2024-01-16 09:15:33
Continue active duty even in your 40s
Can I become a marketer?
In my case, I think I’ve continued to worry regarding this since my mid-30s. Since the online marketing environment is changing so rapidly, even I had a preconceived notion when I was young that it would not be easy for older marketers to adapt to new SNS and advertisements. Meanwhile, the scary reality began to dawn on me that as I got older, there were fewer marketers around me of similar age.
Many marketers retired or changed industries as they reached their 40s, and most of those who remained became managers and mainly took on the role of managing junior marketers. In my case, as I gained experience, I naturally became the head of the marketing team. Before I knew it, I was becoming more accustomed to the role of a manager rather than a practical person.
But the older I got, the more I thought that I should never miss out on practical work. If I continued to move further away from practical work, my growth as a marketer would likely stop. Although it was very difficult, I continued to study new social media and when new online advertisements came out, I tested them myself before any other marketer. I tried not to leave all operations to juniors or agencies, but to run them myself as much as possible so as not to miss the feel of the field.
However, I realized that no matter how much I studied and worked hard, I would never be able to regain the “sense of a young marketer.” Now that I am in my 40s, it is no longer difficult for me to quickly understand the trends and what people in their 20s want. This was not an area that might be solved with effort, and now we were starting to get closer to a situation where we had to worry regarding our survival as marketers.
It would have been nice to be a talented marketer who might easily achieve great results regardless of age, but unfortunately, I was one of the many ordinary marketers who might not do that. I thought regarding how an ordinary marketer in his 40s should survive.
Admit to yourself that you don’t know what you don’t know!
As our careers grow and we get older, the most difficult thing for marketers to say is “I don’t know.” It is really difficult for marketers to say that they are not familiar with new SNS, trends, new advertisements, SEO, CRM marketing, and other new marketer tools such as SQL and Figma. I realized that although I might learn a little bit regarding these new areas by studying them, even if only half-heartedly, if I mightn’t utilize them properly, it was ultimately the same as not knowing anything.
In my case, the number of cases of hiding things I didn’t know was increasing. I thought that saying that marketers don’t know something new is in itself showing their lack of skills, and that they should at least pretend to know something. However, no matter how much they hide it, the marketer’s lack of skills is quickly revealed, and I realized that the problem can never be solved by half-heartedly understanding it.
In the end, when I started to “admit to myself that I don’t know much,” I was able to find a solution to the problem. I thought that no matter how much experience you have, you cannot know everything, that in the online market where new things keep coming out, it is natural to not know, and that “it is more dangerous to think you know what you don’t know.”
Find someone better than me!
Once a marketer acknowledges his or her own shortcomings, he or she must put in a lot of effort to fill those shortcomings. This is a very basic and natural thing. However, along with this effort, I realized that it is more important to “find people who are better than me.”
I began to find and learn from people who were better than me in each field, such as marketers who were good at creating materials, marketers who were good at running ads, marketers who were good at analyzing ads, and marketers who were good at developing SNS, and when I started collaborating with them, I started to realize my shortcomings. I was able to fill it.
I thought that age and experience didn’t matter as long as he was better than me in any area. I started learning short-form from a marketing intern who was 20 years younger than me, management from a marketer at a partner agency, and analysis from a freelance marketer. However, I realized that there were limits to just learning, so I started looking for ways to make the most of the skilled marketers I had found so difficult to find.
Externally, we persuaded the company to hire new employees, selected additional partner agencies, and began using freelance marketers. Internally, we began giving maximum authority to marketing team members as long as they were competent, regardless of age or experience. We were able to proceed quickly and freely with materials, operations, and content production without reporting to the team leader or the company.
Finding talented marketers in each field – Source Infron
In my case, I had a very good experience recently. A new marketer who joined the company I work for created a new short-form video. In order to deliberately provide freedom of content, they did not even show me, the head of the marketing team, a plan, but simply told them to freely create a short form. However, a short form that I mightn’t even imagine came out.
This short form was so different from the company’s content direction that internal marketing team members opposed its exposure. The opposition to exposure was completely understandable. However, I recognized the skills of the new marketer who had just graduated from college, saying that he was very good at creating short forms. So we overcame the internal opposition and exposed it, and there was a truly unbelievable response. In a situation where no costs were used, the efficiency was already more than 10 times greater in all areas, including exposure, comments, and likes, compared to existing short forms.
So, I immediately spent a small amount of money on the short form and began to check its potential as an material. Even though the material was not made for , we confirmed that the conversion efficiency was extremely high. From then on, fortunately, it was an area I was good at as I had a lot of experience. I decided to persuade the company and focus as much money as I might as the head of the marketing team on that short form. We invested a huge amount of money into both TikTok and Instagram Reels. In the end, within a few months, we were able to achieve results that greatly helped increase the company’s overall sales.
In the midst of these incredibly good results, I still remember the moment when I asked the new marketer what the intention and purpose of creating the short form was, and was told, “I just made it because I thought it would be fun.” At that moment, it seemed like marketers in their 40s might no longer learn the sensibilities of marketers in their 20s, no matter how hard they tried. I simply realized that my role was to find talented marketers and turn them into real results.
As a marketer in his 40s, he persuades companies, CEOs, or advertisers on behalf of junior marketers to quickly try something new, test it with a small fee, and check and analyze the results. Then, we boldly make the choice to increase our costs several times, and ultimately take responsibility for the results. This is something experienced marketers can do well and it seems to be the best way for marketers in their 40s to survive.
Small startup marketing team leader K brunchAfter editing the article published in , we introduce it once more on Mobi Inside.
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