Marketing chameleon
Remember this: Agency is digital agency. Marketing is digital marketing. Role is a role, not responsibility.
Game of colours
Let us play a game. Start associating each role you have played in your career with a colour, say: green for management trainee => blue for financial analyst =>red for Senior financial analyst. Once you have done it, can you see how colourful your career looks? Great!!
The twist
Now, let me play it on me, my marketing career.
I have worked as an agency account manager, later juggled a client side job, managing a rooster of agencies, then consulted clients on campaigns and now, leading marketing at a tech startup.
One thing common to all these jobs is: I change more colours in “a day” than many do in their holy lengthy careers.
So, it is best I stop at a time range of one day and sneak peek in to it.
Life 1: House of Lies
This part of my day is called strategy.
Sitting through long meetings.Talking the big talks of budget, spend optimisation, market segmentation, competition benchmarking, partnership marketing, value realisation. Consulting and convincing stakeholders.Drawing big marketing plans. Creating and discovering apps and products. Mixing some media. and Setting KPIs.
Can you see the coincidence this part of my life has with Marty Kaan’s character (played by Don Cheadle) in“House of lies” ?
Life 2: House keeping
This part of my day is called reality.
Strategy is good and the internet is full of it. In fact, you can be someone as remote as an industrial engineer to come up with a great marketing idea.That is reality.
So how am I going to gain any edge?
Only by getting my hands dirty and being the janitor.
In this part of my life, I work to blur the lines between design, development, SEO, SEM, social and mobile, in fact, down to the level of closing the following threads:
Has the image sitemap been submitted? Has the website been gzip compressed? why are the images getting chopped on the iPad version? How can the client’s name be misspelt on the copy? Why don’t we change the match type to “phrase” to increase the quality score? bounce rate metric drilled down to country? What was the reach of this tweet? How many influencers did we engage with this week?
The twist — reinstated
A shop floor manager manages the production floor. A consultant consults clients (Pretty, obvious. Right?).
But when you are in charge of digital strategy, you develop strategy at a high level, while also being able to drive it at a project level. In fact, for me, work seem to get more hands-on as I grow up. This is not exactly how other professions are designed. is it?
In essence, if you enjoy being differentiated this way, then digital marketing is your cup of tea.
Now, getting back to the colour scheme - If SEO, SEM, content marketing, social, mobile, design, development, client and vendor management take up a colour each, I think I require an analytics tool that can track my colour changes, something to measure:
the number of times I changed colours today
the colour that took most of my time
the one that got me the best results and so forth…
And we could call it the “Chameleon for marketers”. Pick it up as a hobby project, if you have too much time on hand.
