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Six Strategies to Advance Your Marketing Career

Posted by sreynolds on May. 4, 2023  /  Career Development  /  Subscribe 0

Colleen Kucera, CPSM - Vice President of Marketing at Ryan Companies US, Inc. 

Advancing your marketing career in the A/E/C industry is hard enough without there being unspoken expectations upon you. Let’s uncover those secret expectations and help you take the next step in your marketing career journey.   

Secret #1 – Develop the required soft skills.
Soft skills are personal attributes that contribute to your success. It’s easy to understand what you need to know with your technical marketing skills. That would include things like keeping up your InDesign skills, becoming progressively better at understanding and assembling marketing plans and budgets and staying relevant with the latest marketing technology. Soft skills are a lot more subjective and difficult to assess on our own. Some soft skills don’t get the attention they need from marketers and therefore hold us back from advancing our careers. Look at these soft skills and determine where you stand in mastering them:

• Marketing Assistants and Marketing Coordinators – Understanding priorities and how to spend your time.
• Marketing Coordinators and Marketing Managers – Having high emotional intelligence, specifically focused on personal awareness.
• Marketing Managers and Marketing Directors – Trusting your intuition with a dose of humility.
• Marketing Executives – Infusing curiosity into your career.

Secret #2 – Manage up.
Before we explore this secret expectation, let’s define what managing up means. For purposes of your marketing career, it basically means making your manager’s job easier. It is critical to develop a strong and trusting relationship with those you work most closely with in your career. This is especially true with your manager. If you take this one step further, why does it matter if you manage up or make your boss’ job easier? Well, each workplace is a social system and thus relationships are a top priority, especially with your manager. Your manager has influence over the projects you are involved with and on the visibility, you have across your company – which both impact your career. Some key areas to focus in managing up:

• Know your manager – Understand their experience, management style, communication preferences, and strengths.
• Provide updates – Have regular and concise communications, disclose challenges, and always include deadlines with your ask.
• Be prepared – Bring solutions, not problems and ask questions.

Secret #3 – Move from tactical thinking to strategic thinking in everything that you do.
Being a strategic thinker is about your ability to solve problems and identify opportunities in a creative way that challenges the norm. Strategic thinkers are not reactive. They are thinking beyond the here and now. To move from tactical thinking to strategic thinking, you must continually be asking yourself questions such as:

• How does what I am working on now, affect other people? Departments? The company?
• How does the client show up in everything that I am doing?
• How does this effort affect the future?

Tactical thinkers are focused on the how, when, and where. Strategic thinkers are focused on the who, what and why. For example, a strategic thinker is not going to ask their CMO how to get a project done. They will think through the objectives (why), bring in the right people (who), and determine the best solution for moving forward (what). Moving from tactical thinking to strategic thinking is entirely up to you because it is a mindset shift. Start asking yourself more questions to get on the right track for that shift in mentality.

Secret #4 – Learn how to handle ambiguity.
Ambiguity is an unclear statement, task, or goal. When you encounter this situation, you may be unsure of how to handle it due to the vagueness of the request or you don't have access to all the information you need. There are a lot of tips to navigate ambiguity. Here are a few to support your growth and path to success in this area:

• Be accepting of change.
• Assume best intent.
• Self-Awareness is key.
• Leverage your critical thinking.

By having continuous communication of your plans and progress, and asking questions, you can avoid additional ambiguity by keeping alignment with all stakeholders.

Secret #5 –Put your career plan into action.
You have your eye on that promotion and you are ready to move forward. But, now what? Three things you need to be aware of before you can act on your plan:

1. Have a plan – To put a plan into action, you need to have a plan. Write down your goals, timing of your expectations, and areas that you need to focus on for both soft skill and technical skill development. Having an actual plan will help hold you accountable.
2. Hold yourself accountable – In addition to having an actual plan, have an accountability partner that can help keep you on track. Make sure you are comfortable discussing your strengths with this person, but that you can also be vulnerable with about your weaknesses and areas for improvement.
3. Use data to prove your points – You can’t just say it is so and things will happen. You must prove your points by utilizing KPI (key performance indicators) and ROI (return on investment) metrics. Track the data to prove your successes and why you are deserving of more in your career.

Secret #6 – Create clear expectations.
To do this, you need to have ongoing, direct, and transparent conversations with your manager. Remember that each person’s career plan is unique, so don’t compare yourself to others. Create a plan and expectations that work for you and your goals. The expectations need to be openly discussed for you to be able to find success and exceed what is required of you to earn that next step in your career. Another area to consider is there are multiple variables that influence promotions, including the size of your organization, the success of a fiscal year, and the business need. Have patience, yet be persistent, as you work through those outside factors to reach your goals.

All these secret expectations are a part of a career spectrum. The need to master them gets stronger and they have more of an impact on your success and career as you advance. Focus on where you want to go and keep leveling up your skillset accordingly. As Amelia Earhart says, “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” You’ve got this, now go make it happen!

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