By Tarif Mohammed Khan
In today’s corporate world, switching jobs is a common phenomenon. A recent Gallup report on the millennial generation shows data fact that 21% of them have changed their jobs within the past year. The reasons vary between looking for higher wages, to furthering career growth or seeking a better organizational culture. Whenever a manager joins a new organization, she/he faces some challenges in the beginning. Marketing is fun and as the new manager, you need to enjoy the challenges and tackle them head on. This article will talk about to focus on a few points to have pace on the new work desk.
Keep Marketing Yourself
You are a good marketer otherwise; you would not have made it this far to a new organization! Since you have joined recently, it’ll take time to assimilate and immerse yourself into the zeal of the environment. Start slowly, by having lunch with your colleagues, by dressing according to the dress code of the organization – this will help you in finding and making an ally. The more you market yourself, the more visible the product you are. For example, you can see if there is a common email signature policy that exists in your new workplace or not. If it does not, introduce one and make everyone understand as it goes to all stakeholders individually, it is one of the core marketing tools for your organization. You will be noticed by the management immediately!
Know your organization
It is really important to know the organization’s goal and vision. Understand the organization’s mission statement, online and offline strategies, sales projection, etc. The more information you have, you will be able to perform with more dynamism. Learn from the mistakes made by the organization in the past and execute successful marketing strategies which align with your knowledge. Here I can share one of my experiences. I joined a company as an assistant manager and was studying the newsletters for the past one year. I came to know that one of my organization’s directors is capable of flying an airplane! On his next birthday, we presented him with a cake shaped like an airplane and he enjoyed that a lot.
Know your Customer
Without knowing your customer and buyer persona, it is almost impossible to carry out successful marketing campaigns. Do some market research, look at data of existing customer base, get discussion sessions with the organization’s sales team. One of the interesting ways to gather information is to attend some sales support call/customer care call so that you can have a picture of what customers feel about your organization/product. When I was working with a ride-sharing company, I felt that no word of mouth buzz is being generated by riders instead there were complaints. So, I heard a few phone calls and figured out that riders have some valuable insights. So, we launched the rider feedback program and developed the apps as well as the process for a better service.
Set Goals and Achieve
Being a new marketing manager, you should set SMART goals and work effectively to make it. Once you achieve your goals, it will strengthen your position. Do not set any highly ambitious goals, there might be possibilities to fail. Also, set goals for the team which you are leading so that they perform and have the opportunity to work with you more. One of my working portfolios was a foil food container manufacturing company. We got a promotional target to achieve over 1000+ restaurants in a month. We divided the full target among different zones and gave it to the field force. So, it becomes a smaller target to meet from each zone and all together we achieved it.
Read regularly
Marketing is a fine mix of Art and Science. The marketing team always needs to come up with new ideas and plans. To have an imagination for ideas, a marketer needs to read constantly. Study and analyze successful marketing strategies and ad campaigns recent as well as past. It will inspire great thoughts and planning. You can also attend knowledge sessions and invite an expert to your organization for overall team growth. You can start something really interesting within your team called ‘Your Book of the Month’. Every month each of your team members needs to complete reading a book. End of each month a presentation session can happen and each can narrate the summary with a presentation. In this way, everyone can learn new things easily. We are a team of 10 people and at the end of the year, we will be knowing about 120 books! Isn’t it cool?
