It’s hard to believe it’s been one year since I made my biggest career decision ever, leaving financial services and joining the wonderful world of Marketing. In the last year, I have had the chance to work on all aspects of marketing including content creation, social media marketing, email marketing, website management and design.
It’s never easy to start in a new job let alone in a completely new field and industry. I’ve learned many valuable lessons during my first year in marketing and I’ve condensed them down to a list of 6 which you can read below:
Always Be on The Lookout for Inspiration.
You’ll quickly realise that you won’t be able to look at an ad, or content piece again without thinking of the thought processes that marketing team went through in creating that campaign. Which can be frustrating when you just want to mindlessly scroll on TikTok on a Saturday morning, but don’t worry this can sometimes be where your greatest ideas come from. I like to keep a note on my phone of anything I see out and about that might be useful for our marketing team. Inspiration can come from anywhere at any time!
Plan Plan Plan
Planning is a key step in becoming a successful marketer. Whether you are creating annual marketing plans, social media plans or your own daily plans, they help to keep you on track and focused on the overall business objectives. I like to write down my daily and weekly plans making sure to capture any deadlines, meetings, content, and work that needs to be completed that week. This helps me to focus on my goals at work and make sure I don’t miss anything. Your plan will become the blueprint of your work, if it’s not written down it won’t get done is my motto.
Thinking on Your Feet
Whilst marketers can try to plan every detail of a campaign or strategy, there will always come a time when you will need to think on your feet. Not everything will run smoothly 100% of the time, and so thinking of quick fixes on the spot is something every marketer should be able to do.
Use Tools to Your Advantage
Something I learned very quickly this year is that tools are a marketer’s best friend. There are 100s of tools you can use as a marketer, but the main ones I have come to know, and love is Hootsuite and Canva.
Hootsuite is a social media management tool. We schedule, track, and monitor all the content that goes live on our social media accounts through Hootsuite. It has saved us hours of manually posting and tracking our content, we also double it up as a social calendar to ensure we are not missing a chance to post some interesting content. Almost everyone online will have heard of Canva by now, it has blown up and become one of the most user-friendly graphic design platforms. For the marketers out there, that don’t feel as confident with their design skills, Canva is a great way to get your creative juices flowing and create some really interesting and eye-catching content.
Everything Needs to Be Measured
In college I naively thought marketing was mostly creating social media posts, getting good content and all those fun things. I wasn’t thinking about the data and analytics behind pretty much every decision a marketer makes. There’s no such thing as just creating marketing content for fun, it should add value to your customers, serve a specific purpose and become a positive touch point that will eventually lead to a sale or interest in your product or service.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help.
Whether you have 5 years work experience or you only graduated last week starting in a new industry can be daunting. There are going to be lots of things that are completely new to you. Don’t be afraid to ask your colleagues for help with something. Asking for help can sometime feel like you failed, but in the long run you’ll learn something new. It will not reflect badly on you, but ultimately show you’re willing to learn and striving to do better at work.
