3 Things I’ve Learned from Marketing in the Real World that College Couldn’t Teach Me
I loved college and my courses, don’t get me wrong, but to state what seems like a corny line in a movie, “There are just some things school can’t teach you”. The stakes are higher, there’s real money to be won and lost and it isn’t your money, it is your investors’ money. You have co-workers who depend on the job to make a living, not just classmates who say “D’s get degrees”.
Some background before I go into what I have learned, I work at a FinTech startup in Downtown Austin. We use technology to simplify and streamline a process that used to cost thousands of dollars and a lawyer. The past year and a half we have had anywhere from 9 employees to 18. The marketing team has always been about 2 people deep and 3 when we got a dedicated designer. A startup’s goal is growth, huge scalable growth, and a lot of growth falls to the marketing team…of two. This means I have the opportunity of a lifetime to see what it’s like to build a marketing strategy and marketing processes from the ground up. Here’s what I learned from my past year of marketing at a startup that college never told me.
Transparency
Know it, love it, live it. Marketing is the most transparent department in any business. Your work is laid out for the entire world to see. That also means your mistakes can be more obvious than any other department. I’ll be the first to admit I was not detail-oriented going into my first marketing job. I had to learn to develop guidelines for myself to prevent errors on public-facing collateral.
I use Hubspot to build a bi-monthly newsletter that goes out to 4000+ people. Hubspot’s spellcheck doesn’t always work and even then it won’t catch the title case or sentence case consistency errors. Since I work at a startup my marketing team consists of me two other people and we don’t have a dedicated proof-reader. That means if I make a mistake and my team members don’t catch it (which we are human so this can happen a lot) then our brand could be lesser in some people’s opinion. My simple fix was to write the copy for my newsletter in a Google Doc and then copy and paste it into Grammarly, then have it proof-read by my team, and then finally copy and paste it into Hubspot.
Embrace that transparency is a part of marketing and find other team members to check your work, show your manager if they have time. Don’t be afraid of making corrections or edits before your work hits the limelight. It will prevent stress and easy mistakes.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Where Your Work Fits In the Bigger Picture
Going into marketing I never thought about what role the Sales team would play in my work. s. As it turns out Sales needs Marketing and Marketing needs Sales.
Our marketing team was two-deep at one point and between my co-worker and me, we managed the product marketing, lead generation, customer marketing, and more. When Sales came in with a request to update collateral or make a new video, I felt disheveled because I only saw their work request, I never got an explanation of how it was expected to increase leads or help the customer on their journey.
I couldn’t see the CAC coming out of these Sales projects, so I finally asked one of the salesmen to add up the KPIs on the collateral I make and the videos we made together, the main question to be answered was, “Does my work contribute to attracting a lead, converting a lead, and what’s the conversion rate?”.
The numbers came together on a spreadsheet and it was clear that some of the collateral had created leads and helped moved them further into the customer journey. It was also clear that some projects weren’t worth the effort anymore and I noticed that Sales stopped asking me to create those specific videos or content.
Knowing that my work was adding to the Sales process was rewarding and made me enjoy finishing projects I knew would help my co-workers. I felt like had a purpose and that my work was valued, and I made my workload more efficient by getting rid of the projects that brought no value to the company.
Always Speak in ROI
In my marketing classes in college, I think there was one class we talked about ROI, net profit and overhead costs. I think it was an accounting class. It took me a few months to realize I could make a case for any new marketing experiment I thought could bring in leads if I could defend the ROI (return on investment). The people in charge of your marketing budget (CEO, CFO, Investors) don’t care about views, impressions, or clicks unless you tell them how spending money will make them money. If you’re talking to executives or even your manager if you explain your marketing project as an investment that will bring in more gains than losses you will have their attention.
To appropriately deploy the speaking in ROI technique, you need to clearly understand the problem you’re trying to solve. If your Sales team says they need more leads I recommend listening 70% of the time, rather than getting defensive or slapping a quick fix marketing gimmick. Once you have a grasp on the real problem use the other 30% of the meeting to propose your solution based on ROI.
ROI can be too general sometimes so I use a list of metrics Hubspot made. This list keeps the most important metrics at the top of my mind for when a budget is called into question or a project needs to be funded:
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Lifetime Value to Customer acquisition cost ratio (LTV: CAC)
- Marketing Percentage of Customer Acquisition Cost (M%-CAC)
- Time to Payback CAC
- Marketing-Originated Customer Percentage
- Marketing Influenced Customer Percentage
I am grateful for my role at a startup because I have been given a crash course in marketing that I may not have received in a large corporation as a marketing assistant or coordinator. I also believe that even if I university had made me buy a textbook in any of the lessons above that I wouldn’t have fully grasped it until I lived it. There are just some things school can’t teach you. *Que John Hue’s movie ending with Don’t You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds playing as I walk away from the keyboard*
