Boosting Your Independent Marketing Profile
The beautiful thing about working in the marketing industry is that it allows for flexibility and creativity. In many cases, a marketer can work solo and maintain a roster of clients, allowing for a more flexible work-life balance and lifestyle.
But marketing is an industry that’s always changing, so it’s important that marketers are willing to take regular looks at their workflow and processes to seek out opportunities to improve. Competition in the digital marketing space is stiff, particularly for sole proprietors. So, in order to maintain a leg up over the competition, every marketer should have a solid plan in place to boost their marketing profile regularly.
How can this be done? Continuing education is one of the best principles to apply here. There is never a shortage of lessons to be learned, and any mistake that can be an opportunity to learn. Marketers should have the self-awareness and humility to be able to address failures and take valuable lessons forward.
For example, let’s say that a marketer loses a client due to poor campaign performance. While blame can usually be spread around to multiple suspects, it’s important for a marketer to have the ability to assume responsibility for any failures that occur. Especially when there are clients involved, this is important because clients aren’t particularly concerned with who made the mistake, they are only concerned with rectifying it and ensuring it does not happen again. A marketer who has the humility to take that mistake, take responsibility for it, and learn from it, will always be more successful than their counterpart who blames everyone else and refuses to change any part of their process.
When working solo, reputation and word of mouth is everything. Maintaining strong relationships with clients is important. A bad experience can make its way around via word of mouth much faster than a positive one, unfortunately. So when a bad experience occurs, a marketer should be willing to enter the fray and do what they can to fix the problem and demonstrate through actions that the mistake won’t occur again.
Another way marketers can continue to boost their independent profile is simply self-promotion. Many shy away from this because they fear being perceived as gratuitous or narcissistic. This does not have to be the case! Tactful self-promotion is possible, and it should be done wherever there is an opportunity. Just as a brand wouldn’t shy away from advertising its goods or services, neither should a marketer who has marketable skills.
A marketer who is always looking to improve their skills and learn from past mistakes will always be more ready to tackle the next challenge that awaits them. This applies to even those working in-house on a marketing team, too. Remember: your career is yours to cultivate, and even if this means being on someone else’s payroll for a while, there are still skillsets to cultivate and improve over time so that you’re ready for the next chapter of your career, whatever that may hold.
