Marketing client manager: What I do and how much I make

I am Chelsea Freeburn. I am 27 years old. I'm a Client Manager at DX Marketing, and I make $45,000 a year. So we use data to help our clients target their marketing to a very specific audience. So let's say it's a real estate client, and they're pushing a new community that they've built. We might have something embedded into your Facebook feed that's relevant to you, because of the data that we use to target the audiences. So Client Manager and Account Manager are kind of interchangeable terms within the industry, and what I'm in charge of doing is essentially, managing communication between the client and the company. So for the company, I function as the spokesperson to the client, and for the client, I function as the same spokesperson to the company. What I love most about my job is communicating with people. I'm very much an extrovert, and I think that's probably another essential quality that a person in Client Management possess, just being able to interact with a bunch of people on a daily basis, as well as when I'm communicating with my client, understanding what their goals are, and working with my team to deliver a product that they're truly excited about. No one wants to deliver something to their client and have them say, I hate it. To say, this is what the client wants, here's what we have to do, that's super exciting and fun for me. I love that part of my job. One of the most difficult parts of my job is keeping everyone on schedule and on task, because within this company, everyone has a million different clients, and functions, and projects that they're working on at any given time. So every Client Manager within the company is saying, prioritize my project, prioritize this, and then, the Data Team, for example, has their own set of priorities as well. So it's essential to be confident, and you sort of have to hound people to get things done. And it's uncomfortable, especially for a person like me, because I want everyone to like me. So sometimes people aren't gonna like you that much, but it's something you sort of have to get over, because at the end of the day, your job is not to make your teammates happy, it's to deliver a product that will make your client happy at the end of the day. One of the essential functions of my job is being super detail-oriented. So everything that we send out, be it a digital ad, be it a report, be it a direct mail piece, it has to be meticulously proofed. So I go through everything from, is this the right creative letterhead on the top of this? Are these the right numbers listed per state? Are these the correct hours listed for the location? Is the legal at the bottom of the piece correct? So that, it's painstaking, and I have to do it twice. So for a direct mail piece, specifically, I have to proof it once digitally, and then once we send it over to the printer, it gets sent back to us, and I have to make sure that everything translated correctly and that all of the different areas of the piece were pulled in correctly. Going along with being detail-oriented, it's important to remember that mistakes happen. So you have to be resilient, and be a problem-solver. So if something does go wrong, you absolutely have to be able to own your mistake, and be prepared to make it right. There was a time when I first started, and for a while I was having a certain report, that I was responsible for weekly, proofed by my supervisor at the time. And once that was handed over to me, I forgot a step. And it had to do with numbers, with math, the not-so-fun numbers. And eventually, the client pointed something out about it, but this was three months after I had been doing the report independently. So it didn't look good on us at all, but fortunately, we were able to fix it. And what I had to do, it took many, many hours, but I had to go back and re-pull three month's worth of data and redo all of the reports, and make sure I didn't forget that extra step. So it was a lot of extra work, and it was embarrassing more than anything else, but thankfully, it was a pretty simple fix. Coming into my career path, I really didn't know what to expect salary-wise. It's nothing they really prepare you for in college. They give you a range of what you might expect, but you don't really know. So I make $45,000 a year, and to me, it's not about the money that I make. It's, I really wanna be doing something that I enjoy doing, which I am. I am a marketer at heart, and even when I first moved to Savannah, I was making a sizeable amount more money with a different company. But DX was a company that I found, I stumbled across, I researched, and I absolutely fell in love with, and I courted them for about six-plus months, until they had a job opening that fit my skill set. And taking that salary cut didn't really mean anything to me because I can adjust my lifestyle to fit that, as long as I know that I'm doing something and contributing to something cool. Salary range within the marketing field will vary from company to company, as well as location. So if I were to be working in New York or Chicago, I'd probably be making six figures doing the same work, but the cost of living is so much higher there. And if I were to move to any of those cities, I would certainly be able to grow significantly within a larger marketing company. DX is pretty small, but we do have great opportunities here. If you see a place within the company that needs work, and you can outline yourself a position and a role, and really sell yourself for that position, it's a possibility that you can create a new position for yourself. In larger companies, that's not necessarily as possible, but it's easier to move up the ladder from an Account Manager to a Senior Account Manager to someone who oversees the whole Account Management Department. And that is something a lot of people aspire toward, but again, to me, it's not so much about salary at this point in time, as long as I'm happy what I'm doing. I do see myself in more of a managerial role eventually. I used to work in a leadership role. But right now at DX, that's not, probably not for me, just 'cause I'm newer here. I've only been here, nine months I think? So put in your time, put in your hours, and there's definitely a possibility of moving up and making more money.