Turns out the only thing you need to give to learn from the career mistakes of some well-experienced marketers is your time. In this article, we spoke to some of the marketers we absolutely love and got them to share one mistake they made early on in their career and the lessons they learnt from it.
The purpose of this article is for you to pick up ways to navigate your marketing career, incorporate some of the lessons here and hopefully (fingers crossed) avoid repeating the same mistakes. Also for you to optimize some of the processes and methods you’re used to, thereby saving time and maximizing results. Ultimately? Well, the overall goal is to make you a better marketer in the shortest time possible.
– Chief Marketing Officer, Selar / Founder, Blurpe.
If you read this article and somehow you didn’t find our founder (who is a pretty bad*** marketer) as number one, wouldn’t you have been suspicious? Just saying. Milton Tutu is the Chief Marketing Officer at Selar and founder of Blurpe, a startup connecting marketing talents to companies looking to hire. By the way, hiring is seamless and fast. Just click here.
In the span of his career, he has led Selar’s expansion across 15 African countries and as of 2023, the company hit a milestone of over 4.5 Billion Naira paid to digital creators. Since expertise doesn’t come overnight, here’s a mistake he made early in his career and what he learnt from it.
Mistake: “One of the mistakes I made earlier in my career was that I was trying to learn so many skills at once. Anything that sounded like money could be made from it, I was on it. Sure I made money doing that but not niching down in time is something I’d consider a mistake.”
What Lesson did you learn from that?
“Later on, I got to understand that building depth in one skill, a single niche of marketing and being very good at it, is crucial. I got feedback and started to build up my copywriting skills, mastered it, and from there I grew to this scale.”
– Content Marketer, Zikoko
Surely you must have come across some jaw-dropping Naira Life episodes, hilarious Inside life stories or maybe some eye-opening Her articles on Zikoko. That’s Tife Oni. Her Naira Life interviews garner reactions in their numbers and contribute to the massive traffic Zikoko gets on its website. She is skilled in research and copywriting amongst many other things. Tife’s ability to elicit responses from her interviewees and turn them into thought-provoking pieces is somewhat matchless. To be fair, we think it’s a superpower, at this point 🤐
Here’s one mistake this senior writer made earlier in her career:
Mistake: “I didn’t always make good use of the tools at my disposal. In fact, the first time I managed a brand’s social media, I used popular hashtags without really analysing whether they were relevant or if they were helping. Also, I once used an email marketing software for 30K+ people but instead of using the software’s features, I ended up sending emails to different segments manually.”
What Lesson did you learn from that?
“I have since learned to review my methods to achieve better results in less time (basically see if there’s a more effective way to do the same thing). I’ve realised that sometimes what might be stopping you from hitting your marketing goals is that you spend too much time fixing problems that could have been avoided with a well-planned strategy.”
– Brand Storyteller
Adebola has over six years of experience in content development and digital marketing and has successfully launched and managed campaigns, platforms and series that showcase the stories and insights of customers and brands. Okay, you can find that on her LinkedIn page.
What we know Adebola for is her strong thought leadership on branding and storytelling for businesses. You can call Adebola an authentic creative (check her Instagram page for proof) who’s bent on teaching youngsters how to achieve brand visibility through storytelling. She is also the founder of Brand Storytelling with AWZ, a community for creatives to connect and become better storytellers. When you think of Brand storytelling in Nigeria, AWZ comes to mind. Let’s take a look at a mistake she made early in her career and what she learnt from it.
Mistake: “One mistake I made early on was patching things up. By that I mean, I used to focus on Individual problems. I would try to fix social media and campaigns separately. I didn’t have that holistic view of seeing everything as connected. I didn’t see how they were tied together and all part of a strategy and this made me go through a lot of hassles. A lot of back and forth, unnecessary stress and wasted energy”
What Lesson did you learn from that?
“The lesson I picked from that is that there’s no marketing channel or goal that exists in a vacuum. If you work with a process or with a strategy, it becomes easier to keep tabs on everything especially if you work in a team where as a marketer you are doing multiple things. I quickly learnt to work with a strategy so I don’t lose focus of crucial aspects and ensure that high-priority targets or goals don’t suffer”
– Country Lead, Cenoa Africa
Truth be told, Feranmi is a marketing genius. With a strong suit in content (and food ) he has gone on to lead content marketing, email marketing, community, and go-to-market campaigns for some companies like Cowrywise, Flutterwave, Pillow and now Cenoa Africa.
There’s nothing more to add (That’s a lie. There’s lots more 🌚), but if you want to know more about Feranmi, we interviewed him in our very first episode of BTS.
Mistake: “I’ve made plenty of mistakes o 😂. The first one was assuming what I learned from my old job would perfectly apply to the one I was doing at the time (Cowrywise) without adjusting it to match the brand image. So back then agencies had one way of running social media, trying to be funny to boost engagement. When I got to Cowrywise, my first role was handling social media and I made the mistake of trying to make a joke. I put out a couple of posts here and there and people started to not take us seriously. We were a financial brand and we were starting to sound like a regular “roadside” brand.”
What Lesson did you learn from that?
“One thing I quickly learnt from that was no matter how great your experience is, it has to match the company’s needs. You have to adapt your experience to align with the company’s brand representation.”
– Social Media Lead, Selar
Lydia has over 3 years of experience in social media management and community management. She has shown commitment to sharing the know-how of leveraging social media for growth. If you have ever been on one of the X spaces or virtual events with Lydia as a speaker, you know that you are leaving with a full-course meal on the rudiment of social media management.
Mistake: “I’d say one thing I didn’t get from the beginning was speaking up for myself. I’m a creative person, I get ideas fast and I’m able to execute cool concepts. But at the start of my journey, it was difficult to communicate these great ideas and the ROIs I knew were attached to them. This was mainly because I was scared, I was always like “Who’s going to listen to a baby marketer?””
What Lesson did you learn from that?
“I had to overcome fear by taking the initiative and doing things in my own space that didn’t necessarily need approval. I experimented with new types of content, types we’d never put out before. When I started seeing positive results, it boosted my confidence in my abilities. I was able to share bigger ideas with my co-workers and boss because I felt ready. I didn’t feel like a baby anymore 😂. I felt more like a toddler or pre-teen”
– Marketing Manager, SunFi
When Michael is not reading books and attending book events, he is busy using his skills in content marketing, community management, product marketing, and email marketing amidst a host of other skills to facilitate growth across B2B/B2C companies.
He previously worked at Cowrywise where he helped build the Cowrywise Ambassadors community, one of the most popular programs across Nigerian Universities. A feat that earned him “The Community Manager of the Year” (2023) award from Non-tech in tech.
In the span of leading content marketing efforts at Cowrywise, Michael developed and executed content marketing strategies that led to a significant increase in brand awareness, online engagement and generation of leads. Currently, at SunFi he is spearheading marketing efforts to drive awareness, acquisition and revenue growth.
Mistake: “When I was at Cowrywise and I was learning the ropes of email marketing, my manager gave me free reins on it. It was my first time handling that magnitude of subscribers, over 700K people. I remember not wanting to screw up because if I did, there was going to be an audience of 700K people. But one time, I added the wrong link to an email I sent out and in no time people started to query customer support saying the link wasn’t going through. I recall the COO asking who sent the email and I kid you not, I was really scared to own up but my manager stood up for me and rectified the mistake. She worked out a way with the engineer to redirect the link to our direct website.”
What Lesson did you learn from that?
“From that incident, I learnt to lean into the difference that exists between a manager and a newbie. The key difference is in their knowledge and experience gap. At the time, I literally thought there was no solution to the wrong link I sent and that I was doomed. But my manager had most likely experienced that situation before, so she was better equipped to handle it without batting an eyelid. That taught me to be more open to my manager because chances are they have the solution you’re looking for”
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