Tips for young marketers; More or better marketing?
In this week's newsletter, I'm sharing two bits of useful marketing content.
Hey there!
I’m part of a marketing Slack group that has a bunch of awesome, high profile marketers in it.
There was a recent thread on ‘tips for younger marketers’.
Depending on where you’re at in your marketing career, I think many of you can benefit from their advice:
9 tips for young marketers
The average CMO lifespan is 18 months. Prepared to get fired when you make it to the top—understand the dynamics of the role and get a thick skin.
Marketing is about both maths AND creativity. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s all one or the other.
Hustle culture isn’t smart. Work smart. Time management is important to your success.
You should be working on your personal brand as much as your company’s brand. As you climb the ladder, your personal brand will carry with you from job to job.
When you leave a company, don’t burn bridges. It doesn’t feel like it, but you’ll bump into a surprising amount of old colleagues over your career.
Don’t be afraid to speak up in meetings or send them to your leadership team. Acting like a leader and sharing useful, actionable ideas help others see you as a leader (and also you might get the opportunity to execute your ideas).
Become a swiss army knife of marketing. Try to spread your skillset and get involved everywhere you can. This breadth will help you as a leader.
Be aware that if you don’t move between product types, industries, B2B vs B2C, product or agency, then you will get pigeonholed later in your career.
(However,) Specialising in a skillset like content marketing can help you climb the corporate ladder. Becoming a specialist gives you a clear skillset that companies can recruit for.
What would you add? Share it below and I’ll make it into a LinkedIn post and tag you.
On a separate note, someone shared the below article with me.
It goes into what marketing IS and why knowing the difference between skillsets really matters.
Do you need more marketing or better marketing?
Best bits from the article:
A great definition of marketing: “We have described marketing as the process of focusing on who the customer really is, and what the customer is actually buying from you . . . rather than what you’re selling. What customers can buy from your business. . . that they cannot obtain from another . . . is the real reason they do business with you.”
The key point of the article: With many business challenges, we don’t have a clear understanding of whose job they are to fix. There’s a difference in skillset between product marketing and marketing services, for example, so referring a challenge to the wrong professional leads to inadequate outcomes.
Example: “Executing an effective new product launch by relegating the planning and execution to Marketing Services, or worse, to your advertising agency, is a mistake. Given that 90% of new product introductions fail to achieve their sales goals, perhaps it’s time to consider that the execution may not be the problem. Perhaps there was never a viable plan.”
P.s. Did you get some value from this article? I give away everything for free, so if you think I deserve it, you can ‘buy me a beer’ right here (i.e. donate $5).
Follow top marketers on LinkedIn & Twitter.
I've never taken a marketing class, & I didn't learn much about marketing in my first 2 jobs out of college, but I was learning so much more about marketing than my "marketing" colleagues by following people on Twitter & LinkedIn like Matthew Kobach, Dave Gerhardt, Blake Emal, Nik Sharma, JanelSGM, Hala Taha, & of course Ben Goodey. :)
At my stage as a young marketer, especially before I got employed in the current job, the most helpful advice is to specialise. In fact, I would even say for plain beginners, to generalise is dangerous, because you may not be able to justify your own value in a short time.
I will modify a bit and say "specialise so that you can deliver some demonstrable results". And based on that, I will add "specialise in something that has shorter feedback loop first". For example, ads. That provides safer ground for young marketers to explore other tactics in the future.
I am not a native English speaker, and found a product marketing job in a hyper-growth SaaS company in Australia within 2 months early last year (we know how crazy things were in March/April 2020). Being specialised in SEO and have demonstrable results in content (though small) I created is why I got interview calls across different marketing functions. But because I focused on something with longer feedback loop, that is why I was not considered "essential" by the first company and got fired at the start of COVID.