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How To Use Direct Marketing Techniques To Get The Marketing Job You Want - A Guide For College Students By Karl G. Dentino GETTING STARTED Preparing Your Marketing Plan: One of the things that most leading marketing executives agree on is that great advertising comes only from great planning. Breakthrough ideas and brilliant campaigns rarely happen by accident. Behind each one is a well-conceived marketing plan. The final creative product on television, in print, or in the mailbox is only one small step in a long and carefully planned developmental process. The same holds true for your resume. Like the advertisement, it too is only one step in a larger process. When advertising agency teams pitch a new account, they don't start by creating advertising. They start by learning more about the product. They study its manufacture and distribution. They analyze the category, examining sales trends and competitive activities. They study the consumer of the product to gain insight into usage habits and attitudes about the product, the company, and the category. Then and only then do they start thinking about creating advertising. Advertising that ignores these critical steps is doomed to fail. Many brilliant advertising ideas never see the light of day because they are "off strategy." So when you begin the job hunt, you don't start by writing your resume. To stay on strategy, there are several preparatory activities you need to work through before you put pen to paper. How do you prepare? Like a marketing manager, you develop a marketing plan. There are literally dozens of ways to write a marketing plan. Which outline or format you choose isn't important. What's important is that you seek to answer the right questions. Your plan is both the destination and the journey. It defines where you want to go and how you plan to get there. So take your time and give careful consideration to all the options. Think about marketing planning in terms of building a pyramid: Each brick represents a key decision. You lay the most bricks in the first row. At each successive level you're building on what you did before, and though you'll have fewer bricks as you progress from one level to the next, each individual brick becomes more critical. If a new brick doesn't fit just right, you can easily remove it, reshape it, and then replace it if the foundation you've built is sound.
Whether you want to create advertising or create a job, the way to do it is by establishing a solid strategic foundation and then building on it one layer at a time. When you finally get to the critical creative decisions, the chances of making fatal errors are minimized if you've done your planning properly. You may find this marketing plan outline useful:
Setting Your Objectives To get any marketing project off to a good start, it's always a good idea to begin by asking a simple question: "What am I trying to achieve with this project?" Great care should be taken to ensure that your answers to this question aren't ambiguous, because your responses need to add up to a clear statement of objectives. In your role as a job-hunting marketing manager, here are some key questions you can ask yourself to help make sure they do:
These are the kinds of tough questions you need to work through before you start doing things. Chances are, if you don't spend time up-front considering critical questions such as these, you could spend a lot of time wasting time. An old saying suggests, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." But how can you carve out a plan for the rest of your professional life in marketing if you've never even set foot in a marketing department or advertising agency? Isn't it a bit unreasonable to expect a graduating college student to make a decision about the next forty-plus years, before you even get out into the "real world"? It's not realistic to expect people who are just entering the work force to know with certainty what they'll be doing--or even want to be doing--fifteen, ten, or even five years down the road; it is important for graduates to envision one or more career path scenarios. If you're like most people, you'll continue revising and refining your plan until you retire. But unless you start thinking "career" instead of "job," there's a chance you could end up missing out on larger, and more satisfying, opportunities. If you don't know yet what it is you want to do, you need to start finding out--or a least narrowing your options--before you become too involved in mailing out resumes. How do you find out? By doing research; by becoming informed. That means reading, asking questions, and listening. If your research leads you to a crossroad (i.e., if you're torn between two or more viable and distinct career options), good for you! You'll probably have twice the workload of your single-minded counterparts, but you'll also probably have twice the number of chances to achieve success. Remember, though, that until you can state your objectives on paper, you're not yet ready to begin your job hunt. Make sure you use a pencil with an eraser--you'll need it. And remember that the first row of the pyramid has the most bricks. This preparatory step in your job hunt can be fun, informative, and quite rewarding. To make the result meaningful and useful, try to narrow your career path alternatives down to a handful. When I tried this exercise, I identified four possible career paths: copywriting, account management, production management, and media planning. I then listed the half-dozen or so characteristics that might describe the ideal first job in each category. The path I eventually settled on was account manager. My short-term objectives looked something like this:
When setting short-term objectives, it's also a good idea to try to envision your "ideal" company. Here are the key factors I wrote down when I was describing my own "ideal" employer:
When defining your own objectives, it's important to recognize that they're not meant to be restricting. If you want to be an account executive and you learn of an entry-level position in media, by all means, get out your eraser. At this point in your career, virtually any marketing experience will be useful in any marketing-oriented career path. The objective-setting process is meant to give you a frame of reference, a basis for evaluating different opportunities. It would be unusual if you didn't modify your objectives as you proceed along your job-hunting journey. By committing your ideal job to paper, you've laid the first, most critical, row of bricks for your pyramid. And once this foundation is in place, your next task is to figure out how you'll get to the top. Getting To Know Your Target Prospects One of the most common mistakes that marketers make is to think they know more about their customers than they actually do. No matter how much you, your boss, or your client may love your idea, it's completely worthless if the customer doesn't find it relevant and meaningful. David Ogilvy used to urge his copywriters to get out from behind their typewriters and get into the supermarkets and shopping centers to avoid losing touch with the people they were trying to motivate. As a job-hunting marketing manager, you face the same challenge. Once you've set objectives, you need to "get in touch" with your prospective customers. The better you understand them and the more you can empathize with their needs, the easier it will be to persuade them to see value in you. A good marketing manager will do research to learn about how customers relate to a product category. You'll want to research your market by investigating different companies that do what you want to do. The time you spend on market research will help you test your objectives and refine them based on what you learn. You also will begin to gain insight on how to communicate with your prospects. Specifically, you want to find out as much as you can about four things: the business, the companies, the positions, and the career path or paths that interest you. How do you conduct your investigation? By doing what you were advised to do earlier: Read, ask questions, and listen. What To Read: everything relevant that you can get your hands on --books, newspapers, trade publications, annual reports, and so on. A wealth of marketing, advertising, promotion, and public relations materials has been published or reprinted during the last several years. Most should be available at your school or community public library. No matter what area of marketing interests you, a good place to start are the "redbooks." These are large directories that provide brief profiles of companies, organized by industry and location, and include The Direct Marketing MarketPlace, The Standard Directory of Advertisers, and The Standard Directory of Advertising Agencies. Trade magazines are likely to publish annual directories as well. The Investigative Interview One of the best investigative strategies you can use is to obtain interviews under the guise of information-gathering. This involves identifying those companies in which you're interested and arranging an interview. But in this interview, you ask the questions. The purpose of the "informational interview" is for you to ask questions that will help you fine-tune your career intentions. Interviewing for information can be a wonderfully effective strategy. You'll learn a great deal, you'll get your feet wet in an interview setting, you'll meet people and make contacts, and you just might impress someone enough to persuade them to hire you. Be sure to set up separate files for each company you investigate. Include everything from articles by and about the companies to personal notes you made about how a particular person or place made you feel after a visit. As your file on a company grows, it should start to suggest a profile that's unique to that company. This profile should include obvious things like the company's lines of business and its financial health. But your file should also include deeper information that could help you determine whether you'd like to work there. Try to answer questions like:
Try to assess how strong the company is in its category:
How many companies should you investigate? As many as you can. The time you spend here is time well spent. Even if you don't obtain a job interview at a given company, you can't help but become more informed and conversant about companies, product categories, marketing, direct marketing, and business events in general...all useful knowledge that can only help you in your job hunt.
Developing Your Database Have you ever wondered why you receive certain offers in the mail? Usually it's because you've demonstrated a certain kind of consumer behavior that leads a marketer to suspect you might be interested in that company's products or services. For instance, an offer from a music club might be the result of your filling out a warranty card from a stereo equipment purchase, or an invitation from a ski resort might be the result of repeat purchases from an outdoor clothing catalog company. If you've bought something through the mail, chances are the company from whom you made the purchase not only has a record of your purchase, but has stored information in its database about what you bought, when you bought, and how much you spent. If the people who run the company are smart, they'll use every bit of this purchasing information to help them make a wide range of marketing decisions about a number of different things, including: product development, pricing, seasonality, media and creative strategies, offers, and more--all with the aim of making future communications to you more meaningful and relevant. This is database marketing. When marketers use customer information intelligently, they dramatically increase the likelihood that future offers will be of interest to their recipients, and that they'll get better response rates. When marketers ignore information (or worse, misuse it), the mailing piece is usually irrelevant and unwanted. The benefits of a database approach to marketing are clear and simple: better results, better relationships with customers, less waste, and higher profit. As a job-hunting marketing manager, you face the same challenge: The most important by-product of all your careful detective work is the list of companies for whom you'd like to work. Use this information intelligently and you can turn your resume into a meaningful and relevant communication. Misuse it or ignore it and you create "corporate junk mail." Building Your Prospect Database 1. Think database, not mailing list. As you build your mailing list of prospective companies and individuals, don't settle for just names, addresses, and titles. Strive to get deeper information. More information leads to more knowledge, which gives you more insight, which leads to more relevance in your resume and cover letter, which leads to more and better job interviews. Be on the lookout for news about new accounts, promotions, reorganizations, new product introductions, a shift in a product or company's positioning, and the like. These events usually trigger personnel moves which could spell opportunity for the insightful job hunter. 2. Collect information from several sources. Trade publications are rich in their supply of current events. Your local or college library may subscribe to periodicals and electronic information services that will allow you to gain virtually instantaneous access to information on an almost infinite number of topics from a variety of sources. The business columns in daily newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are also excellent resources. There is nothing wrong with using the recruitment ads placed in the "Want Ad" sections of newspapers and trade publications as a source for leads, but keep in mind that you will encounter considerable competition, because these ads tend to attract lots of replies. Also consider that most companies place only a fraction of their job openings in media advertisements, so it's best to view these ads as supplemental to your other sources.
3. Use a technique called "laddering." Get the names of several people employed in the area of the company in which you're particularly interested. For instance, if you're interested in account management as a career path and you've identified an advertising agency that's recently acquired a new client, you might include several names on your list: the President, the Director of Client Services or Account Management, the appropriate Management Supervisor, Account Supervisor(s), and even the appropriate Account Executive(s). That way you'll reach everyone on the team who might see you as a solution to a problem. 4. Don't count on the human resources department. You want to reach the people who will make the purchase decision. While human resource department personnel play a critical role in many organizations, typically they're not the people who make the hiring decisions. The final hiring decisions almost always are made by the manager of the department you want to work in. So don't go to personnel. So try to go straight to the buyer. 5. Call Ahead. It's a good idea to call the companies in your database to verify the accuracy and correct spelling of the company name, people's names and titles, and address before you send out anything. When To Do What The three components of the preparation stage we've discussed--Setting Your Objectives, Getting To Know Your Target Prospects, and Developing Your Database--could easily be thought of as simultaneous and concentric activities rather than sequential ones. Your activities in one area will often modify your activities in the other. Once you're satisfied with your chosen direction and focus, you have completed the planning phase of your job-hunting marketing plan, and you are now ready to begin the tactical phase.
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