The Marketing Career Advice That Actually Changed How I Work

Someone asked me recently what marketing career advice I would give to somebody three years in.

I had to think about it, because almost all the advice I was given early was generic. Network more. Build a personal brand. Learn to code.

Four things actually changed how I work. Here they are.

"Own the Outcome, Not the Deliverable"

A manager told me this when I was proud of a campaign that had shipped on time and done nothing.

I had built exactly what was asked for. The landing page was good. The ads were approved. Nobody bought anything, and my position was that the offer was the problem.

He pointed out that the offer being bad was information I had two weeks before launch and chose not to escalate.

This took me about a year to fully absorb. Owning the outcome means you raise the problem even when the problem is not in your lane, and especially when raising it makes the timeline worse.

It is the single biggest difference between marketers who get trusted with budget and marketers who do not.

"Learn What Things Cost"

Most marketers can tell you what a campaign performed. Far fewer can tell you what it cost to produce, what the gross margin on the product is, or what the business needs a customer to be worth.

I started asking clients for margin before I would build a funnel. It changed every recommendation I made.

A 3x return on ad spend is fantastic on a 70% margin product and a slow death on a 25% margin one. You cannot advise anybody without that number.

This is most of what separates a marketing manager from a fractional CMO. One optimizes a channel. The other knows whether the channel should exist.

"Write Every Week, Publicly"

I resisted this one for years because I thought I had nothing new to say.

The value turned out to have nothing to do with the audience. Writing weekly forces you to finish thoughts. You find out which of your opinions collapse when you try to defend them in public.

Half the frameworks I use with clients now exist because I had to explain them in a blog post first and discovered the version in my head was incoherent.

The audience came eventually and it was the smaller benefit.

"Get Close to the Money"

Early on I optimized for interesting work. Brand campaigns, creative projects, the stuff that looks good in a portfolio.

The advice was to spend at least part of my time on the work closest to revenue. Sales pages, lead flows, the ugly spreadsheet where deals actually get counted.

It is less fun and it is where you learn whether any of this works. It also makes you much harder to cut, because you can point at a number.

I still do the creative work. I just do not do only the creative work anymore.

The Advice I Ignore Now

Build a personal brand. This gets pushed constantly and it is downstream of having something to say. The people I know with real audiences got them by doing work and talking about it, not by deciding to have an audience.

Learn to code. Useful, and not the leverage point people claim. Learning what things cost was worth ten times more to my career than learning JavaScript, and I use JavaScript regularly.

Follow your passion. Follow the problem you find interesting when it is boring. Passion shows up after competence more often than before it.

What I Would Tell Someone Three Years In

Pick the least glamorous part of your company's marketing and become the person who understands it completely. Lifecycle email, the CRM data, the checkout flow, whatever nobody wants.

You will be the only person in the room who can explain why the number moved. That is the whole job.

The industry keeps changing faster than most people can track, which I wrote about in why marketing is changing faster than most businesses can keep up. The skills that transfer across those changes are judgment and business literacy. Tools do not transfer.

For a broader view of where marketing roles are heading, the American Marketing Association publishes reasonable research on it.

What Skills Actually Transfer Between Marketing Jobs?

Judgment about which problem to solve, business literacy, and the ability to write clearly. Those three transfer across every platform change, every tool migration, and every job I have had. Platform certifications and tool expertise do not transfer, and they expire faster than most people expect.

This is not an argument against learning tools. You need current tool skills to be employable right now. It is an argument about where to spend your marginal hour once you are competent, and the answer is almost always the durable three.

Writing clearly is the most underrated of the three. Most marketing work is persuading somebody internally to fund something, and that happens in a document. I have watched better strategists lose to worse strategists who wrote better memos.

The practical version: for every certification you earn, write one internal analysis that somebody senior reads. The second one does more for your trajectory and it does not appear on any job description.

What is the piece of career advice you were given that turned out to be wrong? Those are usually more interesting than the ones that worked.