Career accelerators for marketers — those who can, “should teach &” do.
Unsolicited career advice from a mid-30’s marketer turned consultant on specific marketing skills that increase income multiples(vs avg)
No, no one asked me to write this.
(hence unsolicited)
But still, here is a qualitative(n=1) reflection into a marketer’s career so far in terms of skills & compensation and the underlying demand in the professional workplace for marketing advisory / consultation.
So, it’s been over a decade since I started my career as a digital marketer, and 2 years in consulting.
George Bernard Shaw’s “those who can, do. those who can’t, teach” is in general mostly correct, but I find the exception for marketers being “those who can, should teach & do.”
More specifically, the application of specific hard/soft skills opens up careers to a much wider advisory and consultation field, broadening opportunities in projects, companies, leading to a more fruitful career.
Now, the newspaper reason for this demand in marketing advisory / consultation: executives and marketers are increasingly uncertain in face of consumer behavior diversity and complexity.
Reference: any recent article written about the challenges CMOs face.
On the operational level, a look into a typical day-to-day of a marketer will show that:
even with the sheer number of marketing tech and tools, enterprise marketers allocate a bulk of their time manually tweaking strategy, ideating/prioritizing next steps, integrating data and even analyzing campaign results across channels/devices. (Most marketing technology and tools only help automate reporting and data integration, but fail to visualize strategy as a whole or even next steps)
Reference: sample amount of time marketers spend on different types of task vs number of types of tools.
& as an adviser / consultant it’s this discrepancy between the demand to add clarification to overall marketing strategy and operations vs the tools / services readily available that lead to the income multiple increase vs being a do-er.
So, for marketers — those who can, should teach & do;
especially in the areas of strategy, performance tracking, data integration, ideation & prioritization.
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Thanks for reading!
Jo