Advice for fresh marketers

I am being asked by fresh marketing specialists, who start their jobs at new companies - What now? where do I begin? You can not just jump in and start using marketing theories and principles from the beginning.

This is a very common reason for new marketers to get stressed and start losing time by just messing around, and after your employers start asking for some results, you start making mistakes. There are some very basic steps to undertake before you start your decision making process, and I will try to introduce you to them. This post is for people who start their marketing jobs at a company without marketing culture.

Your actions will vary from company size, its type, market and etc, but most of these steps can be adapted to most of the scenarios.

Step 1: Initiation

This step starts before you are even hired. Before the interviews, we all visit the company website, start understanding its mission, goals, products, reports and etc. This is the first phase of understanding where your company stands. You will have to read every article written about your company.

After you start working, you will have access to more data. Look for the strategies, reports, company brochures and monitor its activities. First phase does not include decision-making. You are just a silent observer, and try to learn everything about your company.

Step 2: Key Stakeholders

This is vital. When you start working as a marketer, everybody will have their opinion about company’s communication style, new products and most of them will think that they are marketing experts themselves. You do not need to consider and implement every opinion, you definitely should listen and understand them, but don't try to satisfy everyone.

Start identifying key stakeholders, who you should be listening to. Many people tend to be the drivers of the company policy. Identify them; this will be your priority list, to work with during the strategy creation process. If you fail this step, these people will not hesitate to implement changes in your working process (and at the end, everything will mess up).

Step 3: Interviews

The schedule of your first week must be busy with the interviews with every key player in the company. Talk with them, ask them many things and remember, your main goal is to understand their attitudes and their requirements from marketing manager.

Take notes, visualize data and analyze it.

Step 4: Brainstorming

Make a team meeting of key players and brainstorm their visions and requirements. Sometimes they know what do they want, and sometimes they know what they do not want

Step 5: Forming a vision

For me, the vision is the foundation where I build my marketing strategy. It enables you to make the decisions based on your intuition. You must have the general attitude towards all the business aspects of your company. Talk to the stakeholders about business, they will give you feedback if you are ready or not (if you have the attitude and vision of the ongoing processes).

Step 6: Decision making

Now you should be ready to start decision-making process. This means that you can start using the knowledge you acquired at the university. Start creating a marketing strategy that you should already know how to do.

At first glance, these actions seem quite logical, but lots of times, they are missed.

Remember, everything is mastered by practice! Read and analyze great marketers. Be always up to date about marketing trends, big campaigns and best ads.