Just recently, I caught up with a good friend of mine based in New York, USA over a video call.
It had been over 2 years since we last spoke, so we shared what had been happening in our lives, what direction we were heading in, and what exciting things had happened recently amid the COVID-19 coronavirus lockdowns happening in both our countries.
And during the conversation, I found out that she had just entered the online marketing space after deciding to no longer pursue a career in psychological services.
She asked me for some advice about starting a career in marketing, and I thought I’d share those responses here with you 🙂
1. What are some tools and skills needed for Marketing? Where did you find these and grow?
As a marketing consultant, you’ll probably be seeing the entire process of selling a product or service end-to-end. What this means is you need to have a big picture understanding of how a marketing funnel works.
While there’s a million different tools and skills you can learn, at the fundamental and overarching level, I would say 2 things matter most – copywriting and data skills.
SKILL #1 – Copywriting
No matter what medium you end up deciding to market with (whether it’s social media, online ads, email marketing etc.) you’re going to need the one skill that’s essential to all of these types of marketing. And that’s COPYWRITING.
If you become better at copywriting and learn how to tap into the thoughts and feelings of your customer (i.e. empathy), then you will have a very solid foundation supporting everything you do as a marketer.
TOOLS:
There’s a lot of tips and tricks, but there isn’t really just ONE tool for this. The main thing is to have a really solid understanding of your customer (which you can do by interviewing/surveying them), and follow this general structure: Problem-Solution-Pitch. Here’s an example:
Problem:
Just started in a Product Marketing role and have no idea what to do? It’s scary at first. Sometimes, it can feel very overwhelming, especially when you don’t know what tools and skills are necessarily needed for a PM.
Solution:
That’s why we’ve decided to write this blog post about the 5 Essential Skills Every New Product Marketer Needs To Rocketstart Their Career. [Proceed to go into more detail for those 5 Essential Skills]
Pitch:
If you’d like to develop your skillset at warp speed to give yourself the best possible start to product marketing, check out our online course here.
SKILL #2 – Data Analytics
Apart from that, another skill you’ll need to have is the ability to track results. A lot of marketing is guesswork – and it’s just a matter of experimenting and tweaking things until you get it juuuuusst right.
So understanding your marketing numbers (e.g. impressions, views, conversions, conversion rate etc.) and how you tweak them is super important.
For most businesses, descriptive statistics is really all you need (just numbers of what you see).
But if you want to take things to the next level, you can start running statistical models to determine where to allocate marketing budget most effectively.
TOOLS:
- Excel / Google Sheets
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Ad statistics (if you’re running ads)
- Your email service provider will give you stats on things like open rates and click rates
- Probably more but those just happen to be what I focus on
There’s a bunch of other stuff, but those are the 2 main ones I’d say are fundamental to any marketer in today’s age.
2. How to think like a Marketer? (is there a specific mindset to develop?)
Care About The Customer
Mindset is simple. It all boils down to:
- Care about the customer.
- Care about their success.
- Care about what they can do with their lives after they’ve used your product/service.
When everything you do stems from that intention, you’ll have the right mindset as a product marketer. And it will come through in the work you do.
Dive Into The Customers’ Mind / Develop Empathy
You want to understand how your customer thinks and FEELS.
Understand their story. Their experiences up until this point in time when they’re about to purchase from you.
Understand their psychology deeply, tailor your marketing message to that, and you’ll find marketing is quite simple – you could have terrible graphic design, not have a website, and not-so-good copywriting skills and it’d still work.
On the other hand, if you didn’t understand it well, and you spent a large amount of money on shiny, glossy marketing materials (business cards, nice website, branded mugs/pens etc.), you would blow your budget in no time.
3. How did you get into this role? How did you know you want to stay with marketing? Does it align with your passions, strengths, etc.
How I Narrowed Down My Interests To Marketing
I’ve always had an interest and passion in connecting with people. Forming great relationships where I’m able to contribute to the betterment of someone else’s life.
I’m also someone who finds EVERYTHING interesting and fascinating. From a young age, I had the opposite problem of most people – instead of not knowing what I wanted to do, my problem was (and sort of still is) that I wanted to do EVERYTHING. I’d considered almost every job I could think possible – actor, teacher, brain surgeon, lawyer, mechanical engineer, dentist, forensic scientist, hairdresser, fashion designer, interior designer etc.
I eventually decided on business, as I saw unlimited opportunities to tap into different industries using my skillsets, and was the picture I had at the back of my mind every time I closed my eyes and thought about the perfect job scenario – forming relationships / partnerships with other people, making deals and helping them succeed.
When I went into uni, I chose to major in Marketing and Psychology as they both related to people. I had a keen interest in understanding how people’s minds work, and wanted to become an effective communicator, so these 2 majors made sense to me.
How I Got Into Marketing
From then on, I just TRIED stuff.
Anywhere I could learn a new skill, I’d just do it. That’s the beauty of university clubs and societies – there’s a lot of opportunities for you to try things.
It didn’t matter if it was marketing-related, psychology-related or not. I always found a way to develop a skill and learn something from whatever I did.
Whether it was a paid job or an unpaid opportunity, I took whatever roles I found interesting with a primary focus on learning, and I spent the next 5-7 years working 2-5 different jobs at any one time to keep growing and developing myself.
I ended up doing over 20 roles in over 17 different industries, and my resume looks super weird and inconsistent if you were to look at it today, but to me they all contributed to a long-term vision of the kind of person I wanted to become. For example:
- Gucci Sales Rep: I learned a lot about the power of storytelling in marketing – you can increase the perceived value of anything as long as you provide a compelling story and vision that is associated with an identity that someone wants to be associated with.
- Corporate masseur: I’d go around to various workplaces and give staff members 5-minute massages to relieve their stress while they worked. It paid me relatively well, gave me the opportunity to check out different workplaces, network, and develop my conversational rapport skills. Also improved my massage skills 🙂
- Program Facilitator: I ran 3-week career boot camps/workshops for uni students in Hong Kong and Melbourne for ZERO pay. I did this because I aspired to speak and teach on stage one day, and this was a highly relevant experience for me.
Eventually, I started to focus more on marketing-specific roles, and for me, I wanted to develop skills in copywriting and content marketing – because that’s where I felt I could be most creative and help people most (through value-adding content).
My First Marketing Experience
I got my first internship at a B2B marketing agency in Sydney. It was an unpaid role, and the boss man was very “if you can’t show that you have what it takes, you’re fired” mentality – at least that’s what he wanted me to think.
My first role was Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – not exactly my cup of tea, but I understood the basics of it. What I had to do was update blog posts, alt images (i.e. image descriptions), and meta descriptions (i.e. page descriptions) with pre-researched keywords in order to increase the likelihood of ranking higher on Google searches.
I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but again, I found ways to frame it in my mind as preparing me for my future vision. I saw it as copywriting training – If I only had 150 characters to sell someone to click on the link when it shows up on Google, how can I make it as compelling as possible?
I eventually came up with a formula (hint: I’ve mentioned that formula above already), which I used to successfully get the point across, and the boss man started to be impressed with my work, and flipped his attitude around me completely.
I started expressing interest in becoming a copywriter and that’s when he started offering me the opportunity to review clients’ website copy and making changes as necessary. I started getting paid the minimum wage, which didn’t afford me much, but was better than not getting paid anything.
How I Knew I Wanted To Stay With Marketing
I Didn’t Enjoy Other Work Fields As Much
I eventually got distracted with a few other opportunities that came my way (what I call ‘Shiny Objects’), which ended up bringing me back to marketing.
An example of this is I quit that B2B Marketing job after I received an offer to work at a small tech venture capital firm, which I proceeded to not enjoy as much as it was less about marketing to help entrepreneurs (what I originally thought), and more about communicating regularly with investors.
For me, it’s super important that I’m able to do stuff where I can contribute to others and truly make a difference. And one of the most intrinsically rewarding ways I like to do that is to help people find their inner voice and express it with confidence – something I can do with marketing 🙂
I Developed Self-Awareness Of My Strengths & What Made Me Light Up
I’m a massive fan of personality tests and quizzes.
And what I’d also discovered over time as I was exploring all these different jobs, was that my natural personality and strengths leaned me towards things like:
- Ideation
- Strategy
- Organising thoughts
- Articulating myself with words
I’ve probably done 5-10 different personality types, including the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Sales Inventory Profile, Gallup Strengths Indicator – just to name a few.
NOTE: My recommendation? Check out the Gallup Strengths indicator and do the test. It’ll cost you a little bit, but it’s well worth knowing your top 5 strengths. Even better, go for the full 34 strengths profile, where it goes through from top to bottom your strengths and lets you know what you lean towards (if you do at all). Here’s a snapshot of mine for example:
Combining my personal work experiences with the feedback I received from peers, work colleagues, managers and the results I received from tests like the one above, I started to become very certain of the types of roles that lit me up.
And for me, content creation and copywriting within marketing helped me tap into my top strengths and gave me the most joy (hint: when you do stuff in line with your strengths you’re more likely to enjoy and succeed with ease). I’ve since expanded into more strategy and consulting, which has allowed me to level up my skills and tap even further into my strengths.
I used to hate the fact that I spaced out a lot while working (and used to be reprimanded for it too), but I’ve since learned that that’s just how my mind works, and it can be a very powerful machine if recognised and utilised properly.
That’s part of the reason why I’ve chosen to work as a solopreneur, providing solutions to small businesses / startups – it allows me to tap into my strengths and be recognised for it.
4. Advice for anyone starting out their career and thinking about PM?
Try As Many Things As You Can
Take any learning opportunity you can. And try as many different things as possible.
The best way to find out what you’re good at, passionate about and love doing is to try.
Think about your favourite food – if you hadn’t taken that first step and tried it for the first time when you were younger, you wouldn’t know that it was so great.
And likewise, it wouldn’t have become your favourite food if you hadn’t had all the other terrible foods you tried and ended up disliking/hating.
That’s exactly what I did, and how I ended up narrowing my focus to copywriting and content marketing when I first started. It’s since shifted to more marketing strategy, and I know I work best with small startup businesses VS large corporations/agencies.
Find Mentors & Lead With The Giving Hand
Find someone you respect – not just for their achievements and skill sets, but in terms of their character, personality and the values they hold.
Then, find ways to start a relationship with them by offering value upfront. Begin the relationship with a giving hand.
Now, understandably, as someone who’s quite new (especially if you’re still studying at college / uni), it can be hard to imagine what you can possibly do to add value upfront.
A Common Rookie Mistake With This
A common mistake many young people make is they ask prospective mentors if they can buy them lunch/coffee to ‘pick their brain.’
While this can sometimes work, it’s not the best approach.
While some people are open to the idea of sharing their knowledge with you over lunch, many times, it doesn’t end up in an ongoing mentor/mentee relationship. And in the rare occasion that it does, it doesn’t last long because it feels VERY one-sided.
How To Actually Add Value Upfront And Develop A Mentor/Mentee Relationship
Instead, you want to approach them with something of potential value.
One way you can do this is by researching them. Research their company. Research what projects they might be working on. Or even try to anticipate what they’ll need to tackle as a project in the future.
Then, come up with a proposal on how they can tackle that. Create an end-to-end plan outlining what challenge you’re trying to solve, how you would do it, and what resources you would tap into based on your understanding.
It doesn’t have to be perfect – what matters is the effort and willingness to give value that is demonstrated.
Then, you approach them for a conversation where you can ask for feedback on your plan, and what action steps you can take to improve it. You then go away, work on those improvements and arrange another time to come back for some more feedback. This continues for a while, and voila – you’ve got a mentor!
And now, instead of “just picking their brain”, you’re offering them value upfront, with the side benefit of being able to pick their brain while you work with them to offer them value.
See the difference? 🙂
I’ve seen many young people land their dream jobs in companies this way, and you can do it too.
Will every person agree to meet up? No.
Does it guarantee you’ll land a job? No.
But it definitely skyrockets your chances. And even if they don’t have a job for you – it’ll be very difficult for them to forget you.
Alan
