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When you finally finish school and receive your diploma, you feel like a rock star. You are ready to take the marketing world by storm using all marketing knowledge you learned in school. Get ready because you are now on a journey to another type of school. One that will teach you more than you what you can read in a book or learn from a lecture course. Welcome to the School of Hard Knocks, aka your first job. Your first professional position out of school is often one of the toughest, but most rewarding, classes you will ever take. What they didn’t teach you in school will quickly become apparent as you navigate these uncharted waters. How you embrace these skills will be hard to quantify but their mastery is often what differentiates the rock stars from those who remain in the cubicles.
Here are 4 important lessons that marketing school doesn’t teach you:
1. Trusting Your Gut
In school, students are often bombarded with constant noise throughout their day. Get this paper written. Study for this test. Work on this group project. Add to that a part-time job and extra-curricular activities and you are left with zero quiet time. Unfortunately that means we also have little time to reflect and listen to our inner voice telling us which direction we should be heading. The power of trusting your gut is real but can only be enjoyed if we can stop and listen to it.
2. How to Be a Likeable Person
One of the most underrated qualities necessary in marketing professionals today is likeability. You need to be able to hold a conversation, make connections with others quickly, and cultivate your professional network. Be authentic. Listen to others. Ask questions.
3. Being Able to Say No One of the toughest lessons we learn in life is when to say no to something. We often say yes out of fear. We may have a fear of hurting another person’s feelings or of missing out on a great opportunity. What we fail to realize though is that by saying no to one thing we can then say yes to something else. Don’t dedicate your time and energy to projects you are not completely committed to. They only limit the resources you have for endeavors you are truly passionate about.
4. Managing Your Time Most Effectively
Many of us have been told that successful people know how to multitask. In college, we got a lot of practice multitasking as we juggled homework, jobs and a social life. But the tide has turned on this old-school thought with many psychologists now suggesting that focusing on one task at a time is a healthier, more effective approach. The days of trying to get it all done in a day have been replaced with focused power hours working on individual tasks.
Grand Marketing Solutions is a marketing firm serving the Chicago area. We offer our clients social media management solutions as well as printing and direct advertising services. We have proven success in helping our clients achieve better brand recognition as well as increased visitor traffic and higher conversion rates using proven marketing strategies.
Contact us for more information or to schedule a consultation
