Working Diary 02 - Can I handle the pressure?

The pressure came sooner than I thought it would. Due to a personnel change, our team leader left a week after I was hired, so the only people left in charge of this marketing platform were two people, including myself, who were new to this content marketing job.

The '618 Shopping Carnival' on 18 June is one of the biggest shopping festivals on China's e-commerce platforms (equivalent to Black Friday) and every day since I joined, the whole company has been preparing for the marketing of this shopping festival. In order for my platform to maintain its marketing efficiency on the day of the festival, I had to familiarise myself with the working logic of the platform after the team leader left. One of my most important daily tasks is to monitor and manage the platform back office. There I had to manually control the average CPC (cost per click) of each blog post to keep its budget consumption stable. I am responsible for a competitive marketing model on the platform that competes for the ranking of blog posts in the search results for the same search term. The higher the CPC, the higher the ranking, but the more people click in at the same time, the faster the budget is consumed.

At first, I was very concerned about the speed at which my budget was being consumed in the back office, often fearing that it would suddenly be consumed in a short period of time during my break because I had misjudged the price, resulting in the rest of my time being wasted. So I checked and revised it so often that I rarely took a break. Later, by recording and analysing the data every day, I learned the pattern of different blog post prices and consumption rates: for example, say blog post A requires only ¥1.0 per click unit price to get smooth sales, and an appropriate increase in the price after 6 pm would make it more effective. But blog post B click unit price must be kept below ¥0.6/time, otherwise, it will generate a large number of clicks in a short period of time, but fewer people will click into the product link to buy through blog post B, i.e. the click conversion rate is low and too much money consumed will be wasted, so it will have a lower budget and just need to maintain a smooth click volume.

Something new always comes with new pressures and personnel changes are the norm in business. After going through this huge amount of stress, I realised that I can't predict when a new urgent task will arrive, but for that, I can prepare a coping mechanism. Perhaps it was a quick adjustment of the mind with the help of previous experience, or perhaps it was the knowledge that I had to calm down first and then start to draw the rules.