Constantly learning, within and especially outside of your chosen discipline, is essential to success. This is certainly true in marketing, where breaking down ingrained divisions between advertising, data, finance and other company departments has become critical as people increasingly go through a nonlinear shopping journey that crosses surfaces and formats constantly. Each group’s decisions inform and impact one another, and having an understanding of how each of these disciplines work has helped me guide Meta’s clients on how to engage their customers more efficiently.
Here are a few ways that lifelong learning can improve your marketing:
1. Sell and build upon an idea outside and inside of a company
If you’ve ever done improvisation skits, you know that when you’re on stage, you have to find the “game” of the scene—the fundamental idea that’s funny and can be repeated and extended throughout the duration of the set. If the game of the scene isn’t clear and specific enough, the audience (and the improvisers) get confused, it becomes hard to replicate what’s funny and the scene falls apart.
It can be helpful to return to this mental model in sales work. When selling or building a new offering, I always ask myself, “What’s the fundamental solution I’m offering to my partners?” This question not only helps me prioritize, but also helps iterate on an idea. I now know what parts of an offering are optional, what parts should be built upon further and how to sequence a deal or narrative when going out to market.
Learning the fundamentals of many disciplines also helps me work more effectively across teams at Meta. Even though my core job is in sales, I love computer engineering and have learned how to build on a variety of platforms, including web, mobile, programmed drones and web3. Understanding the underlying technology of what I’m selling has helped me work more effectively with engineers who work on Meta’s products. For example, when thinking about product roadmaps, I’ve found it much easier to position client asks back to product teams in a way that’s digestible and fits seamlessly into their product development cycles.
2. Learn principles of one discipline to be more effective in others
My interest in engineering has helped me greatly respect the discipline’s mentality, which has proven to be essential to running teams in other areas of a business. The engineer’s mindset puts a premium on execution—as an engineer, you’re taking a limited set of resources, designing and building something for your customer, and likely relentlessly iterating until you’ve found product market fit.
As a marketer, having a test-and-learn mentality is critical. Be prepared to let go of ideas that don’t work while embracing unexpected wins. This approach is essential for marketers looking to engage with a diverse range of customers across surfaces and contexts in today’s dynamic digital marketplace.
I’ve used this execution-focused, test-and-learn philosophy in all parts of my career. Planning is critical and taking time to do it is important. However, history has shown that ideas are plentiful—it’s the execution against those ideas that’s difficult. Prioritizing production and execution has also been crucial for me in leading through volatile times while not giving in to fear or bullishness, which can make leaders lose focus.
3. Connect the dots across disciplines to see how they work together
When you understand the fundamentals and philosophies of many disciplines, you gain a more holistic understanding of how they build on one another. In marketing, this enables you to help advertisers gain a comprehensive view of the customer to ultimately meet their unique needs and preferences most efficiently.
Take advertising and what makes “good” creative, for example. Creative has to be eye-catching of course, but it must also resonate with a specific audience and be built for the placement on which it’s served. Understanding how customers engage with your brand across formats and placements helps you take lessons from each channel to build the best creative for the best context. You don’t need to be an expert in all of Meta’s formats, but understanding how Stories informs Feed and how creator content impacts your owned brand equity, for example, helps you make all of these channels more effective. Otherwise, without these interconnected fundamentals, it’s like playing a game of telephone where the conversation gets completely lost.
The power of curiosity
The most effective way I’ve cultivated my skills as a marketer is to invest just as much into my “learning career” as my professional one. There’s so much power in being curious—in being eager to uncover the keys to a discipline, apply its principles to other situations and connect the dots across specialties to craft a holistic strategy. In a complex, interconnected, and dynamic digital world, such a mindset of lifelong learning can equip marketers to connect with a diverse range of customers and find the more efficient path to meeting and exceeding their needs and expectations.
