Misyy Evans

I attribute my success to grit. There's a ton of rejection in writing, and there's also a lot of criticism. In marketing, you can take huge losses - you can have this great idea, and then in action, it just completely flops. So you really have to let things just slide off your back, and then just take a minute, recoup, and then just jump back into it. It's about resilience and the ability to keep going even when things don't work out the way you planned.

The best career advice I ever received came from a director early in my career who was really big on making sure that people have their path mapped constantly. His focus wasn't on keeping people or brand loyalty as much as it was on checking in - are you happy in this role? What does your path look like? Every quarter, he would check in: are you doing what makes you happy? Are you thriving in this? I still keep that quarterly check-in with myself - is this exactly what I want to be doing? What do my goals look like? I constantly make sure that my daily, weekly life matches what my long-term goals are, and if not, I tweak it to make it match. I think it's really easy when life is busy to get kind of in a grind, and then 5 years go by, and you blink, and you realize that you're miserable in your job and your life, and you feel like it's too late to change. So that almost constant, quarterly reflection on what do I want and what am I doing every week to get there is super important. I try to do that with my employees now.

Stick with it. Learn as much as you can about marketing, writing, and your craft. Network, network, network - get your writing out there any way that you can, and learn how to market it. If your goal is to be a marketing director, show what you can do. Make sure you're tracking your wins, keeping a good handle on your analytics, showing growth, and keeping up. Things in marketing move very quickly - you've got to stay on top, stay ahead, while you're also trying to reinvent the wheel every week. So just test, test, test, test, test, and stay ahead of the curve. But networking, regardless, is huge. Get on LinkedIn, meet the right people, follow the right groups, join the right groups, go to whatever conferences you can. Just meet people, because honestly, networking is still a huge part of a lot of people's careers. It's how a lot of people get where they are. With all of the competition especially, being able to kind of move past it with the right connections can be really huge. But if you have the right connection, you have to be able to back up whatever you're pitching.

The field is very competitive now. When I started out, it was much easier - there was much less competition in the digital marketing space. You saw results faster, things happened quicker, and there was less noise. Now the market is very saturated, which makes it harder. Networking has changed really dramatically too - a lot of it happens online, and again, it's very saturated. Getting your work to the right people can sometimes be a lot harder than it used to be just because of the saturation of the market. Things also change more rapidly now. My social media manager and I were laughing about this - you really have to, day by day, know what's trending, what's happening. Every hour of every day, you're constantly changing things, jumping on trends, constantly tweaking, much faster than you had to before. The way that things rapidly move and how saturated everything is means you really have to work hard to stand out.

Integrity, honesty, and authenticity are most important to me. As a journalist and storyteller, it's really important for me to really peel back the outer layers and get to the heart of things. Even if I'm interviewing somebody about policy, I still want to know what their life is like - as a single mom, or as somebody who struggled with this or that. I think that humanities is such an important part of what I do, and also marketing. I don't want to mislead people - I want to be honest, I want to be helpful, I want to be authentic. I think integrity matters a lot in marketing as well. It's not a win if you have to mislead people to get there.