First of all, I never intended to work in marketing. In fact, I clearly remember telling a friend that did study marketing that her career basically existed to bamboozle* people into buying stuff.
Yep. I was that person.
But then, because life just works that way, I got surprised.
I graduated from university and had a chance to work in marketing right away. Back then, I didn’t know what I was doing. Not that I know now.
I was young, I didn’t know all the things I didn't know. And I just said yes to everything.
I learned that marketing is more than just bamboozling people. In fact, it’s not about bamboozling people, it’s about helping them discover the truth, about connecting with them, inspiring others.
I was the only one bamboozling myself. Bamboozle, bamboozle, bamboozle.
Life is funny that way. I always thought I’d be a journalist but turns out I never wanted that in the first place.
Suddenly, I was doing marketing stuff like creating social media content or running ad campaigns. Looking back, I can’t believe people trusted me to do those things, but I’m grateful.
Of course, I never learned how to do any of that in school. Weirdly, a lot of marketing people I know never studied to do it. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but how cool it is that a lot of people learn about marketing by doing it?
The nerd I am, I started reading about social media, about best practices in websites, about storytelling. I asked my marketing friends their opinions. I learned from amazing people that know more than me. I learned to create all sorts of things.
I tried everything, I had the privilege of doing it.
My first love was social media. I ran my first ad campaign on Facebook 10 years ago or something like that. Back when organic reach was a thing, ha!
So, what started as working on social media, quickly turned into other interesting projects like creating websites or running marketing campaigns for universities. Again, I can’t believe people trusted us (because I was working with others, of course) with that.
Slowly, I started to realize I loved some things more than others, which is also a luxury not many careers have. Marketing has soooo many things going on, so many things you can focus on!
And there it was. What I loved and enjoyed the most was creating content.
For some reason, I’ve always had to translate complicated and very specific things into content people would *easily* understand. Like just imagine creating an infographic about how sugar works in your body that a kid could understand. Or what about explaining to someone in a paragraph how public transportation works in Mexico (it was A BIG task). And don’t even get me started on natural language processing and all the tasks related, I basically had to get a master's degree to write those blog posts.
It sounds complicated but that’s something I love about creating content: turning complicated, complex information into easy, digestible, and sometimes funny content.
It’s like learning never stops. I’m just a nerd that enjoys learning. I’m not even sorry.
And, besides enjoying the creation process, there’s some magic happening after that.
Has someone ever liked a tweet you wrote? Or did someone re-shared a graphic you posted? Did your blog post get quoted somewhere else? Did someone, for any reason, ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been. Ever, for any reason. Whatsoever… ok
Ok, but what I’m trying to say is that when you create content that others find useful and enjoyable, well… that just gives me butterflies in my stomach. And yes, that still happens even if I’ve been doing it for some years already.
So, mostly, I love when people react to anything I create. Basically, I’m just doing marketing for the applause.
Kidding.
In marketing, I found a way to be creative and to help others while I do so. It’s something I enjoy doing every day, even when it gets difficult or frustrating. It’s how I earn a living and what I’m planning to keep doing in the future… unless for some reason I can pivot to sitcom writer. In that case, bye marketing!
*How cool it is that I can use the word bamboozle so much?
