Dear marketer,
As somebody who runs a marketing school and a marketing festival for marketers in business (Business of Marketing), let me tell you something.
When it comes to growing your career, knowing your KPIs will take you so far.
Learning to harness your curiosity and your critical thinking, and getting properly obsessed with your customer journey, will take you much, MUCH further. I swear.
I’ve been in marketing for 16 years. And for a long time I didn’t realise that having the confidence to pitch my ideas mattered as much as (if not more than) so many of the things I thought were the real job. The frameworks, and the reports I spent hours making look nice.
Those things still matter, they’re your entry ticket. But every marketer I’ve watched grow fast had something else going on too, and it rarely shows up on a job description.
So let me unpick the four skills I wish someone had told me to practise much earlier.
1. Curiosity
One of my most annoying traits as a child? I was insatiably curious.
I used to sit with my granddad’s Animal Encyclopaedia (the Sea volume, always) and fire questions at him. Why does that fish do that? Why is it shaped like that? Bless him, he’d answer what he could, then scramble through the pages for the rest. I was never satisfied with just an answer. I had to understand it on my own terms.
I carried that straight into marketing, and it has been my biggest edge ever since. Platforms and algorithms change constantly, and so do people. The marketers who keep up are the ones who keep asking questions and testing things to see what happens.
You don’t need another course to stay curious (I say this as someone who runs one). A few habits do most of the work:
- Spend time with marketers who think differently from you. Go to events, join a community, ask real questions and actually listen.
- Poke around new platforms, even ones you’re not ready to use. Work out why people are gathering there.
- Study brands outside your space. Cross-industry ideas are often the most inspiring ones.
2. Critical thinking
Curiosity asks the questions. Critical thinking refuses to accept the first answer.
Take one of the most repeated pieces of marketing advice out there: “You can never go wrong by asking your audience directly.”
Eh. You can go VERY wrong.
You can ask people who have never spent time, money or reputation on the problem you solve. You can ask leading questions, like “How easy was that?”, which already assumes it was easy. You can ask “How much would you pay?” and treat the answer as gospel (spoiler: people guess). You can listen only to your loudest customers and miss the quiet buyers completely.
The advice sounds right. Applied without thinking, it sends you in the wrong direction with total confidence.
The same goes for every dashboard, report and AI-generated strategy that lands on your desk. A chart can tell you open rates dropped. It can’t tell you why, or what to do next. Asking “Where did this come from? Is this true for our customers? What would have to be true for this to work?” is the bit that turns numbers into decisions. It’s also the bit people remember you for.
3. Getting obsessed with your customer journey
If you take one thing from this letter, make it this one. I loved it so much I wrote a whole book about it.
Look closely at the marketing I’m asked to fix and the same pattern keeps showing up. The launch that flopped, the email that didn’t sell, the content that gets likes and zero enquiries. More often than not, somewhere along the way, the business stopped looking at what it actually feels like to be their customer.
Getting obsessed means walking the journey yourself. Sign up to your own newsletter. Buy your own product. Read every reply to your welcome email. Notice where people drop off and get genuinely nosy about why. The best marketers I know act as customer advocates inside their business: listening, spotting patterns and feeding them back to whoever needs to hear it.
I once asked a room full of marketers what marketing was missing most right now. The winner wasn’t “AI” or “budget”. It was kindness. To customers, to teams, to ourselves.
Tools will change. People won’t. The marketer who understands those people better than anyone else in the room is very hard to replace.
4. The confidence to pitch your idea
Nobody told me about this one. For years I thought being really good at one thing was the whole job, and I was “the content person”. Then I watched three content people get replaced by one person who could also read a spreadsheet, brief a designer and hold a proper conversation with the sales team.
What that person had, more than any single skill, was the confidence to walk into a room and make the case for an idea. To back it, even the slightly wild ones, and nobody could shut them out by saying “that’s not really your area”.
You can have the sharpest insight about your customers in the whole company. If you can’t pitch it, it stays in your notes app.
The good news is that confidence can be practised. My favourite (slightly cringe) trick: when you’re stuck on a new idea, pitch it to yourself first. Present it out loud as if someone else were listening, record it, and play it back the next day with a fresh head. You’ll hear the holes. You’ll also hear the bits that are genuinely good, and that’s where the confidence comes from.
So, back to those KPIs
Learn them, and get comfortable talking about them in meetings.
Just don’t mistake them for the job. KPIs tell you what happened. Curiosity tells you where to look, critical thinking tells you what it means, customer obsession tells you who it’s for, and confidence gets your idea out of your head and into the room.
None of those come with a certificate, and no tool is going to do them for you. They grow when you practise them, and they grow fastest around other marketers who are practising them too. That’s why I built a school, and it’s why I’m building a festival.
So here’s my question for you: which of these four have you been quietly leaving to chance?
Always cheering you on,
Fab
