If you are looking to start a career in digital marketing, you will need to start with an entry-level job. In this read, we are going to give some simple, but helpful tips to secure your first job in this domain.
Be Confident in Your Digital Marketing Skills
When starting out, chances are you will look around and compare yourself with those in the same field, usually those with more internships, more experience, better connections and more connections. While this isn’t a necessarily bad thing, it can lead to discouragement.
Avoid falling for this trap. When starting your professional career, it is important to have the right mindset, knowing that there are numerous opportunities out there for you. The first step is to be confident in your skills. College grades, internships and professional experience all can’t compare to the power of your personality or communication skills.
Of course, companies will be on the search for specific knowledge and skills attained during training, but soft skills are equally important. In fact, at Google, the top 6 traits of success are all soft skills. These include:
- Being a good listener and communicator
- Being a good coach
- Possessing insights into others
- Being a problem solver and critical thinker
- Showing empathy and support to co-workers
- The ability to make connections across complicated ideas
You may also want to do some research on marketing agencies in your local area. You can do this by doing a Google search for example if you are in the Hampshire area then type on google something like ”marketing agency Hampshire”
2 Pick Your Digital Marketing Career Path
Before you go down the digital marketing road, it is important to know what exactly you want from the career. This entails asking the following questions:
- What do you like doing?
- What are you good at?
- What strengths and skills do you currently possess?
- Are you better off working alone or as a team?
- Are you more analytical or creative?
There are various disciplines in the digital marketing space and each one has a distinct career path.
Even though you cannot afford to be too picky when applying for an entry job, matching your current strengths and interests to the discipline you like the most will set you on the path of success that can be really rewarding.
Digital marketing specialist is one of the most common entry-level digital marketing jobs. In this position, you help with paid search, search engine optimization, social media marketing, conversion rate optimization and content marketing.
These positions tend to be multi-faceted and so, you will require a background in several disciplines in order to be successful. Starting out as a digital marketing specialist is a great way to jumpstart your career as it will fast-track the hands-on learning process and boost your career growth.
Also, a role being multi-faceted doesn’t mean you should do everything. Consider taking on two or three highly specialised roles so that you can tell a story on your resume and also increase your potential salary.
The following is a list of some of the highly sought-after digital marketing skills and the tools you can leverage to learn and master them:
- Affiliate marketing- Impact Radius and CJ by Conversant
- Web Development- Magento, Drupal, WordPress and Joomla
- Email Marketing- Aweber, Constant Contact and Mailchimp
- Social Media Marketing- Hootsuite, Twitter Ads and Instagram Ads
- Conversion Rate Optimization- Craft, Google Tag Manager and Optimizely
- Content Market- Yoast SEO and WordPress
- Search Engine Optimisation- Google Search Console, SEM Rush and Moz
- Digital Analytics- Optimizely and Google Analytics
Learn the Basics by taking Digital Marketing Courses
After settling for two or three skills to add to your resume, the next stage is to begin learning. One of the best things about digital marketing is that there are numerous free certification courses that you can take and they will look appealing on your resume. From Udemy to Coursera and LinkedIn Learning, there is a lot that you can pick from.