8 Lessons from 8 Years in Digital Marketing

I like to say that talent made me a designer, but experience made me a marketer. I’ve had the enormous pleasure and privilege of working with many business owners and not-for-profits. Doing good work for them is more than a job — as marketers, we’re entrusted with the success of our clients. They take on the risk for our screw-ups. So we need to stay humble and always try to do the best work we can with the available resources. As my own career gets closer and closer to the decade mark, I’ve begun to appreciate how much a professional grows from time in their industry. I really didn’t know a damn thing when I started! Eight years in marketing has given me many important lessons.

What the Marketing Industry Has Taught Me

I think the most important thing you can do in your career is keep learning. (For one thing, stagnation is boring.) So I’ve learned all kinds of things in my eight years as a digital marketer, but here I’m seeking to condense those countless lessons into the most crucial per year. Many of these would be obvious to someone wiser than me, but I’m just being honest by including things that certainly I should have learned earlier on. The biggest mistakes I made repeatedly — it took a while for those lightbulbs to finally go off over my head.

Year 8: Audience research is more important than intuition

New marketers make too many assumptions about their target audiences. I actually kind of envy that early mindset — the creative process has less friction when you default assume that people behave generally like you do. Over time, you learn just how incorrect that is and the work becomes exponentially more complex.

Audience research is frustrating because you will only ever scratch the surface of who these people are and what they want. But the practice is so important. Even a figurative glance will provide helpful information to better optimize the work. But beyond that, audience research reminds us that good marketing connects appropriately to the right audience — it’s not supposed to be consumed or even necessarily liked by you or the client.

Year 7: Marketing that’s “too good” will actually hurt conversions

Let’s say there’s five competing service providers in an area. Some have old or amateur websites and a couple don’t have websites at all. Now let’s imagine I was hired to design a website for one of these service providers. Until I learned this lesson, I would seek to give this company the sleekest, most professional-looking website possible. I thought I was doing great work on their behalf. But the reality is that when their customers glance between them and their competitors, the flashy new website I made comes across as pricey and non-local. If that client was seeking to appeal to a higher-end market, great, but generally it means I overshot and my good work will in practice scare off potential conversions.

Good marketing understands the expectations of the audience. You should only surpass them when the brand wants to position itself a certain way.

Year 6: Don’t implement processes to fix outlier clients

In the aftermath of a bad client, it’s a very fair reaction for everyone to huddle up and seek to create some new procedure to mitigate the damage should a similar situation ever happen again.

I’m of the opinion that it’s better just to take the L and move on. There are always going to be bad clients, so responding with new, highly niche processes creates unnecessary drag across the entire board. The decrease in efficiency is minute, so it doesn’t get detected, but there’s a cumulative effect that essentially does more damage than the original problem.

Year 5: Look for the missing info

One time, I was in a kickoff meeting and the client mentioned something in passing about hiring felons. I barely caught it; my mind ran through our sales notes and what I knew about the organization from their existing marketing. Turns out they have a very well-respected program that provides career paths to individuals with criminal records. It’s an important dimension of their organizational culture but not directly relevant to the product itself, so it just hadn’t come up. The old marketing company missed it too.

I’ve learned it’s helpful to go into a conversation like that with the assumption that there’s missing information to uncover. Oftentimes, clients won’t think to bring up something that (to them) seems routine or unimportant — that info could be the missing ingredient to a home-run marketing strategy. You have to ask odd questions to try and pick at things. I also like to end every kickoff with the question, “What’s something important that I neglected to ask about?”

Year 4: Marketing is not a creative industry

I love production people. It’s the forever bias I have as a graphic artist turned marketing specialist. People who’ve only ever been in management have no idea how fun the ground floor is. Production is where the diversity is, where the neurodivergent thrive. These are the creative individuals. The designers, videographers, copywriters — the people who actually do the work of making marketing products. So it’s beyond intuitive that yes, obviously, marketing is a creative industry.

The problem is that creativity is risky. The outputs are unpredictable. It’s necessary for a process of art direction and project management to shape creative expression into a reliably safe product. Creatives are essential, but they’re only one level of the business, and everyone else has to work diligently to maintain processes to temper the work into something that will actually get approved by the client.

Year 3: The job is to create conversions, not art

It took me a long time to understand that my job is marketing, not artistic expression. This important lesson happened much later than it should have because early in my career I was working for a start-up that wasn’t able to provide art direction or experienced review. My work looked amazing so it was praised internally, and then my clients loved it, so I simply assumed I was doing something right — if my employer is happy with the work, and the client is happy with the work, then it must be good, right? Well, marketing isn’t for the company and it’s not for the client. It’s for the audience. And eventually enough data came in — audiences hated my work.

My early projects were artistically indulgent or too technically complex. They were impressive in every way except the one that actually mattered. This realization caused a complete rethinking of my process. I was humbled. The job wasn’t to have some grand artistic vision. It was to make the client money.

Year 2: Rebranding is a company’s last resort

When I was just starting out, I loved the idea of rebrands and brand refreshes. It seemed like such a clean solution to keep an organization fresh and relevant. In reality, rebranding is an extravagantly expensive process that can take literal years from conception to debut. So ironically, by chasing the zeitgeist you’ll often miss it: Jaguar is a recent and obvious example of this at a global scale.

Plus, 100% implementation is almost impossible. Some people in the organization’s team (not to mention their customers) will personally never adapt to the change, reusing familiar PDFs with the old logo and rolling their eyes whenever they hear the new name.

It’s hard to quantify the value of familiarity, but it can’t be understated. Most of the time, it’s better to keep going with a weak brand than start over. Besides, it’s all subjective. A marketing expert might look at a logo or business name and think “Damn, this is terrible,” but oftentimes that organization’s audience actually does like it.

Year 1: Your clients want very much to trust you

A business owner recently told me that he’d been burned by every marketing company he’d ever hired. It’s not an uncommon story. It won’t take a new marketing person more than a few meetings to discover that business people, non-profit leaders, and entrepreneurs all have an uneasy relationship with marketers. Unfortunately, this industry is marred by bad work and abusive contracts. Horror stories are common. Even when there’s no foul play, the quality of work is generally abysmal. Most agencies are just design mills, cranking out quantity or contracting out everything they can to the lowest bidder.

Your clients will give you the benefit of the doubt. They are rooting for this relationship to work. People are amazingly forgiving that way. Understanding that your clients have a lot to lose, and often are being gracious with you, is an important step in becoming an effective digital marketer. You are being entrusted with serious work that deserves to be taken seriously.

The Lessons To Come

What I really want to master in the coming years is audience research and analytics. I see that as being just so critical. Deepening my understanding of the target group will allow me to create more success for clients. But it’s also impossible to predict what lessons are to come. These are unknown unknowns in a sense — we all have professional blind spots and false assumptions. I look forward to the experiences that challenge me and open my eyes, much like the previous years have.