Edumacated Marketers

Do certificates = Results?

March 28, 2024

In partnership with

Hello Marketers ☕🧇

A long weekend awaits us all. Good!

Do you remember the days of having entire weeks off for Easter, Summer and Winter? Want to reminisce and go back to school? Because for a lot of marketing people, it would probably help you. (No offense).

Now why do I say that?

Marketing Week did a survey in 2019 that found 53.8% of marketers haven’t studied a formal qualification in marketing. 🤯

That can be seen as a great pro of working in marketing. The bar to entry is incredibly low, and the opportunity to earn is very high (so I hear). Yay? Eh.

What this does open us up to, is the Finance Bro, ‘Buy My Course’, ‘Guaranteed Rank 1’ style marketers. You know the types. Posing with a rented Lamborghini on Instagram or YouTube saying how they got rich via marketing… but the irony being, it’s the marketing of the course that made them wealthy.

Not from any prior experience.

If you charge $997 for a course and it costs $100 to acquire a desperate customer, it’s just a money printer. That’s only 1,000 sales until you can buy a house somewhere, AND have a Lambo. Not bad.

And you know what? It’s pretty hard to push back against that, because many of us just don’t have the sheer cajones to pull off such a lucrative, and brash way of existing in our world.

We need to start making better marketers, and we need to start now.

So that’s why I’m happy to share the FIRST EVER sponsor for Marketing Waffle. HubSpot!

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Back to Waffle…

Now that you’ve downloaded the 2024 State of Marketing report, let me explain my view on the state of things, and why continued education (free or not), is important for marketers. And, for the sake of our industry.

I’m not saying gatekeeping is important. In fact, I’m quite proud of the social mobility stories I know from experience that a marketing career has provided for many I know. But, the reality is, we don’t need more crap marketers. We just need the ones we’ve got to be better.

I’ve worked on many projects, for many businesses internally, and externally. You get to see the world a bit. Mediocrity really is everywhere when it comes to marketing.

“Let’s post twice as much.”
“Let’s put in twice as many hashtags.”
“We don’t need to worry about the bigger picture on this one.”
“Pls make logo bigger.”
“I hate this theory nonsense.”

Okay, all of these things can be said with good reason at some stage. The problem is, it usually isn’t. It’s normally a sign of box-ticking, and a complete disregard of stitching projects and ideas together into the bigger marketing machine.

What does reading a book have to do with this?

Your unchallenged marketing opinions get challenged. Properly.

Marketing degrees get laughed off as “irrelevant after 5 years”, which may have some weight, but by reading others’ opinions, besides your bosses, you can get a better picture of what has, could, and should work for you.

From the survey I mentioned earlier, degrees just don’t hold as much weight as well-structured extracurricular formal education later on. Over half of the questioned professionals found this sort of education ‘Very Useful’.

Mark Ritson does a course, The Chartered Institute of Marketing have courses galore, and there will be some other serious professional-level education providers out there. Besides that, there are so many free resources to help you get better at your job. You’ll be levels ahead of your colleagues in no time. Especially if you read Marketing Waffle 👀

And if you want a reading list of great books that’ll level up your brain, refer a friend!

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Wise words.