Everyone’s got to start somewhere, and no one becomes an expert overnight. Attending an excellent business school is a great place to start, but as they say, there’s no substitute for experience. In my career as a marketer so far I’ve had tons of experience both good and bad, so let me share what I’ve learned with you…

1. Be patient: I’ve talked about this before. Patience is a trait that every marketer needs to develop in order to be successful. Marketing is all about controlling variables, and sometimes it takes time to see the effects of your work. You need to have the patience (and the guts) to “stay the course”, and see if you’ve made a good decision or a bad one.

2. Begin with mutual respect: Treat everyone with respect. Not just the people ahead of you on the food chain, not just your co-workers, or your customers. You need to treat everyone you meet with respect.  Besides, if they fail to live up to that respect, you can always change your mind later ;-D.

3. Cover your a**: If you don’t know what I mean, you will soon enough. Always make copies of your work, and keep track of everything you work on. Don’t be anyone’s fall guy.

4. Understand your target market: Don’t assume that everyone is like you. Just because you feel that a product or an approach won’t work, doesn’t mean that it will fail. First, you need to understand your target market, and approach your decisions from their point of view. Yes, you should trust your instincts, but you need to also take your personal feelings out of a situation.

5. Learn, not just from your mistakes, but from others as well: You’re a smart person (you are visiting my site afterall), and smart people learn from their mistakes. Everyone knows this already. You need to also focus on mistakes made by other people / companies, and make sure that you do not repeat them. This is why you should always stay on top of the latest developments in your industry, and in business in general.

6. Always get paid: This doesn’t mean that you should only work for money. Sometimes (like a good internship) the payment is experience, or good connections. The point is, you need to make sure you get something out of any effort you put in.

7. Don’t think you know everything: Pick up a marketing textbook from the 1980’s, and you’ll see that business has evolved. Don’t think that just because you have a diploma that you know all the current trends. You need to continue to learn and evolve. If you don’t you’re dead. We’ve talked about this before, and you know better.

8. Create value: Whatever you do, work hard. You may have just gotten a nice job, but if you don’t work hard at it, you’ll be refreshing your resume real quick. If you don’t have a job right now (hey join the club my friend) work hard at getting one, and create your own project (like I’ve done with this blog) to keep your tools sharp while you’re at it.

9. Don’t gossip: Be carefull what you say and who you say it to. You don’t know who’s listening, and talking behind someone’s back completely violates point number 2. If someone starts gossiping with you, just stay neutral and focus on your job.

10. Don’t panic: Everyone makes mistakes. When you’re just starting out, many times you’ll feel the urge to panic when a mistake has been made and will either throw your hands up and run to the boss, or will try to hide the problem. Don’t do this. Be honest with your boss, and come up with options to correct the problem. If they have a better idea, great, but don’t come up to them with a mess that you created, and expect to be bailed out.

Hey, I don’t know everything. You marketing vets out there post some more tips in the comments.

Wise words from one of my favorite bands (Rage Against the Machine), “know your enemy”. In marketing, you are competing with other companies, and even industries (look at how movie theaters compete against DVD, and television) for scarce money. In order to succeed, you need to arm yourself with all the knowledge you can about your competition. You need to know their strengths, weaknesses and strategies, so that you can develop your plan to defeat them. Great, so you already knew that. But how do you go about obtaining this information? Here are some quick tips for you…

1. List your direct and indirect competitors. How are you going to learn about your competition if you don’t even know who they are? As one of my old mentors (and good friend, you know who you are) would say, “make a list”. Don’t forget to include both direct (companies that provide similar products or services to yours) and indirect competitors (companies that provide products or services different from your own that satisfy the same need).

2. Pay them a visit. After you have your list, you should visit your competitors website and learn what you can. Not only will you learn about their products and / or services, you will also learn how they are marketing themselves, what they think of their own brand, and you will be able to get an idea of which type of customers they are targeting. You can also learn about their history, and the officers of the company. If there is a trade show, visit them and find out all you can. If they have a store, go in and patronize them. Find out what you can up close and in person. It’s important to do this early so that you will get a fresh impression of what type of business they run.

3. Dig a little deeper. Visit www.hoovers.com and check out their financials. If they are a publicly traded company, then there are tons of sources to go to get additional information. Go to www.dnb.com and check out a credit report. Remember those officers you learned about in the previous step? Google them and find out more about them. This will let you know a little bit more about how decisions are made at this company.

4. Set a date to follow-up. Like all marketing, competitive analysis is a process not a project (we’ll probably discuss this in detail in a future post). This means that you need to set up a follow-up date in your calendar so that you can go through the process again, and find out what’s changed. If you’re dealing with professionals, then your competition is looking at you just like you’re looking at them, and they’ll react to whatever strategy you’ve chosen to take them down. Do yourself a favor and stay vigilant.

Once you know all about your competition, you can use this information to find out what you can do better or differently than them. Develop your strategy and watch the competition suffer. We’ll talk more about how to take these suckers out in the future.

Hey, I’m not an expert on competitive analysis, so if any of you readers have anything to share, let me know in the comments, or email me at edwardviator@evil-marketer.com

It’s been a while since my last post, so I guess now is a good time to discuss patience. It’s one of the most crucial personality traits that a good marketer must have. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a good marketing campaign end prematurely simply because the results didn’t come fast enough. Let’s get this straight, it takes a while for marketing to have an affect. There are no magic wands in business. You can’t just wave the magic marketing wand and expect to see results overnight (by the way, if you have one of these, please let me know. I’d like to borrow it sometime). You need patience.

Let’s face it, most of your prospects probably haven’t heard of you. Even if they have, it doesn’t mean that they’ll come flocking to your store or your website. You need to work at it. If you’ve done all your marketing homework, you’ll get the results…. in time.

To be honest, I could use more patience myself. If anyone has any tips on how to develop this crucial trait, please let me know. If I like what I hear, I’ll probably post it here in the future.