Line cook and Digital Director. Two professions that have more in common than you’d think. As I reflect on my time in the kitchen while watching Season 4 of The Bear, the transferability of skills and strategic thinking becomes more and more apparent.
When I consider what makes me the performance digital marketer that I am today, a few key themes stand out from my back-of-house jobs. Being a cook is 90% prep and cleaning. How you get ready for the day and tidy up makes all the difference when it’s time to execute in the middle of a multimillion-dollar dynamic campaign or a dinner rush. When I sit down at the computer, I mentally put on my chef coat and get ready for action.
7 Kitchen Skills That Elevate My Digital Marketing Career
- Practice mise en place: A culinary concept that involves preparing and organizing all ingredients and equipment before cooking, mise en place is one of my favorite transferrable skills. I get my creative assets, testing methodology, measurement, and tech research ready to make launch more seamless, and I’m ready to adjust mid-campaign based on how the initial data is coming in.
- Minimize movements: When I set up my kitchen station, I think through the most frictionless and efficient way for ingredients to enter, dishes to leave, and garnish and supplies to be placed. I apply the same practices to digital activations by understanding the operations of what marketing channels lead from one point to another in the customer journey, and make it as few touchpoints as possible. When a campaign is well connected, I know how people are being reached, how they are being (re)engaged, and that the final action is completely friction-free.
- Follow proper food handling: Proper labeling, storage, and documentation are essential for future usage and value. Well-configured analytics data, tracking UTM parameters, and consistent naming conventions all contribute to seamless management in the future. Don’t be the rookie with ad names that end in _copy, _copy1, _copy2, and leave query string parameters static when cloning objects. Just like a good stew needs to sit for best results, I typically won’t start to see statistically significant results for a few days. This also underscores how important a clean structure is for future analysis and reporting.
- Taste every dish and always try something new: There is no such thing as perfection; most things can be improved, and boundaries expanded. Even high-performing campaigns need to be stretched, tested, and pushed to improve. If a dish never tastes bad and a campaign asset never flops, I haven’t gone far enough. The competition is out there trying to be better; we need to be, too.
- Keep notes on experiments: When something succeeds and tastes great, I want to be able to easily go back and identify what changed so I can replicate and scale it. A strong ad or email performance is a great feeling, but unless I can replicate it over and over, it was more luck than skill.
- Envision the final dish: Before creating a menu, I envision how it will come together and how people might react to it. This is very similar to crafting a brand book. A menu and brand book are both north stars that ensure dish and campaign consistency. Without a brand guide, a campaign is more likely to go off the rails in the day-to-day details of tweaking and optimizing.
- If you can lean, you can clean: In digital marketing, there’s no waiting around for something to happen. There are always details to improve and insights to be gleaned. In the kitchen, when the rush dies down, it’s critical to use that time to identify how to make things easier and sharper for the next wave or shift. When I have a few breaths between activities, I dig into Google Analytics to see what we can discover about the users, website performance, and user interactivity for future improvements.
If you want to build a direct response campaign focused on driving specific results for a, we can cook you up something special within your budget. If you have an existing campaign that could work harder, we’d be happy to audit and analyze the recipe to look for opportunities. And, if you’re looking for someone to corroborate your admiration for the force that is Jamie Lee Curtis’s guest star power—that’s us. Reach out to craig@vermilion.com or use the form below to get started.
