Day in the life of
Marketing Director – Don Rua
Job Title
Currently: Marketing Director, but I’ve held positions as Product Manager, MarTech Director, and Digital Marketing Manager, all for software and software+hardware companies, and have held a leadership position over front end and back end developers.
My Typical Day
Short answer
After some early morning review of tasks lists, strategic planning, and team standups, my day is jumping from one MarTech channel to another (email, web, social, ads, video, etc) to launch campaigns, run tests, produce content, or make adjustments to move the needle forward. There is never an end to opportunities to tweak and dial-in better marketing across digital channels, so I have plenty to do, plenty to discover, and plenty of value to add every single day.
More detail and context
I prefer to work in startups, and it’s not unusual to start with one digital marketer covering all channels, so my days are very busy. It’s like spinning plates on a stick, and you have to keep running from one plate to the next to keep all 10 spinning without any crashing. I oversee our output and results for email, video, advertising, blog and website copywriting, web template and page modifications, automated chat, marketing automation and workflow, social media posting, SEO, Google Analytics and overall website traffic, conversion optimization, and A/B testing, and more. And yes, I literally have objectives and hands-on activities in each of those areas.
A Day in the Life
We are a remote company, I work at home, and I did previously at my last job for a software company with under 100 employees. I have a dedicated office in my home.
Morning
First thing I’m typically reviewing what I need for the day, checking my ClickUp task list, and wrapping up any unfinished items from the night before. Then join a morning standup with our Sales, Marketing, and Onboarding teams. We discuss successes, ongoing challenges with customers, content needs, product needs, attribution and use of CRM systems, etc. I like to schedule time for research and activities that are required ongoing, so at 11am-12pm I may have an hour dedicated to producing social media posts, researching industry topics to share, and scheduling social posts for the week. Then I may jump to building out an email newsletter for the week, turning to my content planning spreadsheet to find the articles to share in the newsletter, opening Photoshop to build images to go with the articles. As I build it out I will be reviewing all of the lists of emails targeted and may want to do some tweaks on targeting to expand the reach.
Setting up workflows in HubSpot
After lunch
After lunch I may spend an hour reviewing our Google search and retargeting ad campaigns, filtering our negative keywords, checking performance numbers by ad, ad group, and campaign. Then I may review one of our content clusters on the website, upgrade and enhance some of our blog articles to keep them fresh. I might then spend 30 minutes reviewing our position ranking in SEMrush vs our competitors across hundreds of keywords, or perhaps do some gap analysis on what keywords our competitors are targeting that we are not.
Tracking keyword rankings in SEMRush
Later in the day
Later in the day, I may review some blog articles written by freelancers I use from UpWork or WriterAccess, as well as work on blog posts that I’m writing on a topic that needs our own data and expertise. End of the day I might be reviewing a video we shot at our team summit, moving clips in and out to create a sequence with some narrative, and sending the timecodes back to an editor for final polish.
Pros
I love my job. I’m excited every day to start work and solve problems. It’s like game playing, constantly solving a puzzle to make the world better for our customers, for their customers, for our shareholders, for our team, etc. And there’s constant change, constant innovation in the field of digital marketing, so I’m never bored. My personality is attracted to the variety of tasks, and the opportunity to make a change which, when iterated 1000’s of times via automation, can have a big impact on our bottom line.
I also love the interaction with all levels and teams in the company. To produce content that connects with all of our audience, I need to know what dev is cooking up or about to launch, I need to know what questions are being asked of our support team, I need to know the macro forces on our market and industry and be in sync with the CEO‘s vision. It’s an opportunity to learn and synthesize which is mentally stimulating.
Cons
I don’t really feel any cons in my day to day, but there’s always a wish for more resources to apply specialization. Each marketing channel can benefit greatly from applied specialization from an FTE hire or boutique agency. I’m not as efficient building CSS and web page templates as a developer, not as quick in image manipulation as a designer, don’t have the connections of a PR firm, I can’t make as involved email campaigns with just a few hours a week, etc. It’s exciting to have an impact in all of those areas, but I also know that anywhere I could add some help, would really help against marketing objectives.
HubSpot page builder
Advice for students who are interested in getting into Marketing
If you love solving problems, and want the results of your efforts directly observable in your customers’ and prospects’ success, to be able to tie your efforts to the company’s bottom line, Marketing is a good career. Huge dollars that used to be spent on IT and dev have shifted to MarTech budgets. Data science is a growing area that is very relevant for marketing. At my last Fortune 500, we had a team of 6 data scientists within the marketing department, helping with segmentation, surfacing marketing or pricing insights, etc.
Marketing depts can make good use of a variety of educational backgrounds. Mine and plenty of others I’ve met are in psychology, with a hunger for why people behave how they do, and formal education in the scientific method, research methods, testing methods, and statistical analysis. But I’ve worked with great marketers with a degree in English, Business, Math, Economics, and more.
Also, in marketing, there are many many ways you can take your career. Some of my web admins have shifted fully into an IT and dev career, another into game dev for EA. I have watched marketers grow into Product Analysts, Marketing Product Managers, Campaign Directors, Account Managers, Ad Specialists, Email Marketing Specialists, and much more. To me, marketing is pure play, and near daily I find myself hitting a flow state where I’m just digging into a marketing problem, building out solutions, testing, and publishing. Maybe today it’s chat flow logic, tomorrow it’s 3 different copy lines set up for testing on a website CTA button, or perhaps it’s structuring an outline to present our data showing we beat the competition on performance by 14X (true story). I highly encourage a marketing path for those with inquisitive minds, who want to chase new challenges regularly, who have competence in writing, statistics, and outside the box problem solving.
Context
I’ve launched a SaaS startup and handled the marketing, I’ve worked at startups as a marketing director, and I’ve worked at Fortune 500 with a team of 150 in the marketing department, so I have seen a wide variety of marketing approaches, expertise, etc.
Trends
Marketing will always be a home for creatives, (graphic artists, video specialists, writers), but the past 15 years there’s been a transformation in Marketing across all size companies. MarTech exploded as a category of software to help Marketing handle scale, digital channels, tie marketing efforts directly to revenue, bring more accountability, and take advantage of the tremendous innovation and disruption for marketers. The emergence of social media, use of mobile, explosion of video content and platforms, advances in ML, and tools for any marketer to apply A/B and multivariate testing to their output, has created a rich career field with new things to learn every week.
Don Rua
Marketing Director
Admiral, a B2B SaaS company
Working at Admiral
