When you work with marketing – and probably true also for many other fields – a lot happens behind the scenes. It can be difficult for others to understand what’s the value of marketing or what does it even entail. After many years of being active in the field of marketing I still struggle sometimes with explaining what is it exactly that I do. It doesn’t help that same titles can mean completely different assignments.
So lately I have been writing down what I do during the day – big or small. Probably not everything has gotten written down but in my case it is definitely not a job that works for routine lovers who like knowing exactly what is coming in the next days, weeks and months. Instead I probably don’t know what happens the next day. Sure, there are days with 6 booked meetings and some regular assignments but in a role like mine where I support marketers and field force members from seven countries, no day is the same and the portion of unplanned is high. It can be anything from giving strategic marketing advice to digging into consent data and laws regulating personal data processing; from hands-on creating an email to discussing business processes and how to track that our marketing efforts are paying off. I don’t mind jumping from one task to another usually. But last week when I had a day where I had worked on 18 different things before lunch and that didn’t even feel like a stressful day, I thought that maybe this kind of a job isn’t for everybody. Perhaps though it would be interesting for others as well to get a glimpse of what I do.
Here’s what I did that day:
- Reviewing emails 15 min
- Helping a colleague with understanding the nuances of registering an event in CRM and sharing tips 20 min
- Checking with CRM support that event attendees were loaded correctly, reporting issues and reviewing corrections 10 min
- Discussing with data support team how to diagnose what caused surrealistic growth numbers for opt-ins 15 min
- Discussing with marketing automation software support why we seem to default to a not email-safe font in our email builder 20 min
- Helping a field force member to understand why one customer doesn’t seem to have email opt-in anymore 15 min
- Putting in a support request to customer data platform owner regarding some email engagement data not showing up as expected after discovering strange behaviour 5 min
- Helping a marketing colleague understand their local email engagement data 10 min
- Guiding a brand manager about how to update key messages and its implications 10 min
- Reviewing emails regarding ongoing projects 5 min
- Checking in on a project that looks like it might be derailed 5 min
- Tried to calm down a new marketing colleague about images not showing up in emails for customers 20 min
- Working on data request definition to further investigate problem with opt-ins spike 10 min
- Giving feedback on a project 5 min
- Monthly catch-up with our dedicated digital marketing agency leadership 30 min
- Had an improvement idea for our email creation tool and shared with team in charge of tool development 10 min
- Proposing a solution for removing wrongly processed opt-ins. First steps 3 min
- Continued discussion how to improve the rate of our emails reaching customers 3 min
- Lunch
- Looked into a customer whose opt-in didn’t seem to get processed as it should 5 min
- Meeting with HR 25 min
- Onsite search optimization training 30 min
- Training a colleague on how to download new customers 5 min
- Meeting with country marketer to discuss issues with a service provider 1:10h
There was probably something else in the afternoon because I remember running late to pick up my kids but you get the idea.
How does it compare to your work? Does it look like something you would like to do as well? I enjoy the variety that my job offers as well as being able to help people and pass on some of the knowledge I have gained over the years.