’ll find yourself with an empty skill set. You want to be a Digital Marketing Manager, not an AI Minder. (Maybe you do, but those are completely different careers!) Imagine, you’ve only ever written copy with AI, and then you find out that Google has once again decided to penalize AI-generated blog content. Now you’ve got to pick up a whole new skill in record time.
Wherever you sit in the various AI debates, it’s part of the digital marketing field now, and there’s no avoiding it. Find the balance by using it where it’s helpful to you, and identifying where you should rely on good ol’ human intelligence.
Further Reading
📰 Learn Digital Marketing with Ironhack’s New Bootcamp
📰 Advice for Marketers of the Future
📰 What It's Really Like Working in Digital Marketing
📰 AI in Marketing Leveraging data for Personalized Campaigns
