4 Marketing Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

To an aspiring marketer, the profession looks bright and sunny. Everybody starts with a dream of creating viral posts, but seldom it works. Hence a lot of disappointments and frustrations. 

On the other hand, other teams (especially in the companies that don’t have evolved marketing teams) consider marketing as a leaky bucket. Especially when the marketing team does not bring any real business to the company. They still have to rely on agencies for business and have a team of 2-5 people just for the heck of it. 

Therefore, for marketing professionals, it's really hard to justify their roles. 

Here, I’ll list the 3 biggest lessons that I have learned in my 5-years career. New marketers can take it as advice to get the most of their efforts. 
PS: I’m an engineering graduate, I joined content and marketing out of personal interest. And trust me, I have worked with 8 firms till now (I freelanced a lot in my early days and in different capacities), and each role brought different learning. 

Lesson 1: Hang on to your idea. 

You see, marketing is all about conveying your ideas in the most effective way possible. Especially when it comes to creative writing for social media, you’ll find a lot of people eyeing your content. That is why we generally get our content approved by teams/seek their opinion. 

If they don’t work the first time, don’t trash them completely. Try them for
different things at different times.

My colleague had an idea about the flowchart, and she has put that in several creatives. But it was not approved a lot of times. Finally, when it was approved, it became one of the viral posts of the time.

So, make a notebook for writing your ideas. Turn pages and refer to it often. It will help you when you get stuck (writer’s block) or when you’ve to deliver sometime on a tight deadline. 

Lesson 2: Put effort in to learn tech

Okay, it may sound absurd for people from a non-tech background. But I am not talking about learning to code or something. All I am saying is to use tools and technology wherever you feel it can simplify your task. 

My colleague used to send outreach emails to hundreds of people every day. Luckily, she used some tools for email automation. While in one of my
organizations, I used to save the content in the draft and write emails for
every single recipient. Yes, I would copy-paste the template, but still, I could send only a max of 35 emails/day. 

See, this is what I am talking about – email automation.

The point is – when you want to scale/grow, then being smart help. Nobody counts how hard-working you’re. But everyone considers the results you deliver. 

Lesson 3: When it comes to promoting content, choose
benefits over cost.

This XYZ firm has won a global-level award. We decided to do a press release. My boss asked me to suggest some reasonably priced PR distribution sites apart from the free ones. So, I searched for some, got quotes from people, and finalized the one that was offered distribution for about $27. 

There were only 3-4 popular publications (by popular I mean that I knew for that particular industry) in their network. Unfortunately, those sites did not publish it and when we asked the PR site, they said they guarantee distribution and not publication. So, even though over 45 sites published the news, we did not really win any benefit from it. 

The moral of the story – when the news reaches the right people, then only it creates an impact. Especially when you’re dealing with timely content, do not hesitate to spend more.

Lesson 4: Give it the time it takes.

There were a lot of times when I delivered early because somebody rushed for it or pressurized me to finish off soon.

I was freelancing for a known e-commerce brand in India. My manager used to ping me every day to finish off a write-up. She would give an unreasonable timeline. Would not assign the topics beforehand and expect early submission. The result was – both of us were unhappy. She wasn’t happy with my content and I was too frustrated that I decided to leave. 

So, take your time to finish a piece and ensure that you do justice to it. Because at the end of the day – you’re your brand. Plus, revisions consume more time (your and your manager’s) than compiling something thoughtfully. 

So, this was my bit.

What lessons have you learned? Do share. Because together we learn, together we grow. 😊