It’s been over 10 years since I closed the chapter on my undergrad marketing studies at the University of Denver. Whether it was serendipity or plain luck, shortly after graduating I landed an internship in Lake Tahoe working for a company that was noticing a new sector emerging in marketing: Search engine optimization and social media management to help businesses get more website traffic. This brave little company was on the crest of a wave of modern marketing and I was lucky enough to learn how to paddle in with them.
I still felt like a student.
Several awesome companies and roles later, I found myself standing in front of my own university-level class, as the teacher.
Earlier this year, BCIT and the team behind its satellite campus, the “Whistler Learning Centre” recruited me to curate a mixture of traditional marketing theory and current digital marketing techniques. Honoured and intimidated all at once, I poured over the construction of my dream curriculum for digital marketing. Our class was chock-full of lively discussion, brain-stretching questions and what my colleague often describes as “growth opportunities”.
A couple of big hairy questions came up as recurring themes during the course that I think every marketer should hold a mirror up to and look at regularly.
Am I applying too much of my own bias to my business’s marketing?
Probably. Create marketing personas at the start of your journey to understanding your customer. As your marketing matures into digital channels offer up the segmentation to machine learning in areas like Facebook/Instagram ads or Search and Display.
More reading: Avoiding Psychological Bias in Decision Making
Am I still reading about what’s current?
I’ll admit it. I was hitting delete and snooze repeatedly on my go-to marketing news outlets until recently. When I used to work on a larger marketing team I used to spend the first 15 minutes of my mornings reading about current trends to see what we could take advantage of in our marketing. Prepping for this course has reminded me, there’s still plenty more to learn about our field.
What am I measuring?
It’s really easy to get lost in the weeds of vanity metrics like “Clicks”, “Shares” and “Followers”. Just because our profession has merged with the web doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to solve for profit with every marketing campaign. Figure out your KPIs and get cozy with Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Guide for Beginners
Want to join me for an upcoming course? Drop me a note, let’s chat!
