In this issue: How do you move your marketing career up faster? By managing it just as you would manage a marketing campaign. Experiment and get outside your Comfort Zone to maximize your Return on Marketing Career (RoMC).

Experience

A team member at the media performance agency I run asked me the other day, “If I follow and execute – to the best of my ability – what my VP is asking me to deliver on, will I stand out from my peers? Am I going to get faster promotions?”

Here’s my answer. “To accelerate your career, you need to do more than what you’re currently paid for.”

If we want to Move Up Faster in our marketing career, it is not enough simply to ‘do our job’. We have to go further than that.

Reflection

Since this newsletter is aimed squarely at marketers, and I am completely and unapologetically a marketer at heart, I will unpack the above answer using a marketing analogy:

Manage your marketing career just as you would manage a marketing campaign.

This is the absolute foundation of what I believe. We should manage our career in marketing in exactly the same way as we manage any marketing campaign we’re responsible for. This is the backbone concept, the key idea, behind this and all the future issues of this newsletter.

In other words, how you would maximize Return on Advertising Spend (RoAS) is the same way you should maximize Return on Marketing Career (RoMC):

Let’s drive the point home. Imagine that you’re running a paid search program in Google Ads. There is an input – a media budget. That’s your investment or cost. And there’s an output – revenue. That’s your value. If you divide one by the other, that’s your RoAS:

But also imagine that you set the campaign up a year ago and you haven’t changed it since. How well is it performing today?

I’m pretty sure your RoAS will almost certainly have decreased because the revenue side of the equation will have declined. Because you haven’t changed anything, while your competitors have made their campaigns work harder and harder:

Obviously, there’s a better way to run this campaign. (Remember, this is your marketing career we’re talking about, RoAS is just an analogy.)

You should be getting outside your Comfort Zone and experimenting. You have to exert extra effort and energy to do it, which is why that’s on the cost side of this equation. Getting outside your Comfort Zone and pushing for innovation and constant changes will be costing you something:

When you get outside your Comfort Zone and experiment, the intangible Value you add, or your knowledge and skill-set (both in the context of a marketing campaign or your career) will grow:

When you know more, and when your skill-set grows (about how to use tools, work with people, communicate ideas, etc), you become more efficient and effective. Your impact increases, within the context of your role. (Or, just as it would if you were managing a Google Ads campaign, the tangible revenue will grow faster):

That’s good news. If your impact is higher – because you know more and you can deliver more Value within your role, working with your team, for the customer, and for the firm – it will be much easier for you to make a case to your manager to consider you for a raise or a promotion. (Or, within a context of our hypothetical Google Ads campaign, to increase the budget allocated, since the RoAS is growing):

To summarize, RoAS = Return on Marketing Career (RoMC). As a marketer, if you want to move up faster, you must generate more Value for your team, the customer and the company that pays your salary.

How do you create more Value, and get to the things that you want? With this RoMC framework:

There are four steps to this process:

Step 1. Get out of your Comfort Zone as much as possible, even if that scares you because it’s new.

Step 2. Doing new things will increase your professional skill-set. That’s the only way to learn.

Step 3. A broader or deeper skill-set will increase your Value to your manager, your team, your firm and your clients.

Step 4. The higher Value you deliver in your role – now that you have a bigger skill-set – the sooner you should get a raise, or a promotion.

References

Way back in 1908, two academics called Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson developed the Yerkes-Dodson law. This states that our efficiency at certain tasks increases as our arousal or stress level increases (and vice versa).

So we can be more effective – and add more Value – if we do stuff that makes us stressed or aroused while we do it, i.e. tasks or processes that make us feel uncomfortable or that take us outside our Comfort Zone.

Now I’m not saying that we all need to make ourselves constantly more stressed in order to perform better. But it’s clearly true that if we just keep on repeating the same actions, then we’re going to achieve less and less. That’s how the law of diminishing returns works.

Psychologist Marco van Gelderen explains the effects of the Comfort Zone:

So staying in your Comfort Zone is the opposite of adding Value. If you want to add Value, you have to get out of it.

If you’d like to discuss your career journey with me one-to-one, please feel free to email me at Greg@moveupfaster.me or message me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.

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