The Life of a Digital Marketer

You have the same story as I do. Anything you do as a marketer for a brand is in the service of putting out content that is strategically (cough) developed to drive awareness for the brand and its products, eventually driving sales that puts a smile on everybody’s face.

So you put your heart and soul in orchestrating the written and visual communication that requires hours and hours of restless research in order to get the words and the images right for everything to work in sync and strike the hearts of the buyers and remain in their minds until they get the satisfaction of buying from the brand.

You fight with the creative team, you fight with the internal bosses, you put in overtime, over thought, over heart to finally able to churn out something that will be seen upon for you to hear the words “Good to go fella, nice work!”

You put everything in a PowerPoint File, lock a meeting with the client for the final consensus, open the presentation, explain each and every slide like no one else knows the brand better than you do, finally reach the end, say thank you, wait for the go ahead and the client says, “Go back to the first artwork” and shares a stream of changes that is either subjective or can be lived without, moves on to the 2nd slide, repeat!

The presentation is over, the client is happy, you’re furious on the inside, but act like you’re happy too, the client goes away, you go back to the team and begin to implement the changes for back and forth rounds until the client’s changing mood is satisfied.

The campaign is locked, it goes live! Unwanted roadblocks are there in getting the campaign deployed, but more on that later ;)

While you try to satisfy one client’s changing mood, there’s a stream of other clients engaging in the same back and forth with you because you’re working at an agency and the agency’s bread and butter keeps on coming from different clients in different categories with different demands that no one brain is supposed to juggle humanistically.

But you do it anyways thinking how you’ll be labeled in your own mind and especially other people’s minds as the go to guy to handle as many things as they throw at you and you’re still able to come out on top.

But somewhere in the process, something gets missed or broken or expectations are mismatched and the building blocks of the organization jotted on an excel file uploaded online for the whole team to view seems to be falling apart, you suddenly put yourself under blame for being all over the place and not being able to keep up with the pace, so you try to dedicate your weekends to your work that is inevitably bound to drain you out and make you think perhaps it’s not you who’s unable to do what is required, it is the nature of the business of how the agency operates that plagues so many account managers in a mid-tier agency where there’s no one giant client paying all the bills and you’re left with no other choice but to keep increasing the clients and get buried under the weight of the operations of the agency.

So after all the headache, heartburn and kidney failure, what is the point of working tirelessly day in and day out like a hamster on a hamster wheel thinking you’re getting somewhere when you’re only going in circles?

The point is that you don’t have to put your heart and soul in someone else’s brand. That heart and soul will come from the client in the form of the feedback that we despise as account managers and don’t really look forward to.

But we should look forward to it because the client cares about what is being communicated in the name of the brand whether it be in the form of colors, text, imagery, tone etc.

Be the client of the client!
Guide them into extracting whatever is in their mind onto the canvas and job done!

Don’t take the job personally, do the bare minimum, build the base, make it look good, put it infront of the client and let their egos build it from there because that’s what they want anyways.

Save your heart and soul, invest it in something more beneficial for yourself, but the question is what?

Invest it in everything that needs to be better about yourself starting from your mental and physical health.

You’re a brand yourself and you’re the CEO of your life. How you grow, how fast you grow, how happy you are, all of it is in your hands. We are responsible for our own suffering when we don’t really have to suffer.

We take ownership of unnecessary things that we don’t need to and in turn experience unnecessary pain that we don’t have to.

This is how you not just manage clients and their egos, this is how you manage everything in life. Stop for a second and think before doing anything, how much time should I really be investing in making someone else’s brand better and bigger when my own brand is no where on the map?

You either keep going with the flow or you change the flow and make it flow in the direction you want. It seems easier said than done, but it’s doable, absolutely doable!

You are the orchestrator of your own life story.
This is Mr. Zeecon, in the making of a great story!