W-T-F…How I Became a Marketer in Less Than Six Months: A Deep Dive into Career Change, Taking Risks and Failing Fast

Disclaimer: This article is not sponsored by ChatGPT nor am I implying to use ChatGPT to do your work for you.

If you’ve been following along for a while now, you probably know I write. And I write A LOT, so much so I worked as a ghostwriter for a year.

And it was FUN for a while, and I am eternally grateful for the experience. But like with all things, we must evolve and adapt our skills…especially as darling ChatGPT is on the hunt for my job.

Jokes aside, I am now a marketer: no fancy marketing degree or even communications. Here I am, and in a management position too. 

But before I tell you how I got here, we must go allll the way back. So bear with me a little while I take you on a chaotic trip down memory lane.

Circa 2018

Ironically, before I commenced my poorly vetted opportunity as VP Marketing at an “entertainment-tech startup”, I was “seeing” a guy who had just quit his lucrative job to start his own marketing agency. I mean at that time, I didn’t know any better. “Hey, sounds fun, why not?” says a naive and supportive 19-year-old Naomi. I went to a couple of meetings with him, which consisted of him and a group of his high school friends who managed to chalk up a suit at that time. Yes, this was before wearing t-shirts was cool guys. I know…

Anyways, neither that relationship nor did that company work out—but maybe in my attempt to grasp onto whatever memory I had of him, I said a wholehearted “Yes”, when the founder of the poorly vetted startup asked me to be on the executive team.

I thought, “Why not? Sounds like a good summer job.”

And boy was I wrong….

I vowed to myself after the summer that felt like forever I would NEVER work for a startup again. No job was going to cost me my sanity. And I dismissed the idea of marketing in my mind, writing myself off as a “bad” marketer.

Here is the catch. 

Marketing—-which consists of so many things (SEO, PPC, Demand gen, social media..just to name a few) and different strategies requires 1. Strategy and 2. Execution and 3. Tracking.

You lack one of those things in the puzzle, and your marketing will fail.

Strategy is difficult, but fun because you get to test your different theories.

Execution is hard to comprehend, but easy after you have a roadmap.

Tracking seems easy, but can be hard because we are often limited or held back by our own biases. And rarely are results instantaneous or consistent, leading us back to square 1.

Let’s use social media as an example. Have you ever looked at an account with more than 100k followers and its perfectly manicured feed and wondered if they got there easily?

The answer is hell no.

You can have the best content in the world, but if you don’t know how to play the social media game, you will barely reach 10k.

My issue is that I HATE parts of the execution process. By that, I mean engagement, following up, liking, posting multiple times a day..etc. This is my weakness, which is why I’ve learned that it’s okay to outsource some things.

Of course, at 19 years old, I took these weaknesses as failures because I looked solely at the numbers. I couldn’t do both the strategy and execution simultaneously, and that today is still my biggest peril.

Today, I know better and understand where my strengths are. In fact, I think I got to where I am today by focusing solely on what I was good at… creating excellent content and strategy.

2022: That Time I Tried to Start my Own Agency

9 months ago, according to LinkedIn, I tried to start my own agency—-which now turned consultancy.

Why did I do that? 

I have absolutely no clue.

All I knew was that I was burned out and unhappy, so of course, the natural solution was to create more work for myself!

Anyways, the thought of getting a “real” job was daunting and so anxiety-provoking that it was easier for me to put my mind to work.

So with the wholesome support of my partner, ahem (who also happens to own a successful marketing agency), we built a website and tried to film a sales video (which will NEVER see the light of day), and started building out a roadmap to success.

I knew nothing about SEO and what I was getting myself into, but hey, when you’re stuck with you, yourself, and I for the entire day, you better get to work right?

My thought process was why make a $50-60k salary in an entire year when you can potentially make $20-30k/month from running an agency? The math was obvious but my motivations were completely wrong.

You see, unlike my partner, I am very uninterested in the art of making money. Which you can argue is a flaw, but it’s something that I learned to accept. So dangling the carrot of a potential payday lurking in the near future was not quite enough to make me go as hard as I should into this game.

During this time, I consumed a lot of content and I tried to test my luck with email automation. Oh my god, I didn’t even know what copywriting was, nor did I know how to do it properly. To this day, I still don’t know if my copywriting is adequate, but it seems to have gotten me somewhere right? ChatGPT to the rescue please!!

Anyways, long story short, being consistent with learning and content creation for my own startup was challenging, to say the least. It was painful at times—imagine learning a completely different language for the first time. That frustration inevitably came out during our initial sales calls, and when I look back, it was solely because I had the mindset of “why wasn’t this just easier?”

I was recovering from burning out and honest to god, just didn’t want to do the work it was going to involve to make this successful. And SEO is a LOT of grunt work and technical work, so if you’re not passionate about it at all, you’re going to have your ass handed to you.

Throughout this tumultuous learning path, what happened was this: I was slowly evolving from being a writer—to knowing about the intricacies of marketing and the buying process.

Marketing is not rocket science, it just takes experimentation. A lot of it. Every business is different and there’s no exact formula to success. The problem the majority of companies face is how much they should invest in marketing and how they can guarantee ROI. As I mentioned before, what a lot of marketing companies do is sprinkle a little bit of effort into multiple areas. However, it is sometimes difficult to measure direct ROI if your goal is brand awareness. Brand awareness, like posting more frequently on social media, doesn’t result in immediate conversions. Needless to say, companies need to gain clarity on exactly what their objective is for the stage their company is in, and then develop clear metrics around those results. For example, for later-stage companies, the goal might be to become a household brand. This means more brand awareness, but perhaps fewer direct conversions. For earlier-stage companies, they may just want to get as many conversions as possible to guarantee profit right off the bat. You can’t fail at marketing unless you know what metrics you’re basing your analysis of failure on.

Marketing is psychology. You probably can deduce strategies fairly quickly from what you see working online and basic human nature. High-value brands benefit from exclusivity—think luxury brands like Hermes and Ferrari; not just anyone can buy them, which makes them all that more valuable. In fact, I would argue I knew a fair amount about internal linking, how to structure blogs, and marketing copy, far before I knew what SEO and copy even meant. I was using these techniques in high school to pull off vegan fundraisers, club events, and my short stint at running a customized mug business.

But it’s about what you can do with this data that will really differentiate you from being an average marketer to a good one. Look, I can probably write a book on marketing if I had to, but it doesn’t mean at all I know what I’m doing. Good marketers learn by failing. Except, this is a hard pill to swallow because marketing comes with real costs— and you never want to waste a dime of your client’s money.

Luckily, marketing is also pretty forgiving. The more content you put out Into the sphere, the more chances of it gaining traction through time or on a different platform. I’ll give you an example, one of my accounts on Instagram has only received 11,000 impressions this month. Conversely, simply reposting on Pinterest has generated a whopping 86,000+ impressions. That’s 8x more impressions by simply switching to a different platform. These numbers are small, but it’s the relativity of those two numbers that I’m getting at.

Anyways… what is the point of this story?

You came here to learn about how I became a marketer. Here is the truth.

It boils down to these things.

Luck

Interest

Effort

Taking a risk

🍀 Luck

I got lucky several times throughout my short-lived career, and although my “yes” personality often gets me in trouble, it’s also taught me a lot of hard lessons so I don’t regret it. Every painful experience has led to growth and resilience. 

Truthfully, I signed on to my role as a content creator, but it just so happened that content creation and marketing have a lot of parallels (so what would you know?). I got promoted in record time because of my efficiency and ability to think strategically and innovatively, something I think the company was looking for. Also, my manager at the time, declared his departure a month into my being at the company, so I succeeded him in the role.

I will always say I got lucky, but then luck itself doesn’t do the job. I full-heartedly put in the work and effort to the opportunities that come on my plate.

💡 Interest

I love visual creation, content writing, and big thinking. I’m even starting to like analytics which is crucial for marketing. I want to go where the moon goes, and whatever job allows me to do that, I’m a happy gal.

👩‍💻 Effort

I mentioned this before but I practically attempted to train myself on another discipline for six months+ straight, every single day. Monday to Friday, I’d consume content, write content, and work on email automation and lead gen. Saturday and Sunday I would create graphics and copy for social media. And out of all things I could create content on, I chose the one industry that I perceived I had a weakness in, technology, and not just technology, software products. Was it goddamn painful at times? Yes. Do I regret it now? No.

🔥 Taking a risk

Frankly, I was unsure of taking on the job, it was kind of a whirlwind moment, and you know what they say, “nothing’s too good to be true.” But despite my initial hesitation, there is one important thing I learned through this job.

1. I am extremely capable. 
2. You absolutely do not need to excel at every little thing in life— I certainly don’t, and in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter.
3. Trust and respect in the workspace exist. Good culture exists. It’s not a distant fantasy!

Final words

If you’re feeling stuck in a career or maybe you haven’t quite started yet, here is my advice. Start somewhere. Indecisiveness is a silent killer. And do something you may have not exactly thought of doing but is still intriguing for you. Despite the numerous jobs I’ve hated throughout the years (retail, hospitality, accounting..) I always took away at least one thing I enjoyed from it. Think of career building like layering a cake. None of us start out as a voluminous and decadent cake. But the more layers we start adding, different flavorings, whipped cream..etc, the more delicious and substantial the cake becomes.

It’s very rare you’re going to get your dream career right off the bat, so in the meantime, find somewhere you can dedicate your time to learn and focus on learning new skills. These new skills can always help you evolve into the role you want to eventually have. And don’t be afraid to put in extra hours toward your hobbies and passions. 

If you think about your career and your life as different baskets, make sure you’re consistently investing in different baskets. It gives you a safety net in case something doesn’t work out.

For example, if neither my writing nor my marketing career worked out for some reason,  I could technically attempt to tutor full-time and still make a decent salary. I’ve been investing in my ability to teach others, so many one day I can apply those skills elsewhere.

Having a variety of things you dabble in also helps keep your life more interesting, and less monotonous. I truly believe you’ve “made it” not for the position you have, or the amount of money you make, but it’s when what you do every day and your job description, reflect your deepest interests and desires. That’s when you found your dream career.

And on that note, to my fellow career buildings or aspirers, I wish you the best of luck on this journey. And remember, you have a lifetime to achieve all the things you want to. Don’t let the fear of the unknown prevent you from starting.