Congratulations on starting your career in marketing. Marketing is an amazing profession where you can feed both the creative and analytic sides of your brain. And it is a pretty short list of professions that can make that claim.
As I think back to the start of my career 20+ years ago, the first piece of advice I’d give you is no matter how promising the analysts make it sound, don’t invest your whole 401-K in drkoop.com stock. However I realise this piece of advice may not hold much relevance to today’s graduates, so let’s instead focus on some things they’re more able to act on:
- Keep studying – Having spent the past 17+ years of your life studying, you’re probably very excited to start applying all that knowledge. However, marketing is always evolving, so strive to spend some time every single day learning something new. Could be about new strategies/tactics in marketing, could be the history of your brand, could be about some of your brands’ competitors, could be looking at a parallel category where you can get some learning. Knowledge is power, so try and get as much as you can.
- Listen more, talk less – You have two ears, two eyes yet only one mouth, and that’s the proper ratio to use them. You might be eager to prove you belong with your new colleagues and you’ll think your mouth (or email) is the best way to do that. The best way to prove your worth is to listen to everything everyone else is saying, learn from it, and then pick and choose the right time to speak up. By talking less, they’ll pay more attention to what you’re saying. Plus if you choose only the most insightful and valuable things to share, they’ll want to hear more from you.
- Know your target audience – The most successful marketers know the pains, wants, need and desires of their target audience intimately, and use that knowledge to drive all of their strategies and tactics. This might sound like a no brainer, but you’ll quickly realize very few marketers are following this path. It’s so easy to think about what you want to say, and where you want to say it, without thinking about what that means to your target. Ask every day – ‘What does this mean to our target?’ ‘What would they think?’ – ‘What would they do?’. It’s the most important compass for everything you do.
Hope you’ve found these tips helpful – keep learning, talk less, know your target, and make smarter investment choices. Do these and you’ll have a happy, healthy, successful and fruitful marketing career.
This blog originally appeared on Avention.com. Follow #First90Days on Twitter for more great tips!
