Theories on the Job & Your Future - A Message to Undergraduates

Editor's Notes

1. It’s called THEORIES ON THE JOB AND YOUR FUTURE because you’re essentially in college to get a job. Since I am here lecturing you, I need to help you get that job done. There’s nothing more useful to you right now than getting a job. The sooner you find the direction you want your life to take, the sooner you’ll feel that sense of fulfillment when you wake up. Lots of you probably know the feeling of waking up and not wanting to get out of bed: exams and things like that. But you probably also know the feeling of vacation and spring break, where you can barely go to sleep because you’re excited. The goal is to make that the way you feel as often as possible. Theories. Why should you care about theories? They provide a lens to view your problems through. A lens clears up your vision. Nothing is more useful in my day-to-day than the theories I’ve learned over the past 7 years. I want you to leave here feeling that you can implement a strategy to help you get that job and then navigate your career to make it what you want it to be. I’ll be dropping in PPC and Analytics knowledge here are there as example--this isn’t job training. NEED A VOLUNTEER: Imagine where you want to be in five years: How old will you be Job title? What kind of projects are you working on? Salary? Do you own a home? Do you have kids? Do you have a dog? How likely are you to reach that if you live your life as you woke up today? Why? Why not? Now what are the things that you can do over the next 6 months to make that happen? Learn a skill Work a part-time job to get work experience Start writing or creating more Try and build some websites A great way trick used by addicts to make or break habits is to visualize your future self or your default self. I suggest using this as you go through your career. You’ll notice that when you do something that counteracts your long-term goals, you’ll say things like “it’s just one…”--marginal cost thinking is bad for good habits!
2. -Experience that has led me to where I am (marketing degree -> non-marketing job -> in-house -> freelance -> agency -> freelance -> consulting) -Don’t be afraid to ask me about anything work-related. I spend way too much time thinking about the things that you’re going to go through so let me be your shortcut. -I’m going to stop every few slides to ask for questions, but let me know if I use terminology you don’t understand yet. Half of what I say may be greek to you, so I need you to let me know!
3. The best way to create a ton of value and be in-demand is to become an expert at anything. It doesn’t even matter if it’s not in-demand. That means more job offers, higher pay, & a greater feeling of fulfillment IMPORTANT: There’s rarely a wrong thing to specialize in. It’s good to be ahead of the curve but in reality most people don’t even realize there’s a curve, or they’re looking at the wrong curve, so you’ll be fine. When I say value, in-demand, & fulfilling, it’s important to know that, although money doesn’t cure unhappiness, you’ll be taken care of. So here’s my roadmap.
4. “Smartest” is really a way to describe the person you will learn the most from. Some smart people suck at teaching and managing. Skip them if you can. Jeff Garton helped me see the power of Reporting, among many other things I tried to make a PPC Report and couldn’t do it because I didn’t have the expertise. Jeff created one after I said I couldn’t do it. I inspected what he did and learned from it. I started to run the report & build other reports on top of it. Naturally from reporting on the campaigns I was able to start managing and running them in AdWords In this case, I gave the report an honest shot and just didn’t get it. Jeff knew that I had delivered on just about everything else so he wasn’t super upset about it. True sign of someone who gets it. He was the “smartest” person I could have hoped for. HOW TO LEARN: get your hands on an AdWords account as soon as possible. Non-profits get free advertising dollars from Google, up to $10k/month (https://www.google.com/grants/how-it-works/). Offer to manage one for free or for $200/month. AdWords has training documents available for free too, so you can take exams to test your knowledge. I hear you’ve already done this. So just email Marketing Managers at non-profits. Learning that most people do x and special people do 10x is incredible to understand. All of you are smart enough to do just enough and make a living. But all of you also have the opportunity to work at the highest level. Make more money, get better clients, work on things you really care about. Work for the smartest people you can find to give yourself the best shot. Don’t mimic what they do exactly. Instead, try and understand why they make decisions the way they do. That bring us back to theories and why they’re important. For example, all reports are different. I had to learn why we measured metrics like CPA and Conversion Rate for our AdWords campaigns. Figuring out which how we identified things as profitable or not helped me develop the skills to bring that to other clients. TACTIC (which I guarantee 90% of you won’t do): Think of the 5-10 smartest people you know right now. Ask your family. Ask your friends. Reach out to them and tell them you’re looking to learn about how they got to where they are. Start the speakers in this class that you identify with. You’ll find out about companies and people that are doing cool work.
5. Identify a non-profit Look at their service offerings Mock up a campaign in the Tampa Bay area that targets 5 keywords per service offering Contact them and tell them they can get free advertising and you want: Experience Contribute to their mission with your time Make campaign! Add to resume What keywords are you sensing right off the bat? How about for each audience? Forget keywords, think of your parents or yourself as parents. If you or your child was getting bullied, what would you ask Google? How can we group those together into ad groups? What negative keywords should we use?
6. Part of what got me the job with Jeff was that I had run an AdWords campaign at my previous job without telling anyone. I got a free voucher and just did it. That allowed me to talk about some basics with him and also showed my initiative to push ahead. Later, Jeff would tell me that he couldn’t pass projects to the old marketing coordinator. He felt like he could do that with me. It made me feel really good that he could trust me with those projects. After I had taken over the marketing and we had hired some people to take some off my plate, I wanted to do client work. I had heard about freelancing, hit up some friends to ask about it, and eventually landed a client making an AdWords account. I did way too much work and charged way too little (10+ hours, $150) He did get two clients in the first two months from it (worth like $4500 to him) I had “freelance experience” now! TACTIC: Figure out what you want to try first and do it 10x--preferably for someone else. Writer? Write 10 blog posts about each of these lectures. Creative? Recreate 10 logos for each of your favorite brands. Figure out if you enjoy it, even if it is a struggle at first.
7. Three years of AdWords experience essentially makes you an expert. If you do something specific like this for three years, even part-time, you will be too. Being an expert isn’t about knowing 100% of a topic. It’s about knowing more than 95% of everyone else. I still learn new things all the time. Fast forward two years: I started to notice that ads on social networks were becoming more in-demand. I ran some campaigns for clients to try it out. That's not 50% of my business and I kill it. I don't have enough time to take on all the work that I have coming in. It was only made possible by understanding how to manage AdWords, how to work in Excel and run reports, & applying that knowledge to a new area. That’s why there’s no wrong speciality. You can always apply your learning to different areas of expertise. There’s this idea that we either have a fixed vs. a growth mindset. I’d recommend learning more about it You can look at your internship as unrelated to your next job, or you can find threads to connect them. You just have to find them yourself. You probably think that translates very easily, doing PPC on AdWords and then Facebook. Now 50% of my business is operational consulting--I organize teams and fix broken marketing programs at a very basic level. It’s incredibly interesting: I get to build a process that is 4x more effective at shipping and grew our sales 2.5x MoM and YoY last month. You’ll often pick up skills while you learn the thing you dig deep on. I never thought I was interested in ops but now I see it.
8. I have done local SEO, blogging, social media management, account management, employee training, payroll...you name it. I actually didn’t like PPC for a while--I just didn’t see it as fun. Just try some stuff, use the scientific method. Hypothesize what you will like, try it. Look back every 3 months and think about if you are happier now than before. If not, switch some things up. ACTION ITEM: Write down 1 thing to stop doing from the last 3 months and 1 thing to start doing over the next 3 months This is the fundamental element of any successful team, advertising or otherwise, their ability to stop doing shit work and start trying to do better work Getting interested in Google Analytics: I immediately found GA amazing. Does anyone know what GA is? I saw the data and knew this was valuable. Where do customers come from? What destinations are they booking? How much revenue are they generating. As much time as I could spare, I would poke around and see what I could find. Seeing data from 1 million visitors/month is compelling. You can access a demo account and learn just like I did, for free: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342?hl=en#access TACTIC: Identify 2 subjects that sound interesting. As broad as data and as narrow as restaurant logos. More on how to dig deep next.
9. Again, I learned from the smart people around me. I also learned from the free info from other marketers. Learning is actually really simple: read or watch things to learn and then make sure you try and implement them. Otherwise, in one ear and out the other. Much like this presentation. If you were to follow all of my tactics and suggestions, as well as deriving 2-3 action items of your own, you’d be 10x more likely to fulfill your short-term desires. No doubt in my mind. TACTIC: Find someone you like, follow them on Twitter & sign up for their email list. See next couple slides for my recommendations.
10. TACTIC: Also look at people they follow on Twitter. Look at people I follow/retweet on Twitter. (https://twitter.com/everythingswan) Most people have YouTube videos, blog posts, books, or podcasts. Figure out how you learn and look for that format to make is easier. You can piece together an incredible amount from the free stuff that people give out. If you learn one new thing every day, you’re just keeping up with everyone else. If you want that ideal lifestyle, you need to do a little bit more. With GA, I started to learn about in-depth metrics. You’ll need to know these wherever you work. Customer Path: You can see all of the touch points of a customer from their first touchpoint through their transaction How many people are using the promo code we mailed out? Do radio ads in a new region drive more people to our site? What channels are sending us high quality vs low quality customers? I used some basics on a daily basis, like CTR & CPA, and then just learned the rest as I went along. HOW TO LEARN: Google Analytics Academy. https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/ You don’t have to be a data scientist to know how to do some basic analysis. It can get overwhelming. Always ask yourself the two golden questions What are we trying to achieve? How will we know if we’ve achieved it? Lots of you will go into agencies where people will talk about media impressions or site visits and those don’t answer too many questions very well. You want to answer specific questions, like how many people took the desired action from our ad? How many people called us in the area where we are running our new ads? Eventually he left the company and I just took over his responsibilities. He was VP of Marketing and we never hired anyone to fill his role. Sounds awesome but I wanted to die for about 5 months. When you’re put under pressure, you feel like you’re going to crack...but after enough time and enough pressure, out pops a diamond. If I hadn’t constantly been learning new things that made me uncomfortable, they would have hired someone over me
11. You accelerate your learning by surrounding yourself with smart people--even if you don’t work directly for them. There’s also a powerful network effect where smart people are naturally friends with smart people and lazy people seem to find lazy people. Your ideal life probably has friends and family that are supportive of you and business friends at the place you work. There’s a tendency to not give away any cool info because you’re directly or indirectly competing with each other for jobs. Your career is a battle against each other. With a purely capitalist lense, you would think that you should try and crush each other, but that’s not a good strategy. It’s easier to be true to your values 100% of the time as opposed to 98% of the time. The things that you need to understand is that: there is a surplus of work to do and a shortage of capable people to do it AND you can create more value as a collective than as an individual (why agencies exist). So forge the relationships with people that you find interesting and that you want to hang out with. It’s not about only getting business from them, some of these relationships are more like having a good friend who knows what you’re going through. I learned about how deep my buddy Hyde got into social this way. This level of expertise by some ppl on Pinterest still blows my mind. I learned about how intense and powerful technical SEO can be from Brian & Matt I learned about how to make sure you’re viewed as valuable to clients from Leslie TACTIC: Start growing your close network right now. Talk to someone in one of your classes about grabbing coffee 1x to talk about things that you’re learning. If you take 4 hours to research PPC Ads and 4 of your friends all research something that they’re interested in, you can accelerate your knowledge in all of those 4 other areas in an hour. That’s a network effect. Reach out to one of the mentors that you identified with most--only 2 of you will actually do this and it’s the easiest intro ever. Knowledge compounds! It’s like earning interest, except financial interest compounds at 5% and your knowledge can grow at 100% every 3 months, especially at the start. Marketing & Advertising is like dog years in professional life.
12. Thinking about Your Ideal Life, start making those decisions today to make the life you want to live. You’re much more likely to regret the things you don’t start than the ones you do. No one regrets being in shape. No one regrets knowing more than they did yesterday. No one regrets spending time with people they love. No one regrets having a dope life and doing dope shit.
13. Anyone interested in growth hacking or high-level digital marketing? A team of engineers, designers, & analysts were largely responsible for Facebook’s growth You will find this compelling if: You have ever looked at football/baseball statistics and found them interesting You found your intro psychology and sociology interesting
14. https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/airbnb
15. https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/linkedin
16. Don’t be afraid to email me if you have questions related to anything I talked about. Happy to answer them.