In my opinion, digital marketing is one of the “easiest” careers to get into that can pay a lot of money. You don’t need 2-4 years of time for a college degree, expensive certifications, or 10 years of experience for an entry-level position.
All you need to do is know enough to successfully do your job, prove to your potential employer that you can do your job, and then get hired and do a good job. It’s a relatively simple process and one of the many reasons I made a career in digital marketing.
So, in this post, I’m going to walk you through how to get a job in digital marketing.
Choose what you want to specialize in
Digital marketing is mainly a combination of many smaller skills/areas.
For example, here are a few specialized areas of digital marketing:
- SEO
- Paid Advertising
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
Since you’re trying to get a job in digital marketing (possibly your first job in this field), I recommend you specialize in one area. Specializing will speed up the time it takes to get a job by allowing you to focus all of your efforts on one thing.
With that said, I didn’t specialize in one area. I needed my skills for a business I was working on. However, after being a digital marketer for over 10 years – I recommend specializing in an area instead of trying to learn everything in the beginning.
Learn the basics
Nowadays, learning the basics is as simple as typing “tutorial” after your skill on YouTube and learning everything you need to know as a beginner in less than an 8-hour day. However, this is where I’ve people get stuck the most.
Instead of spending 8 hours (spread out over 1-8 consecutive days), a lot of people feel like they still don’t know enough and keep trying to learn more. DO NOT DO THIS. Spend 8 hours learning and regardless of how you feel, move on.
The goal at this stage isn’t to learn as much as you can so that you feel like you know enough. That level of comfort comes from practicing and learning while actively working. If you develop the habit of trying to consume more information in order to feel satisfied with your level of knowledge – you will likely get stuck in the “learn the basics” stage for months or years.
Work for free to build a portfolio
In this phase, your main goal is to build a portfolio as fast as possible. This portfolio will be your proof to your future employer that you can do what you say you can.
For the sake of moving fast, I recommend you work for free during this phase. Reach out to friends, family, and strangers (locally or online) and offer to help them for free.
Since you’re not charging any money for your services, the people you reach out to have very little to lose. This will make building your portfolio easy, especially if you don’t have any sales skills.
The last recommendation I have for this phase is to try to have at least 10 portfolio items in total. If you live a busy life and can only complete 1 portfolio item per month, this means it will take you 10 months to finish this phase.
With that said, try to complete your portfolio items consecutively without many breaks in between. The more breaks you take between working, the more time you’re going to spend re-learning things you’ve forgotten.
Buy A Domain Name
A domain name is basically the digital address of your website (www.DomainName.com). Having your own domain name will help you stand out from other people that are applying for the same job position.
Domain names aren’t expensive and can be had for less than $15 per year. I personally recommend and use NameCheap for the majority of my domains.
During the process of purchasing your domain name, you only need 2 things:
- The domain itself
- The free registration privacy that NameCheap offers
There are other things they offer but, at this stage, you don’t need any of them.
Get a domain-branded email address
Similar to having a domain name, having an email address that matches your domain name will help you stand out (ex. [email protected]).
There are many different email providers you can choose but since most people have experience using Gmail, I’d recommend signing up for Google Workspace.
Google Workspace allows you to use your custom email address on the Gmail platform and gives you access to the other tools offered by Google (Drive, Sheets, Docs, etc..).
Build a personal website
Once you have completed your “starter” portfolio, I recommend creating a personal website (and linking your domain name to it) to help you stand out against other people who may be applying to the same jobs as you.
I’ve looked at at least 300 resumes from people applying for digital marketing positions and it’s been rare to see someone have their own website that looks and functions decently. It’s been more common for applicants to either have no website or a poorly made website that barely works.
As I said above, the goal of this website is to help you stand out. So keep the website simple and include the following:
- Homepage
- A Page that shows your portfolio pieces
- A Page that talks about you (basically an “about” page)
- A page with your contact information or a form that can be used to reach you
That’s it.
Your website doesn’t need to look amazing or win awards. It simply needs to be good enough to help you stand out against the majority of the people applying to the same job positions.
Build Your Resume
This phase is pretty self-explanatory but now is the time to build your resume.
There is plenty of information on the internet that can help you build a decent resume but here are my recommendations:
- Keep your resume relevant to the job you’re applying for. You don’t need to include your cashier experience when applying for a digital marketing position.
- Clearly describe the responsibilities you had or skills you needed to use when building your portfolio items. Avoid vague phrases that could cause the person reading your resume to say “What does this even mean?”.
- If you have a college degree, include it. If you don’t have a college degree, you don’t need to add your high school as a replacement. If you have the skills needed to get the job done, most employers won’t care about your formal education.
- Add a section that showcases the tools/software you’re familiar with. This doesn’t have to be long but it allows the person reading your resume to quickly gauge if you have experience with tools they currently use. If so, they’ll be more likely to invite you for an interview.
Apply For Jobs
Once your resume is in order, start applying for jobs using LinkedIn, Indeed, and any other methods you prefer.
In this phase, the goal is simply to get a job so that you can have official work experience at a company. You shouldn’t be looking to maximize the amount of money you’ll make. Instead, if you have multiple offers, choose the job you think will allow you to learn the most.
If you don’t know which opportunity will allow you to learn more, choose the bigger company that has a more respected brand/name. Working for a well-respected company can increase your credibility when attempting to switch employers.
I recommend staying at your first job until you feel relatively comfortable. This should be a minimum of 12 months but could be longer. After you’ve been at the first company for a year, I recommend you start looking for new jobs that offer more learning opportunities and room for growth.
With that said, you’ll need to use your own judgment for deciding when to switch companies. It’s possible that you’ll get hired into a great company for your first job. This could mean that you’ll have years worth of learning and developing to do there before you feel like it’s time to move on.
So don’t take my recommendations at 100%. Use them as guidelines and adjust them as you see fit.
