Becoming the marketer you’d be intimidated by

Nov 26

At some point in your marketing career, you meet that person.

The marketer who presents strategy like it’s second nature.
The one who doesn’t panic when a client pushes back.
The one who can explain attribution models without pulling up CGPT.
The one who seems calm, grounded, and totally unbothered by the noise in the room.

It’s not that they’re intimidating on purpose.
They just operate with a level of clarity and confidence that feels… next-level.

T he good news?
You can absolutely grow into that marketer. The one who experiments boldly, defends strategy with logic, tracks things properly, sees nuance in the numbers, and knows how to optimize instead of guess.

After working with hundreds of businesses over the last decade, I’ve learned that becoming “that marketer” has nothing to do with titles or talent. It has everything to do with the habits and skills you build along the way.

Here are the seven lessons that actually get you there.

1. Embrace experimentation

One of the sneakiest traps in marketing is letting other people’s preferences box you in too early.

A client “doesn’t like Instagram.”
A boss “heard YouTube doesn’t work.”
Someone’s friend’s cousin’s dog “thinks TikTok is dead.”

If you’re not careful, you end up building a narrow strategy based on… vibes.

Meanwhile, experimentation is where all the clarity lives.

Testing different:

platforms
messages
hooks
audiences
landing pages

…gives you data you can actually use.

Yes, it costs a little more up front.
But it saves you months of guessing later, and it’s one of the fastest ways to grow your instinct and confidence.

The marketer people admire isn’t the one playing it safe.
It’s the one running smart tests on purpose.

2. Stay grounded when your strategy gets challenged

A big milestone in any marketer’s career is learning to stay calm and even firm when someone challenges your plan.

In the beginning, I assumed everyone above me (clients, bosses, whoever) knew more than I did. If they pushed back hard, I backed down. Now? I’ve seen enough cycles to know this:

Strong opinions fade with time.

Like the client who swore they “only wanted awareness” and “didn’t care about conversions”… until halfway through when they asked, “So how are conversions looking?”

If you only built an awareness campaign because their opinion was loud that day, you’re stuck with their discontentment later.

But when you trust your expertise, you can say: “We can absolutely do awareness, but based on what you’ve told me about your goals, I’m recommending a three-phase structure: awareness to build reach, consideration to warm people up, and conversion to capture intent. Each phase has a different purpose, and without that structure we’ll end up measuring the wrong things and expecting results this campaign isn’t designed to deliver.”

You don’t have to be combative.
You just have to be clear.

Grounded marketers don’t panic when someone questions them.

They explain, they guide, they recommend and they stay steady.

**3. Learn how to track sh*t properly**

Marketers want better results… but were you taught how to set up data collection or define what “results” even mean?

Launching campaigns with no KPIs, no events, and no measurement plan leads to incomplete reporting and a whole lot of stress later.

The harsh truth:

You can’t report what you didn’t define.
You can’t optimize what you never tracked.

Strong marketers build the measurement strategy first and set up the tracking needed.

P.S. Developers are often not learning marketing analytics. This is your skillset to own, and it will make you instantly more valuable.

Master the basics:

GA4
GTM
custom events
pixel implementation
QA testing

Track your macro conversions:

sales
form fills
bookings

And your micro conversions:

quiz submissions
lead magnet downloads
video views
scroll depth

And here’s the non-negotiable part: Tracking is not something you “clean up later.”

Reporting can wait. Optimization can wait. But tracking cannot.

If the right events aren’t in place from day one, the data you need will never exist and no amount of dashboards or analysis can recreate what wasn’t captured.

It’s how you make sure that when reporting time comes… you actually have something worth reporting.

4. Accept the limitations of data

Data is powerful but it will never capture the full customer journey.

People behave like humans, not tidy attribution models (unfortunatelyyyy)

Someone can:

scroll your posts for months
never like a single thing
quietly watch your stories
click nothing
then one random Tuesday… search your business name on Google and convert instantly

Technically: organic search.
Actually: months or years of brand-building doing its job.

This is why smart marketers don’t evaluate everything through the lens of “did this post convert today?”

Because some of the most valuable work we do is what creates:

trust
familiarity
brand presence
perceived professionalism
connection

And here’s the part clients, bosses, and even junior marketers often miss:

Performance channels only work when brand work already exists.

Paid ads convert better when the website doesn’t look outdated.
SEO performs better when people recognize the brand they see in search results.
Retargeting works better when social content has been consistently warming the audience.

Your “invisible” efforts are often the reason the visible results exist at all.

Data can’t always show you that very easily.

And this is where strong marketers rise:

They can see the whole ecosystem.
They know when a tactic is meant to drive performance…
…and when a tactic is meant to build the trust that performance depends on.

5. Know your data nuances

If you’ve ever looked at performance data and thought, “I know there’s more going on here, I just don’t know how to explain it,” this is usually why.

I was coaching an in-house marketer on a Google Ads account he was managing for his company.

One question kept coming up: why are the conversions so low?

So a little backstory.

Previously, everything lived inside a single campaign driving traffic to the homepage. When we looked at the search terms, most of the spend was actually going toward the company’s brand name even though the goal was to show up for non-brand searches primarily.

We restructured the account:

A dedicated brand campaign
A separate non-brand campaign driving to service pages
Brand keywords excluded from non-brand

Once that was in place, the numbers started telling a more honest story.

Branded search showed extremely high CTRs and conversion rates, which made sense. People searching the brand were already close to deciding.
Non-brand search showed lower conversion rates, also expected. Those users were earlier, colder, and still figuring out what they needed.

When we looked at assisted conversions (under the Attribution section in Google Ads), which shows how users move between campaigns before converting, we saw the truth. The non-brand campaign was consistently introducing users who later returned through branded search and converted.

And this part matters.

If we had paused or removed the non-brand campaign because it “wasn’t performing,” the branded campaign wouldn’t have stayed strong for long. It would rely almost entirely on existing brand demand instead of capturing new, high-intent searches.

In other words, we would have cut off top-of-funnel demand, the very traffic that eventually turns into brand searches and conversions.

6. Optimize, don’t just interpret

For a long time, I thought being “good at analytics” meant being able to explain what happened.

I could walk through reports.
I could demonstrate that a number went up or down. And sometimes even why :)
And for a while, that felt like enough.

What changed for me was realizing that interpretation on its own doesn’t actually move performance.

So much more value was added when I started asking a different question: “What am I going to change because of this?”

What that looked like in practice was using data to answer real questions and then making changes to experiment further.

Here are a few examples:

FAQ click tracking: When we tracked clicks on FAQ accordions across product and category pages, it showed us exactly what information users were missing. For one site, pricing and US shipping were the most-clicked questions so we added clear, highlighted explanations directly into product and category page templates instead of burying them just in the FAQs.
Search term reality checks: One client described their service as “custom portals.” Search data showed almost no demand for that term. People were searching for “web development services.” We updated the page titles, headlines, and copy to match how people actually searched and not the internal language.
CTA language testing: On pages with multiple buttons pointing to the same form, we tracked clicks by button text. That made it easy to identify which phrasing people responded to most and then standardize that language across the site when applicable.

In essence, interpretation explains the past. Optimization is how performance actually improves (hopefully) or changes for further data gathering.

7. Repurpose everything

For a long time, I treated content like one-off deliverables.

Repeating myself felt wrong. Like I was being lazy. Or like people would notice and get bored.

That idea did not come from data. It came from me.

I felt the same pressure years ago when I was teaching Zumba. I taught almost every day and constantly felt like I needed new choreography and new songs. But most people only came to one class a week. They wanted repetition. They wanted to get better at the routines. They would ask when a song was coming back or why I skipped it.

What feels repetitive to the person creating the thing often does not feel repetitive to the person experiencing it.

Marketing works the same way.

As a marketing director, I work closely with web designers, content creators, and video teams. One of the most useful shifts I made was using data to direct that work instead of guessing what to create next.

When a post does well, I do not move on from it. I reuse it. I change the hook. I test a different format. Sometimes it is the same idea with a different visual or setting.

And the reality is that most businesses do not have Procter & Gamble–level marketing budgets. Ninety-nine percent of companies are small or mid-sized. When you invest in a photoshoot, a video, or a piece of long-form content, that work is expensive. Letting it live once is usually the real waste.

Repurposing is how you stretch that investment.

That does not mean blasting the same thing everywhere without thought. Fatigue is real. People do tune out. That is why the goal is not repetition for repetition’s sake, but reuse with intention. Different formats. Different angles. Same core message.