Stepping into a new marketing role often feels chaotic before it feels clear.
You arrive ready to get started, and within a few days, someone mentions a website update. Another colleague brings up social media. Someone else wants to know if ads are possible. Before long, you are working on different tasks without a clear foundation or strategy.
It happens in many companies, but it is not the best way to begin.
Marketing roles often carry expectations before there has been any honest discussion of goals or direction. That pressure can push people into action too quickly, long before they have had time to understand the business and their audience.
At redrose.digital, we meet many skilled marketers who felt this rush in their early months. They were capable and eager to contribute, but weren’t given the time to understand the landscape before being rushed into activity.
If you are starting your first marketing role, moving to a new company, or preparing to hire someone for this position, the steps in this guide will help you establish a strong foundation.
Why New Marketers Feel Rushed Into Doing Too Much Too Soon
Most businesses want results quickly, especially if marketing lacked structure before. That urgency trickles down to the person in the role. It creates the impression that activity is proof of progress, even when it lacks a strategy.
The problem is simple: if you start delivering before you know the audience, the competition, or the current strengths and weaknesses, all you’re doing is guessing. Things might work, but only by chance. And when they don’t, confidence dips on both sides, even though the groundwork was never there to begin with.
Taking the time to pause, research, and understand the current structure is the key to long-term campaign success. To make things easier, we’ve broken down this initial learning period into five simple steps.
Step 1: Audit What Already Exists
One of the most helpful places to begin is with the work that came before you. Many new marketers inherit a mixture of half-finished ideas, old campaigns, outdated pages, and a few ideas that genuinely worked but were never repeated.
Spend time gathering everything you can find: past campaigns, website pages, social posts, email activity, reports, notes, and customer feedback.
The aim isn’t to necessarily criticise previous campaigns or activity. It’s to understand what the business has tried, what made a difference, and what stalled because no one had time to maintain it.
Most SMEs don’t realise how many gaps sit under the surface. Missing data. Outdated lists. Important content that was never documented. Processes that only exist inside one person’s memory. Once you start piecing all of this together, you get a clearer sense of where you actually stand.
Step 2: Understand Your Buyers
After you’ve reviewed the existing work, the next step is getting to know the people you’re trying to reach. It sounds obvious, but many marketing plans fall apart because no one ever stops to ask the basic questions:
- Who buys from the business?
- What encourages them to choose you over someone else?
- Where do they look for information when they need help?
- What makes them hesitate?
When you understand the buying journey, planning the marketing strategy becomes easier. Messaging feels more natural, the right channels start to reveal themselves, and you build ideas based on real customer behaviour and personas rather than relying on assumptions.
Also, take time to speak with people when you can: sales teams, customer support, and even a couple of long-standing clients. These conversations often provide better insights than trying to determine the company’s position on your own.
Step 3: Research Competitors
Many marketers look at competitors to see what others are doing. That’s useful, but it’s only part of the picture.
The real value comes from asking the following questions:
- Who do your buyers compare you to?
- What do these competitors handle effectively?
- Which areas of their messaging feel weak or confusing?
- How present are they across key online spaces?
- And which platforms or opportunities have they overlooked?
The point of competitor research isn’t to copy what others do. It’s to find the opportunities they’ve missed.
If everyone in your sector repeats the same talking points, that’s a chance to introduce a message that actually stands out. If your competitors dominate one channel, you may find space in another. If their audience doubts something, you can address it directly and build trust faster.
Why Research Comes Before Delivery
Research might feel slow when you’re eager to get going, but it’s the step that makes every piece of marketing more effective. Without research, you’re operating on instinct. With research, you’re making decisions based on evidence.
Most new marketers don’t struggle because they’re bad at the job. They struggle because they’re expected to deliver before they know enough to make confident choices.
When you spend your first few months learning, things start to fall into place. Your messaging feels more accurate, your priorities become clearer, and your campaigns start to reflect what’s actually happening in the market. Over time, the work feels more directed and far easier to plan.
Step 4: Use Insight To Build the Strategy
Once you’ve gathered enough information, you can finally start shaping the practical plan. Instead of asking, “What should we do next?”, the question becomes, “What should we do based on what we know?”
With the research in place, it’s easier to establish a clear plan. Channels become easier to select because they’re rooted in how buyers make decisions. Messaging grows clearer as you draw from what you’ve learned rather than early assumptions. And the workload becomes more focused as opportunities rise to the surface, helping you prioritise certain activities over others.
Step 5: Give Yourself Room To Do the Job Properly
Starting a new marketing role comes with a mixture of excitement and pressure, and it’s easy to feel like you need to prove yourself straight away. But the most confident marketers are those who take the time to ask questions, observe patterns, and understand the environment before acting.
When the foundations are strong, daily marketing activities become clearer. The business sees progress that lasts. And you, as the marketer, finally get the space to do meaningful work instead of racing from one request to the next.
redrose.digital: Helping SMEs Set New Marketers Up for Success
If your business is bringing on a new marketer, we can help you establish the structure they need in the first few months.
Our support gives SMEs a clear view of what marketing should focus on, which areas matter most, and how to build a foundation that allows new hires to work confidently.