A Non-Typical Day In The Life Of A Content Marketer at Bannersnack
When I look back at my own professional career, I can see that I made some huge steps during the process. In fact, it is interesting to see how I changed my behaviour and my perspective about what I’m doing now and what I’ve done back in the days when I wrote an article that I’m the Brand Evangelist for Bannersnack.
Times changed. The company is growing bigger and our product is used by more and more users. This means that it requires more devs, more designers and also more people working within the marketing team.
Therefore, due to the fact that our marketing team has been growing and continues to grow, we want to hire content writers. However, this article is not the regular kind of article you will read when somebody shows their intent to hire more people. It’s the kind of article I wanted to read before I changed my job, when I resigned from the agency I was working with before Bannersnack.
This article was quite difficult for me to write. It was hard to figure out where to start, what points to outline and how to present a balanced point of view. Because, you see, I am subjective and I also want to present my point as objectively as possible. This is how I feel while working with Bannersnack.
Therefore, before I opened my Google Docs and started typing in, I read Tim Soulo’s article available on Medium about building an 8 figure marketing team and loved the idea of hiring not for position but for the job to be done.
The usual working day at Bannersnack
Bannersnack is the first SaaS company that I worked with and, as you may already know, the company I am still working for in the present. It’s also the longest job I ever had. Why? Well, the answer is very easy to give. It’s because I’m a passionate marketer who loves to work in and for this industry, who loves to experiment new things and also loves to learn. And here, at Bannersnack, is the place where I was able to grow the most.
Let me tell you how one day at Bannersnack looks like from a content marketer’s perspective.
Usually, I start my working day earlier than the rest of the marketing team. This means that sometimes I get to the office at around 08:00 or 08:30 in the morning. This happens because I enjoy the quiet moments I have before everybody comes in and starts their day. Most of the times, I start by making me a coffee and sitting down at my desk. I don’t have a daily routine because as I said earlier, I love to experiment and try new things, and that means my mornings are different.
Sometimes, I sit down at my desk and start writing an article while on other occasions I just sit down, open tens of new tabs with new articles on topics I am interested about and start reading. Sometimes, I just go on YouTube and watch a couple of videos on the same topics.
Every marketing strategy we have starts with a clear purpose.
For example, we don’t just blog because everybody is doing it and because the marketing gurus are saying that we should do it. We are blogging because we have a clear purpose in our mind, every piece of content is based on a specific strong keyword research process and because we know exactly what we can do with that specific type of content.
Therefore, every morning, after I have my documentation session and my coffee, I take a look at Trello and see what tasks I have to work on, what’s in progress and what I have to finish.
It’s already settled in my ways to take every task and every problem and write them down in my agenda. They make me feel quite accomplished every time I get to outline a new task in my personal agenda and set it as completed. This is why, before actually starting my work days, I open my Trello account and look up for my daily tasks and move the completed ones to the “Done” section.
Working and learning are two processes that in marketing, go hand in hand.
This is why it is important for me to take on different kinds of tasks and work on them on a daily basis:
A. Big and Medium Projects
- I’m constantly working on big projects. These include industry reports, case studies, blog editorials and features of the product.
This process helps me keep my head in the game at all times and make Bannersnack the leader of the industry. Working on big projects also helped me understand how to work with a team, how to anticipate what’s trendy at one point or another and learn how to improve my leadership skills.
Finishing a big project that requires teamwork can also give you a sense of belonging to a small community.
For example, I consider to have been involved in a big project when we launched our first own banner design statistics report or when we have first published the social media image sizes guide for top social networks.
- I am also working on medium sized projects, like writing articles for guest posts or for our own blog
When I started doing guest posts for websites it was very hard at the beginning. You might be facing the same issues: People do not know who you are, what you do and why they should allow you to write an article for their website. It happened to me as well. This is why I started writing on Bannersnack’s blog but also on my personal blog.
The two gave me the chance to create a portfolio that I could send to others, allowing them to clearly see who am I was and assess whether or not I was a good fit for their website.
That’s why you will find there are a lot of guest posts under my name at this point. But if you want to know my guest post strategy, here’s an article where I detailed it.
- I am constantly looking for opportunities to make our brand more present in the World Wide Web by building partnerships and relationships
Building partnerships and relationships is something you are going to do on a constant basis, day by day, almost hour by hour. I am always keeping my Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook tabs open and I’m checking my Instagram constantly.
Because, when I am talking to someone on Twitter, when I’m DM’ing with someone on Instagram I am nevertheless working on building relationships. That’s how I managed to do a co-marketing project with HubSpot about How to make banner ads that don’t suck.
B. Initiatives and Involvement
- I am involved in regular talks with product designers, marketing managers, SEO managers and content creators
I’m working remotely. It was not a choice but a necessity, since the office where our development, marketing and design teams work is located in another city. This is one of the main reasons I need to constantly communicate with the product designer, the marketing manager, the SEO guys and the content creators.
I believe in communication and I believe that we need to have regular talks and updates on what’s happening inside the app but also about how we can market it in the industry.
- I am always coming up with new initiatives that complement our marketing goals
A content marketer is not only the person that writes the content for a blog, a landing page or an email campaign.
Because content is everything around us, they must understand how they can use the content to reach the goals of their marketing strategy, helping the brand get more awareness and also be a leader in the industry.
That’s why at Bannesnack, we encourage initiatives that are being based on having a clear purpose.
