Here's how you can leverage self-awareness to advance your career in digital strategy.

Self-awareness is the cornerstone of personal and professional growth. Start by conducting a thorough self-assessment to understand your strengths, weaknesses, values, and motivations. Utilize tools like SWOT analysis, personality tests, and feedback from colleagues to gain a comprehensive understanding of yourself. Reflect on past experiences and identify patterns in your behavior and decision-making. This deep self-knowledge will help you align your career path with your true interests and capabilities, enabling more authentic and effective contributions to your digital strategy role.

Understanding myself has been a game-changer in my digital strategy career. For example, I realized that I’m highly productive during the first three hours in the morning when I have no interruptions. Knowing this, I schedule my most important and demanding tasks for this time to maximize my efficiency. I also discovered that, while I can work very effectively under pressure, I highly dislike it. This insight has led me to improve my time management and planning skills to avoid last-minute rushes whenever possible. Understanding these personal preferences and tendencies helps me create a work environment that supports my strengths and mitigates my weaknesses.

Self-awareness is your compass in digital strategy. -Know your strengths and weaknesses. -Learn from feedback to grow. -Stay curious and adaptable. -Lead with confidence. -Shape impactful strategies.

La autoconciencia es fundamental en la estrategia digital. Conocer tus fortalezas y debilidades permite enfocarte en áreas de mejora y destacar tus habilidades únicas. Esto no solo optimiza tu rendimiento, sino que también te hace más adaptable a cambios rápidos en el entorno digital. Fomenta la reflexión continua y el aprendizaje constante, cruciales en un campo tan dinámico. Aprovechar la autoconciencia te permitirá identificar oportunidades de crecimiento y construir una marca personal sólida y auténtica, esencial para avanzar en tu carrera de marketing digital.

Self-awareness is my digital strategy superpower! It helps me play to my strengths, find learning styles that work, and identify areas to grow . Knowing my personality fuels motivation, and recognizing adaptability keeps me ahead of the curve. This lets me choose the right path and make a real impact in the ever-changing digital world.

Everybody is an expert in digital until they are not. Understanding that digital is a moving target and requires a multi-dimensional approach to understand yourself, your strengths and areas of development and your goals in terms of growth and learning.

Figure out what you're good at and where you need work. Be honest! This lets you focus on getting even better. Knowing how you handle stress helps you create a work environment you thrive in. This is a win-win.

Self awareness is typically tied to your core competencies which leads to biases against other marketing avenues. Agencies who only offer one or two services, will pitch against spending budget in the other channels. Agencies who just acquired another company and expanded the services services, will push the new services. What is not very well understood is that the actual platforms e.g. Google, Meta, and Amazon are all trying to push more towards a more holistic marketing strategy. Your SEO will directly impact your Paid Search campaigns, Meta/TikTok want more organic Social and are rewarding UGC ads & Influencer content that seems more natural when users are on the platforms. Expand your core competencies to adapt to platform updates.

As digital strategists, we need to stay ahead of the game, which means being aware of our goals and continuously educating ourselves to expand our knowledge. After assessing my strengths and weaknesses, I set specific objectives that align with my capabilities and areas for improvement.

I ask colleagues, mentors, and supervisors for their honest opinions on my strengths and areas for improvement. This input helps me understand how I'm perceived and identify opportunities for growth. By acting on this feedback, I can refine my skills, make better decisions, and align my career path with my strengths and goals.

Setting stretch goals allows you to remove yourself from your comfort zone. Digital strategy is not a linear process and requires a growth mindset to be an expert in the field. Choose goals which are realistic and celebrate milestones.

Outlining, re-outlining, and confirming goals is the key to any engagement. Ensure that there is client sign off on the bench marks, and then continue to do so. Clients constantly change the benchmarks, often without telling the marketing teams or agencies and where you may think that you exceeded expectations, your clients or bosses may be holding you accountable to a goal/benchmark that has changed. When you have the goals set, ensure that you understand what is being reported on and what tools or reporting the client/boss is leveraging. Numbers in the ad platforms are often very different than what are in other systems, make sure that you know what your accountable for and when there are data variations how you can QA them.

Regular feedback is critical in sharpening your skillset and expanding your lens beyond what you already know. Identify 1 or 2 mentors to guide you on your journey.

I can't say I started from day 1- however now; I regularly seek feedback from peers, mentors, and my team. This input is invaluable because it provides external perspectives on my performance and helps me identify blind spots in my leadership and technical skills. Constructive criticism is something I actively request during project reviews or one-on-one meetings.

Self-awareness and ensuring you mark your own homework can help you augment your capabilities. The questions I often ask myself in all strategies is start with Why? What problem are you solving for? How did it perform? etc. Are you being impactful, insightful and identification. Self-awareness is a skill that like a muscle, needs a good workout to stay strong and flexible.

Regular reflection is a powerful tool to drive career in digital strategy : Align Work with Values: Reflect on what truly motivates you and make career choices that align with your passions and purpose. Set Clear Goals: Establish SMART goals and regularly review your progress, making adjustments as needed. Enhance Emotional Intelligence: Understand your emotions, develop empathy, and manage stress effectively. Continuous Improvement: Identify skills gaps, seek out learning opportunities, and be open to experimentation and adaptation. Identify Strengths & Weaknesses: Regularly assess your performance and seek feedback to pinpoint areas for growth.

Reflection and reviews shouldn't be one-offs, instead set them up at a regular cadence and keep a track of what did and did not work. This should be at least a monthly recap so when there is a larger review each quarter and yearly, there are no surprises. The worst spent money is what you cannot learn from. The best spent money are the lessons that your pull quickly AND can leverage in other marketing channels or beyond. For brands, don't keep your marketers or agencies in silo's. Have them talk to each other and combine on regular reviews, this will grow your overall business rather than be in a situation where everyone is battling over budget and you're left trying to decide who to trust more.

The only constant in digital marketing is change. you need to be comfortable with not having all the answers. In order to adapt and grow, one needs to have a digital mindset: a set of attitudes and behaviors that enable people and organizations to see how data, algorithms, and AI open up new possibilities and to chart a path for success in an increasingly technology-intensive world. Some key principles include experimentation, continuous learning, collaboration and resilience.

Stay open to change and continuously seek learning opportunities. Enroll in courses, attend workshops, and read industry-relevant materials to stay ahead.

Constantly monitor what marketing tactics your competitors are doing. If they haven't worked for you in the past, but the competition is investing in those tactics, it likely means that they're getting a good return and you just didn't do it correctly. The biggest change in the industry is a mis-understanding that AI, automation, and black-box tools have taken over. Instead of throwing in the towel, look and ask the questions for what the new levers are that you can pull. Most companies are re-positioning themselves with branding, new sites, creative - all of which are great but the people working on these or optimizing the marketing campaigns don't take into account the technical aspects or data which are what the Platforms pull from.

Recognizing that large events can be overwhelming for me, I focus on attending smaller, more intimate gatherings where I can have meaningful conversations. For example, I attended a business development workshop today to get to know the business ecosystem in the city I live in a bit better. By staying true to myself and networking in settings where I feel comfortable, I’ve been able to build genuine relationships.

Keep a journal or use a digital tool to regularly track your achievements, challenges, and learnings. For example, jot down key insights from each project, noting what strategies worked well and what didn't. This habit not only enhances self-awareness but also provides a tangible record of your growth over time. Reviewing your progress can boost your confidence, highlight areas for further improvement, and keep you motivated by showing how far you've come in your digital strategy career.

Self-awareness is not just about professional growth but also about personal well-being. Recognizing the signs of burnout and knowing when to step back and recharge has been crucial for maintaining a sustainable career in such a dynamic field. Harnessing self-awareness has been instrumental in navigating my career in digital strategy. It has helped me maximize my strengths, improve my weaknesses, and make strategic connections that enhance both my personal and professional life.