Andrew Lloyd Beaver PA has strong advice for newcomers into marketing that they might not want to hear. He is telling them that nobody wants entry level strategic marketers and if you try to go using that path then you will fail. Many newcomers want to jump right into the deep end with coming up with the big ideas and being the hero that saves a company with a marketing campaign. Andrew Lloyd Beaver PA wanted the exact same things when he started out and even tried it for a while. He wants to help newcomers by telling them that starting out this way will just be a waste of their time and will not lead them into being successful marketers.
The blunt fact that Andrew Lloyd of Beaver, PA wants to let you all know is that no matter how good your ideas are in the beginning nobody will listen to them. The ones that people trust are the people that have been doing smaller work for years and built up a trust and a reputation. You don’t have to be too concerned though because you can still work your way up to being that person, you just need to stop and take a step back to work the lower jobs. If you want anybody to think that you would be a good strategic marketer then you need to put in the time and work to prove it to them.
Now Andrew Lloyd knows that some of you are already angry and being told this and think that they shouldn’t need to just put in a bunch of hours just to prove that their good ideas are good. He isn’t telling you that at all though, it isn’t about how much time you have been doing it, it’s what you are using that time for. As a newcomer there are going to be people to respect and you know that just because they have been around the longest doesn’t make them the best. But they used their short time to develop their own personal skills that helped them achieve.
Andrew Lloyd realized this and before he even started working for a company he decided to figure out what unique skills he could bring to the table and started doing his own side projects. Smaller scale things that would let him show off exactly what he could do and cause the company to hire him over someone with more experience, but not as good. So hone your skills first and then you will be ready to start getting jobs.
Now work in marketing can refer to a plethora of different things and Andrew Lloyd wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to do. At first he thought any time spent thinking about projects he wanted to do could count as work and then he realized that it didn’t really translate very well to content. To actually work effectively though means that output needs to occur in some way. You won’t get better just by thinking of the ideas, only when you try and implement them using your skills. Whether you are writing content, managing ad platforms, or even writing creative briefs you are working and honing your skills to perfection.
Some might call out Andrew Lloyd for being anti-creative and not wanting these newcomers to have better ideas than him. In truth he is the exact opposite and loves it when new people come into the marketing world with fresh ideas and imaginations. It is what keeps the marketing world alive, but alone it can’t really do much. Most people that come in want to do strategy work and dictate it to other people. Instead of writing up pieces by themselves or creating assets they want someone else to do all of that work. That work though is the foundation that they need to understand before they can tell other people what to do with it. They need to keep that creativity inside of them but use it to get their hands dirty and do that type of work for themselves. The more work you do on that side will actually let you be more creative and know how you want to bring those ideas to life.
Now Andrew Lloyd talks a lot about creativity and strategy. A lot of people might look at it and think that those two words can be interchanged for each other here. What he wanted to do was bring the terminology down to a level that even the most basic of newcomers can follow in order to help them. In marketing the term strategy is used a little bit differently in the professional sense and in a project you might hear about good strategy and bad strategy. Here though he wanted to make things sound a little bit more like newcomers think about it. They think of strategy as being the person with the ideas and not doing the grunt work of writing or designing. They want to be the one in charge with a vision of directing a large group of people with tasks to make everything come together in their perfect vision. They might think that is what creativity also means, being the ideas person. In fact almost everyone in the marketing business can be labeled as creative without being the ideas person. The writers and the designers are also creative despite doing what you would consider the hard grunt work of the marketing world. Without creativity they wouldn’t be able to follow the orders of the strategist that you want to become. Not everyone who is creative is a strategist, but every strategist needs to be creative.
Andrew Lloyd Beaver PA says on his SubStack, “go out there and make the right choices as a newcomer into the marketing world.” Just remember to start out with practicing your skills at writing and designing and let your creativity flow. Before you know it you will be working one step closer to being the strategist that you always wanted to be.