Author: Sara Salarvand

No day is the same, which I don’t think is a bad thing. That is why I was drawn to this role and to marketing.

There are always deadlines for deliverables that we’re marching towards. We have regular meetings with both current and extended teams for projects, meetings with stakeholders, and sessions for self-development, during which we carve out time to focus on those deliverables. We are also always prepared for some sort of twist, whether it’s a last-minute communication or a high-priority shift, because promotions and pricing in marketing readiness can sometimes be unpredictable.

I’m not just a marketer; I am also an internal communicator, so my audience primarily consists of frontline associates and leaders. Sometimes, executives and other positions within the organization see our work as well.

My advice is to take the time to learn who your sales audience and stakeholders are and talk to them often. This could mean meetings, surveys, store visits, asking for feedback prior to launches, etc. This is my 19th year at UScellular and I’ve worked in multiple roles that have thankfully created lots of relationships. These are the same people that have referred new people to me and have spoken highly of me when I wasn’t in the room.

We have the type of organization where we can easily get to know people. Our company supports Associate Resource Groups and events that allow us to network and connect on various topics. I suggest getting involved if your company offers this. I can name five people off the top of my head who have been here for over 20 years. It’s just that kind of organization. I’ve worked in frontline sales, as a supervisor, in process improvement, in operations, and in performance management. In all those different roles, I’ve built great connections, which is a beautiful thing. I would highly recommend staying in touch with those you meet along the way because you never know when your paths will cross again and who will be referring you for a new role.

I have this awesome network, from the care center to sales and now a few executives because I have worked in various departments. There are not many answers I can’t find because I’ve been here for so long, and I know someone who will at least know who to call. If you haven’t been with your company for long, just start somewhere. It could be grabbing coffee with someone new or participating in a work event and setting a goal to make at least three new connections. We all had to start somewhere at some point.

What is your advice for new grads?

My advice for them would be to crawl, please crawl before you walk. If you can get an internship first, go for it. Hopefully, if you work hard and do well, you can get hired on. However, if that’s not the path, there is a lot of networking potential for the future. I would have loved to have had a marketing internship. My experience in this industry was that a lot of the experience that I didn’t have was needed right after graduation. I asked myself, how do I get experience if I don’t get the opportunity? I never gave up hope and kept working hard. I also continued to network, and what I found was that in different capacities, I could still work in or with marketing. Sales and marketing go hand in hand, so I took the sales path when I could not get directly into marketing.

Marketing is what I wanted to do and so I would also talk to marketers when I had the chance. That is how I ended up in this current role. A couple of colleagues in marketing, were aware of my desire to earn a role and approached me. They stated things like, “we talked to you about a role in marketing. We know you have these skills, so you should interview.” When I first started to join the job force, things were harder because I was so passionate. After graduation, you have the world in front of you and you just want to go out into the world and do what you majored in. What’s also sad is that a lot of folks don’t get to work in the field they got their degree in. But it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I’ve always enjoyed presenting, so I found ways to do it in other roles. Before I worked in marketing, I was known as a great communicator, which helped me brand myself and gain practice in preparing for the work I do now. I present a lot in this role, and I never knew I would, but I was prepared for it, because I found a way to incorporate my strong communication skills from my previous roles. 

My advice would be to find places where you can somehow incorporate that experience too, and it’ll also make you more well-rounded. Because I have sales, process improvement, and operational backgrounds, I can apply these experiences to communicate and teach strategically. I can also ask questions to stakeholders to get answers that can be incorporated in our readiness planning to support the frontline. It’s not my primary role to do so, but it sets us up for success, creates efficiencies, and enhances the partnerships that I have. I feel that it is important for new grads to chase their goals, make their intentions known, and don’t be afraid to have some role diversity. It has worked well for me. 

I also learned late in my career that mentors are “clutch”. I did not realize this for years. I was the type of person to just put my head down and thought my work will speak for me. Mentors can also be the voices in the room that advocate for you and they can also teach you some of the pitfalls and tips that worked for them to set you up for success.

That was a great overview of what you know. It is all about finding your strengths and personal branding. It’s also flattering too, to be selected to learn from. People need that in their life. And along those lines, did those mentors show you any particular path?

In my role, yes. Specifically, to the deliverables, not necessarily. A lot of the information or the guidance that I have received was about development: how to raise your hand and not wait to get called, how to network, how to follow up, and not to start your development plan in January and then forget about it. Also how to check in with your leader, your teams, and your stakeholders – knowing how important that is and that also keeps you relevant in certain capacities. It also keeps the lines of communication open, so people do not have to guess what your goals are. A lot of people won’t ask you what work you’re doing, so it’s up to you to inform them. I struggled with that before and a mentor had to tell me that you must brand yourself, you must advocate for yourself, you must stay organized, and follow up when necessary. 

My mentor doesn’t work in marketing. She’s in a different part of the organization, which is helpful for me, because I do have so many people in marketing that I still lean on, but she gives me a completely different perspective, and I appreciate that. She has access to different tools we don’t have in marketing, like these master trackers in excel or via other software or apps. As marketers, sometimes we just take off and “fly.” She has challenged me to sit back and map out the things that I’m trying to accomplish and track them accordingly. If I have a presentation that’s in six weeks, I know I need it reviewed two weeks prior and that keeps me organized.

Alerts keep me organized as well. For me, I like reminders and notifications. I set my alerts three to five days out, it will not be set for the next day, because you must plan for ad hoc things and life. I like and recommend my team’s approach to planning. We have multiple touch points to review our trackers and deliverables with our key stakeholders as well. We schedule things, but also have meetings with our extended partners to check in so that we’re all on the same page. These things help us tremendously.

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Here at HeadStart, we’re going against the grain, and we have been doing that for many years. We don’t want our clients to sound like everyone else, so we’re leaning in to writing with humans, for humans, and by humans. We work with you to create powerful, engaging marketing copy that gets attention. Contact HeadStart Copywriting today.

I think good storytelling and writing—two things I love—are at the heart of marketing. I also like its interdisciplinary nature. As marketers, we talk a lot about wearing different hats. This variety keeps it interesting and lets me switch between more analytic and creative approaches. I enjoy that balance between the two. 

Good storytelling depends on understanding the audience. It requires thinking about people’s behaviour, how they respond both emotionally and rationally, and how we make decisions based on that. I’m not always thinking about these high concepts in my day-to-day marketing tasks, but I do think these ideas inform everything in the background. Writing good copy comes from that combination of being analytical, being creative, and thinking about people at the center and how we work.

Before working in marketing, I worked in film, TV and commercial production, and that’s given me a specific—and very beneficial—literacy. Since a part of the content we do is video content, I’ve found this experience has been helpful when I’m working with freelancers or editors, having that understanding of what goes into a minute of video, in the same way that I understand what goes into a page of text. On a very practical level, even just understanding what file formats we’re going to need to deliver is helpful. 

I also like talking to people! Of course, interpersonal skills apply in any role on any day, but they’ve been a big asset when it comes to the partnership creation and management side of my role, which has been an aspect of the job that I enjoy and didn’t expect. Going back to the interdisciplinary aspect of the role that I like, personal strengths can also support professional strengths, and those partnerships have been valuable and have brought some success to our content. 

What is your #1 piece of advice for someone who wants to become a better marketer?

Something that I have been thinking about is my own consumer habits in relation to marketing. I’ll ask myself, “Why did I buy this thing today?” Or if I’m reading something or taking an interest in a company or a brand, I try to unpack that a little bit. For example, there’s an outdoor brand I follow on Instagram and I’m on their email list. I’ve never purchased anything from them, but I fill my cart every few months. When I do, I’ll try and answer, “Why did I fill my cart this time?” Is it because I saw they had a sale? Or because I’ve been seeing images of their products frequently? And then I ask, “Why do I not buy their stuff?” It turns out that often their inventory hasn’t changed that much over time, so if I didn’t purchase things the last time that I looked, there isn’t anything new. So, their marketing works well, but I haven’t bought anything because their product hasn’t changed at all. I’ll try to apply this to what I’m working on: How do you create a sense of newness if something hasn’t changed? Or, in reverse, if things are changing, how does that impact the way that you communicate about it and how do you create brand consistency? 

Lastly, what is your MarTech stack?

I’m probably a little old-fashioned. I like manual processes because they help me think through things. Adopting sophisticated systems sometimes bypasses the part of me that gets to think through things. Still, the things that I rely on are a good project management system and a good scheduler. I’m an aspiring Google Analytics user, so I use it in some really basic functions: measuring impact, understanding which pieces of data are meaningful and tell a good story, and learning the language of Google Analytics. 

I’m also finding ways to integrate tools like ChatGPT or Copilot. I had some reticence about using these tools, in that my role calls for using my ability to analyze and to come up with good copy. But I also feel like I’m not alone as a writer and editor because these tools complement what we bring to the table. I look for ways to make things more efficient and to open up space and capacity, even in my own brain. I want to be able to apply those skills in the places where it matters most, where there are more complicated problems to solve, when the communication is more complex, and when more factors are involved. Using these tools for simple tasks opens up space to focus on the meatier writing problems. They’re tools that save you time. I think I’m still a budding enthusiast in terms of wanting to figure out exactly how to make those tools work for me the best, and there’s a whole art to prompting—I don’t think I’ve totally grasped that yet—but I’m enjoying figuring out how it works. 

Those tools can be so great at following the rules, and that’s helpful. But it can also be great to know when to break the rules or play with the rules. I’m always interested in finding places where we want to be straight ahead and by the book or places where the wrong grammar is going to communicate better. The human element is relevant to these tools, and I think the human ability to interpret its output can be useful. 

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Here at HeadStart, we’re going against the grain, and we have been doing that for many years.We don’t want our clients to sound like everyone else, so we’re leaning in to writing with humans, for humans, and by humans. We work with you to create powerful, engaging marketing copy that gets attention. Contact HeadStart Copywriting today.

A few months back, I noticed that Grammarly had upgraded its plagiarism detector, adding an AI check. In addition to flagging passages that show similarity to existing online copy, the tool now highlights passages that “contain patterns often found in AI text.”  

Why is this a problem? I’m confident that none of these pieces – written according to detailed briefs submitted by clients – were generated by AI. Recent pieces I’ve written were 100% original, the product of my brain only. So why does Grammarly think that substantial chunks of my work resemble AI-generated content?

The answer is clear. Because AI tools like ChatGPT were trained on available online content, that content (including a lot of marketing material) forms the basis of their understanding of what web copy should be. And because these AI tools used well-established standards – including format, voice, length, headers, and keywords – when writing that content, it’s not surprising that ChatGPT tends to see itself when new content follows those same standards.  

And we have been doing that for many years. We don’t want our clients to sound like everyone else, so we’re leaning in to writing with humans, for humans, and by humans. We work with you to create powerful, engaging marketing copy that gets attention. Will the gains made by AI make it harder to stand out? What do you think?

I’m part of a small team. So, it’s me, our marketing director, and our social media manager, but the heavy lifting of the content falls on me. That’s everything from website copy to newsletters to press releases, anything that needs to be written, aside from social media. When I first started, I was doing that as well. 

I think I have an advantage because I’m not a career marketer. I spent 10 years as a high school teacher. When I got the job at my current company there was nobody in my role, so I think that was a real advantage for me because I got to see all aspects of marketing. I didn’t have any expectations because I wasn’t coming from a big marketing team. 

Blogs are always weighing on me. For example, I have only gotten two blogs out this month and my goal is to do three. Blog writing tends to be the thing that slips, because when we look at measurables, the ROI is difficult to measure. We’re really focused on driving sales, and it’s difficult to measure the impact of blogs on bringing in leads necessarily. We try to connect the dots to see if there’s a direct correlation there. So, it ends up being less of a priority, although it might be the thing that I prefer to do, rather than writing a sales email or ad copy. 

Are your customers in obvious places? Do your audience’s channels present a challenge for your prioritizing?

This is a huge challenge. When I started, we were more of a developer-oriented product, and very technical. They were pivoting as I joined, looking to hit the enterprise decision makers, who don’t care how the tech works, they just want to know what it can do. However, even though we are targeting enterprise decision makers, we don’t want to turn our backs on the developers. Many of these enterprises have their own development teams that could use our platform, so we want to appeal to their needs also. But developers are not the decision makers, they’re not the ones who are necessarily going to buy it. Creating content that kind of speaks to both audiences is difficult. But it’s also difficult because we’re also a horizontal solution that spans across industries, so that is a challenge as well. 

To create quality content, I must learn what the retailers need, and what the manufacturers need, and other industries. And so, from creating content, it’s a constant pull of not only writing blogs, or ad copy or emails, but also making sure we address the retail industry, the manufacturing industry, and the mining industry, etc.

Do you think that being a “lone ranger” gives your company an advantage? Do you have to have a marketer in each vertical?

If we had more people, everything would be a little bit easier.

But you’re finding it doable? And you are obviously seeing some results?

I am finding it doable; I am getting results. I think with content, there’s this constant push of doing more and more. Maybe that philosophy is not the best, and we would end up with filler. But because I have to be really thoughtful about where I put my energy, maybe being a lone ranger is an advantage.

I do think there’s a personalization when you’re the Lone Ranger. I am currently starting outreach to industry publications – researching popular industry-specific publications. I’ve been able to find some writers and reach out directly to them, writer-to-writer. I think this gives less of a corporate marketing approach with the need to try to sell something. The goal for me is more about educating the market with the hope of spreading brand awareness. I’m able to personalize my outreach, explain that I have a small team and that I’m looking for some help getting our message out – not trying to advertise. Maybe this feels more personal, than if I was with a huge company, with a huge marketing team. 

Is there a difference between having a lot of marketers on the team versus just you and the budget?

Obviously the company is trying to balance the budget. If I’m doing too good a job with content marketing, then it may seem like I don’t need the extra help. But there are areas where I’m obviously not an expert. I’m not an SEO expert, I don’t particularly like SEO but we were able to budget for an outside SEO firm, because our leadership team also recognizes that landing on the first page of Google is important. We’re trying to reach all these different industries, and I don’t really know what the best keywords are, so we were able to present SEO expertise as a real need. SEO takes a lot of time, it is a science, and it’s always changing, so I could put my effort towards that, but then we’d lose the other value that I can bring.

Are there any tools you want to tell other marketers you appreciate in your daily world?

I do use LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT more. These tools are good for some tasks but I see them as simply one more tool. For example, I’m not great at writing headlines. I’ll ask Gemini for some help, but I rarely just copy and paste the result as they tend to be formulaic. But there might be a phrase, a snippet, or verb that I can use. I think I like Gemini because it often gives you options.

I think Google Analytics is very useful. If you play with it, you can pick it up without much experience and get some good insights into where traffic is coming from, where users click and for how long. So, I find some of those insights valuable. We were using HubSpot for social media scheduling, but all social media sites have gotten better about their own scheduling tools like LinkedIn. You can schedule posts on almost all platforms, so you don’t need to go off-site.

I think right now is a very exciting time to be a marketer. We’re truly living in the golden age of marketing technology with access to innovative software, analytics tools, and online learning opportunities. Marketing has become less of an art form and more like science. There’s so much more freedom of action. We can now bring campaigns to market much quicker, prototype concepts more easily, and test initiatives in real time. However, all this progress comes with a level of accountability never before seen in the history of marketing as a profession.

I am an avid reader of history. I find that understanding historical perspectives has helped me recognize emerging trends in customer behaviors, markets, and business cycles as well as how they connect to wider patterns. 

Also, speaking multiple languages and having lived in many different countries has given me cross-cultural awareness that is important in our globalized world. This awareness helps me empathize and see things from other people’s perspectives. I cannot overstate how important this has been for my personal and professional growth.

What is your #1 piece of advice that you have for someone who wants to become a better marketer?

Advice that I got very early in my career is that good strategy is extremely important, but excellence in execution can make all the difference. So, as you’re building strategy, as you’re building scale, put equal focus on your execution plan because that’s what truly makes any campaign successful. 
 
I would also advise that whatever stage you are at in your marketing career to show up and focus on getting things done. Because once you’ve built a reputation as someone who can produce quality work reliably, whether it’s strategizing or executing on a tactical level, more opportunities will open that will supercharge your career’s growth trajectory.

Lastly, embrace a culture of accountability and be open to learn and relearn things at all times. Whether you do that through structured channels like training or informal ones like seeking mentors around you — make sure the learning never stops. 

You’ll find that everybody thinks they can do a marketer’s job but not many can do this job well — at a level of reliable accuracy. This means the race is always on to show the value that you add through a snowballing effect of consistent good marketing.