Always Be Learning
So we talked through the customer lifecycle, The different roles you’ll soon be filling, some fundamental industry concepts you need to know but this, This is the real lesson. Teaching you about digital marketing is all well and good but we don’t just want to teach, we want you to learn. We want you to know how to get results and achieve success as a digital marketer and that’s possible only through autonomous and continuous learning.
Once upon a time there was a saying in business, ABC, Always Be Closing, made famous by the movie GlenGary Glenn Ross, But when dealing with innovation closing just isn’t enough of a measurement for success, not even revenue growth is enough, that is because most of the time we’re selling or creating products that are completely new, both to us as suppliers and to the audiences we market to.
In this industry, that of digital products, it’s learn or die, and you need to Always be Learning, Your competitors, your target audience, their different segments, the overall market size, your own market-share, you’re marketing language, the performance of your website and the viable alternatives to each of its’ pages, new tools and their benefits, new mediums for advertising, It never ends, literally never ends. And this is the part of the job that’s always constant, you always, Always need to research and learn new things and how to do so effectively, basing your research on a core world of business concepts.
Each of us learn in our own way, some read lots of blogs, some find case studies, some listen to podcasts. Personally, I like books, they have the capacity to tell a entire story, instead of just bits and pieces, for me they put information from blogs or podcasts into context. There are two books i’d like to suggest to you at this time.
How Stella saved the Farm which is a simple, even juvenile allegory for innovation
And The Lean Startup, which is a thorough, real world guide to the same method of innovation.
A second method of learning love work and hands-on experience, getting feedback from actual leads and clients for good or bad teaches important lessons. from ads, emails, social posts, articles, feature adoption and user interactions, researching how each milestone of our creation is captured by the target audience teaches us how to move forward.
So, i would like to suggest to you that whatever you hear. Anywhere, from me, from anyone, take it with a grain of salt, research those terms online, until you form your own solid understanding of them. Then take that understanding with a grain of salt, think of it as a preliminary understanding, ‘cause it’s sure to shift and change the more you learn, in the coming future.
Let’s take a a look at several monstrous companies who went bankrupt because they refused to learn.
How Kodak invented the camera that would destroy it
One of the most famous case studies teaching lack of foresight when it comes to disruptive technologies involves the infamous demise of the camera and film company Kodak.
Despite the fact that the first digital camera was invented in Kodak’s own R&D department by Steve Sasson in 1975, and when the first consumer product hit the market in 1981, Kodak’s own Head of Market Intelligence handed in a fairly accurate report predicting the adoption-rate of digital cameras, Kodak’s management failed to see digital cameras as disruptive technology for two decades ending up with the company filing for bankruptcy in 2012.
How Nokia lacked initiative to participate in the Smartphone battles
Nokia, a Finnish company which started out in the pulp mill industry back in 1865, in 1960 Nokia first ventured into the telecommunication markets going from military, government and enterprise markets slowly towards consumer markets with car-phones and personal computers, until 1987 when they rolled out the first product that can truly be described as a mobile phone, the Mobira Cityman 900.
While we won’t go into the inner workings of Nokia’s corporate culture & structure, we will establish that it is that same culture which was the main reason for their failure in adopting the innovation of smartphones. The smartphone innovation was foreseen by Nokia’s Management as early as 2005, and it was also viewed as an important shift in the market. The problem arose when the top and middle management had to do something at risk of losing their status due to shifting organizational structures.
So it wasn’t any lack of foresight as in Kodak’s case. It was lack of initiative and fear of internal struggles that brought Nokia to let innovation pass it by.
Nokia’s fall from grace teaches us that knowledge isn’t enough, you gotta have the guts to do something about it.
This doesn’t mean you need to delay work because you’re still learning, it means that the work itself is the process from which you gain knowledge, and doing things you don’t know perfectly will get you there.
Work to learn, Learn by Doing.
Good Luck from QLC.