The Hardness of Being a Digital Marketing Consultant

Being a digital marketing consultant, or any type of consultant for that matter, is exciting. Working for yourself offers you a lot of freedom. If you’re good … or lucky … you can make more money than you used to make working for someone else. And you can control everything from the types of clients you work with to the hours you decide to spend with them.

But it also presents some different challenges, too. There’s plenty of stress, particularly when you’re first starting out, have no capital and if one client misses a payment you’ll have to sell plasma to make the mortgage. It’s not the same kind of stress you had when you were working for someone else, but it’s there.

You also go through the process of learning your strengths, weaknesses and, most importantly, your limitations. Biting off too much can be disastrous. There’s no sick feeling like the one you get when more than one of your clients are mad at you. But not biting off enough can also be disastrous. You’re back to the plasma thing again.

I’ve had two unfortunate experiences in my now year-and-a-half of experiencing, “life on my own.” One was a shortcoming of a client. The other was, at least I think, a shortcoming of mine. Neither were fun to experience, but both were necessary to help me learn my limitations.

About halfway through year one of Social Media Explorer (the business, not just the blog), I signed a neat client. They engaged me for a fair amount of work and I was able to budget 4-5 months out with them and another couple of accounts so that I could take some time to work on a bootstrapped side project after their busy beginning months were complete. But three months in, the client stopped paying. And by the time I reached my “time off” to focus on my project, the deficit caused by the client’s unwillingness to pay nearly bankrupted me.

But I recovered and let the legal system tend to the issue. I hated that the relationship had to go south, but I don’t work for free and when your lack of concern over your bills affects my children’s ability to eat or live in our home, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for you. I learned the value of contracts, due diligence on accounts receivable, my accountant and a good attorney.

More recently, I came to the end of a year-long engagement with another client and gave them an assessment and recommendation of where we should go next. After getting the go-ahead to submit another contract proposal, they abruptly ended our partnership without much explanation. While we went through some odd challenges together, ones neither of us could have prevented or predicted, and were behind schedule on what we’d set out to accomplish, I can only assume they weren’t happy with my ability to help them.

In retrospect, I keep thinking I could have done more, focused more time or attention to prevent it from turning out the way it did. But you learn to take the client’s wishes and move on.

Dealing with the bad news in client work is never anyone’s favorite thing to do. I’ve always tried to be confident and proud, but understanding and service-oriented when the fit hits the shan, as it were. Do I have shortcomings and limitations? Absolutely. Am I generally pretty effective and well-received by my clients? I sure think so.

At the end of the day you learn more from experiencing the bad than you do from the good. I’m a better person, professional and consultant because I’ve had to fire and sue a client, and because I perhaps didn’t do enough for another. But it doesn’t take away the sting and self-doubt.

How do you handle the bad in your job? Is there a better way to cope and deal than wallow in self-doubt until you smack yourself and have an internal locker room tirade with your confidence? I’m all ears. The comments are yours.

The Magic of Simplicity

It’s natural for people to be resistant to change, large or small, so trying to change attitudes within an organization can be difficult. But when you spread the word about the value of simplicity you are not spreading some oddball theory, you’re echoing one of the most successful people in business history, Steve Jobs. If you refer to the benefits Apple has enjoyed by embracing simplicity, and make the appropriate parallels to your own business, you’ll build a compelling case.

You can spread the religion of simplicity project by project, by interacting with people and groups one at a time. Getting people to buy into a concept to the point where they start contributing their own ideas can literally create a movement within an organization.

Simplicity is a way of looking at every part of your job, the jobs of those around you, and the way your company operates. Once you start seeing the world through the lens of simplicity you’ll be astounded at how many opportunities exist to improve the way your business works.

Work on it right away, or wait until you have a great idea?

As an account executive, I’ve always been asked by my employer or customers to make presentations. Crafting PPTs is an essential skill for specific occupations because everyone could precisely convey their opinions about specific issues through the presentation. No one will deny the importance of the presentation, but when we consider the preferences of time management, answers may diverge.

Depending on personal experience, personality types, and emotional concern, I prefer to work on it right away rather than wait until I have a good idea about the presentation when I’m assigned an important presentation.

By waiting for a sec, you may make your arguments of the presentation more comprehensively or persuasively because you have more time to think about the issue. You may consider much more possible factors that influence the outcomes and increase the validity of your report. However, there are some disadvantages about this approach.

First, I believe that crafting presentations is about creating something original, and creation is never instant perfection. In fact, many good ideas may emerge during the trial and error process. For example, Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, was known at Harvard as the sophomore who had built Facemash, a “Hot Or Not” clone for Harvard. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons.

The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard’s Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness. The second reason everyone at Harvard knew about Facemash and Mark Zuckerberg was that Facemash had been an instant hit. However, creating the most popular social media in the world is never the original intention when Mark built Facemash. Therefore, creation is never instant perfection, and many good ideas may emerge during the trial and error process.

In addition, waiting isn’t the only way that good ideas come from. You could discover and explore many amazing ideas from everywhere, at anytime, and from everyone in your daily life. In fact, the scope of the argument should be focused, but not limited. We can get inspirations from daily experiences and interactions. For instance, brainstorming is one of the most prevailing approaches to stimulate innovation. By discussing the topic with each member in your group, many great ideas may appear unintended. However, your creativity is limited when you block all the connections among other people.

In conclusion, because of the continuous improvement concern, and the diversity of the sources where good ideas come from, I’m on the opinion that working on it right away rather than wait until I have a good idea about the presentation when I’m assigned an important presentation.

Product-related communication with salespeople

Product managers need to act as cross-functional integrators not only in different business scenarios, but also in different organizations. For instance, during the product marketing campaigns, product managers are responsible for answering customers’ questions, visiting their clients in person, providing new product discounts, and assisting sales teams through marketing strategy formulation. On the other hand, product managers may need to decide the suitable channel types in order to accelerate the selling process by cooperating with agents.

One of the key tasks that product managers have to tackle with is assisting salespeople to achieve the goals. The relationship between product managers and salespeople may vary according to the organization culture, and the position of the product manager. Some of the product managers are identified as selling assistants, product developers, or product specialists. In short, one of the most important things that influence the success of the product is the cooperation between product managers and salespeople, a relationship that is built on respect and trust. Finally, the ultimate goal for product managers is securing the messages that salespeople convey could draw potential customers’ attention.

The character of Product Managers

What is the role of product managers? And what are the key tasks that a product manager needs to tackle with?

Satya Patel, who left Twitter in a product-related role, wrote:

“Product management isn’t a role or a function, it’s a set of skills. Those skills help remove obstacles and grease the wheels so that the functional experts can do their jobs best. Product management also balances the needs of users, the business and the team and makes the difficult tradeoffs needed to keep pressing ahead. In that way, Product Managers are very similar to CEOs. Very few would argue that a company doesn’t need a CEO. Product managers are simply CEOs of their products. No organization should be without someone who has ‘product management skills’ and works to make everyone else’s lives easier.”

Nabeel Hyatt, venture partner at Spark then wrote:

“An excellent product manager is keeping in mind the long term vision while driving short term results, has the customer intuition to get there, and has the authority/integrity to lead the team along the way – very much a mini CEO when it’s done right.

The ability to relate well to people

Teamwork

I think to be successful in a future job, the ability to relate well to people is more important than studying hard in school because of cooperation and career roadmap development.

Cooperation is one of the fundamental elements for achieving business goals. It’s virtually impossible for anyone to accomplish a specific project by himself. For instance, I was a product specialist in a software product company two years ago. One of the main responsibilities to me was building a channel of information to communicate with software engineers and website designers. In my opinion, to be successful in this position, the most critical skill is to relate well to people rather than studying hard in school, if “product specialist” is one of your options of future jobs.

In addition, in order to be successful in your future job, you need to plan out a well-structured career roadmap, but the academic theories can’t provide sufficient help in career planning. For example, I couldn’t figure out what I was going to do, or what I was going to be when I just graduated from college five years ago. I had tried to ask for help from elders, such as professors, former boss, and even my parents. Finally, I got the answers to my questions, and I still believe that it’s impossible to make a right career path or even to be successful in my career if I merely drilling in studying academic theories.

As a result, because of cooperation and career roadmap development, I’m of the opinion that the ability to relate well with others is more important to be successful in my future job.

Tips for making your presentation more compelling

As a product manager or a product specialist, the skills of crafting a compelling presentation is one of the most important capabilities to your career. Have trouble to convey your idea effectively? This article is for you.

First, let’s start from the Keynote/Power Point arranging. The eye ball movements of human tends to scatter the images rather than reading the text. In other words, you can’t put too many words or sentences in the page.

Every page of your presentation is a picture.

And pictures are all about graphics, patterns, colors, and tables. Try to keep an eye on aesthetic.

Second, pay attention to your audience during the presentation. Presentation is a process, and process means time span. Remember to pay attention to the facial responsive of your audience. For example, if they’re looked to fall asleep, maybe it’s time to accelerate your speed of reporting because it means that the topic or section you’re talking about may be less interests to them. And once you find that they’re looking at you with smile while you’re talking or staring at the Keynote page with sparkling eyes, maybe it’s time to slower your pace or pause a while to make the depth of discussion dives deeper.

Finally, practice makes perfect. The longer the time you spent on practicing every step of your performing, the shorten the distance to achieve a perfect presentation.