7 Lessons to Unleash Your Marketing Potential at Work

Exploring how you can you can unleash your marketing potential is the difference between being a good marketer or a great marketer.

Learning is fundamental to your own improvement, but the advice you receive can sometimes be biased or hard to apply. Because of that, we’ve created an objective, practical list that can help you on your journey to unleashing your full potential.

Innovation – Use Technology That Allows You to Flourish

Technology can help you to become a better marketer in lots of ways; it all depends on just how you want to flourish:

• Do you need a tool that’ll free up time so you can take a course?
• Do you need a tool to unlock your creativity, so that you can create better marketing collateral?
• Do you need a tool to help you with budgeting?

If you’re struggling to determine what type of technological helping hand you need, ask yourself a few questions:

• Would this technology help me achieve any of my goals?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of using it?
• Would it improve my skills?
• Would I learn something new?
• Is implementation realistic?
• Do we have a budget for it?

The last thing you want is to see a solution implemented that becomes a problem – that’ll hinder both your personal and professional growth (and the growth of others). Here are some actionable tips:

• Short-term – start researching software and conduct (or encourage!) a current systems analysis.
• Medium-term – develop and deliver a proposal.
• Long-term – prepare yourself and your team for implementation.

Trust – Interact With Different Departments

You can easily get so lost in your department that you forget there are other departments. Interacting with different departments can have more than one benefit:

• It improves your social skills (and your popularity!) within your organization. 
• You’ll pick up new ideas and points of view that are different from yours.
• You can get tips from others about how to improve your work.
• You can become a trusted ally to your colleagues.
• You’ll help to extinguish conflicts before they spread.

Here are 6 tips for connecting with other teams:

• Understand their challenges and limitations.
• Suggest cross-departmental meetings.
• Avoid speaking in jargon.
• Make a positive contribution to their projects.
• Celebrate their wins.
• Ask for feedback.

Self-Promotion – Market Yourself

Everyone wants to be seen as an attractive or magnetic proposition. It’s natural. But how many of us self-promote enough to actively encourage this? Self-promotion isn’t the same as boasting; nobody wants to hear someone shout their latest and greatest achievement across the room.

You’re marketing the company you work for – but are you marketing yourself? There are 4 benefits of self-promotion:

• People will gravitate towards you because of your positive energy.
• You’ll increase your chances of connecting with the right people internally and externally.
• Your ideas will manifest through collaboration.
• Your reputation will improve.

Here are 3 practical tips for self-promotion:

1. Help People

You could use this tip on its own and you’d nail your personal marketing campaign. People love helpful people – whether you helped them book a holiday or solve a complex problem, always be ready to lend a hand.

2. Promote Others

If you want recognition for the work you’ve done, you need to recognize the people within your organization. Tell your clients how good your fellow Content Writer is, or your Marketing Manager how good your colleagues are.

3. Be Authentic

We are drawn towards genuine, honest people; they make us feel safe and we always know we can trust them. Simple things like being confidential with information or giving honest, constructive feedback will always be appealing.

We all know we have to self-promote in some form, but we often get it wrong.

Here are 5 things you shouldn’t do when you’re self-promoting:

• Depreciate others to make yourself look better.
• Focus all the attention on yourself.
• Brag.
• Exaggerate.
• Be economical with the truth.

Understanding – Know Your Colleagues

Everyone wants to be understood.  Your marketing manager wants you to understand why they made that particular decision on a project. Your designer colleague wants you to understand that he’d rather you didn’t give feedback in front of the team. Understand what motivates everyone, what demotivates them, or what they like and dislike doing. This will enable you to:

• Gain the trust of your colleagues.
• Build confidence.
• Lessen the risk of isolation.
• Foster healthy relationships.
• Allow people to be vulnerable.
• Make people feel like you aren’t judging them.

Your colleagues hold the key to success, so you need to build strong bonds with them. If you want to make everyone feel understood, try the following:

Ask Thoughtful Questions

Next time a problem arises, even if you don’t think it’s your fault, instead of asking why this happened, ask if there is anything you could have done to prevent this from happening. The first option immediately puts a person on the defensive because there’s no real attempt to understand. The second doesn’t hand out any blame, and if the person being asked is to blame, they’re more likely to accept it. It’s natural to make mistakes, we’re human. Learning through our experiences can help turn a negative into a positive and is a great way to improve and develop.

Understand Everyone’s Strengths and Weaknesses

If you understand everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, you’ll be able to get the best results for any project. You’ll also be able to give better feedback on what people do well and what they need to improve. Plus, you can go to them with tasks they actually enjoy doing, which will make them feel like you value their expertise.

Empowerment – Listen to Your Colleagues

Once you know the destination, you need to get there. Everyone in the team is going to help you navigate through problems with their tools and expertise. If you listen to people’s suggestions then you can reap these 5 rewards:

• More growth and innovation.
• Better colleague engagement.
• Increased initiative.
• Determining the best action (negotiation, encouragement, etc).
• Contribute to increased staff retention.

Remember, it’s not enough to just listen, you have to act positively as well. You can use this simple formula to show people that you’ve listened to them:

• Ask people what they want to talk about.
• Provide feedback (compromise, encourage).
• Create actions for both of you.

Decision Making & Problem-Solving – Know When to Use Logic and Intuition

You have to make plenty of decisions at work and help solve various problems – but how do you maximize your chances of making the correct decision? Sometimes, it feels like it’s impossible to make a choice, regardless of whether it’s based on data or a hunch. If you can analyze problems, you can make better decisions by using a combination of intuition and logic.

For example, logic would mean basing a new product on the feedback from the latest version. Intuition would mean basing a new product on the fact that you think it’ll disrupt the market. The fact is – both data and hunches can get results.

Here are 6 tips for thinking logically:

• Organize information so it’s easier to analyze.
• Give reasons for your opinion and consider other outcomes.
• Present data to back up your claims.
• Identify assumptions.
• Evaluate all arguments.
• Conclude.

Here are 6 tips for thinking intuitively:

• Pay attention to your first impulse when you have to make a decision.
• Identify when your intuition misleads you.
• Don’t confuse wanting an outcome with intuition.
• Add some excitement to decision-making.
• Ask for an expert’s intuition.
• Detect unproductive systems or patterns.

Reflection – Continue to Evolve in Your Position

Reflect and improve: that’s what all the greatest marketers do! Taking the time to reflect puts you in a better position to understand your strengths and weaknesses, as well as identify where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. Here are 3 benefits of practicing self-reflection:

• Improved emotional self-awareness – once you start to understand yourself, you’ll know how to react in different situations.
• Integrity – you know what your core values are, which means you can stick to them and they’ll drive you forward every day.
• Improved analytical skills – it’s easy to be busy moving from task to task and forget to stop and think about what you’ve done. Reflection forces you to analyse and can result in new ideas bubbling to the surface.

Sometimes, reflection can sound a bit abstract, though. Just how do you do reflection?

It’s a lot easier than it sounds. Here are 4 simple steps:

• Find out why you’re self-reflecting – for example, you’ve got a review coming up and you want to reflect on your work.
• Find a quiet place – you can’t self-reflect on the train home, you need a comfortable, distraction-free area.
• Self-reflect – talk to yourself, write a self-reflection letter, do a breathing exercise, meditate. Whatever it takes to get information from your brain into something tangible.
• Act – create a list of tasks that you need to complete to make your self-reflection session as beneficial as possible.

Are you ready to continue your evolution and unleash your full marketing potential? Here are the 7 lessons we’ve covered in this article:

1. Innovation – Use Technology That Allows You to Flourish
2. Trust – Interact With Different Departments
3. Self-Promotion – Market Yourself
4. Understanding – Know Your Colleagues
5. Empowerment – Listen to Your Colleagues
6. Decision Making & Problem-Solving – Know When to Use Logic and Intuition
7. Reflection – Continue to Evolve in Your Position

Remember, everyone is different – if you’re struggling, use the self-reflection exercise to determine which areas of improvement would bring about the most benefit.

The post 7 Lessons to Unleash Your Marketing Potential at Work appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog – Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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