A marketing career can be useful and exciting. Marketers can play an essential role in helping companies sell their products and services to consumers.
However, they should continuously define new sales strategies and methods to interest consumers.
If you are a qualified communications professional and have strong organizational and problem-solving skills, a marketing career could be an excellent option for you. Here are a few essential steps you should consider when you start a career in marketing.
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Is a Marketing Career Right For You?
A marketing career requires employees to be successful in specific areas:
- Clearly conveys thoughts, ideas, and information both in written and oral form.
- Recognizes the problems and develops an appropriate action plan to address them
- Organizes and interprets complex data
- Can generate new ideas and can manage and communicate them to others.
If you have these qualities, you could be the right candidate for a marketing career. Marketing offers different career opportunities, so it is easy to choose one that reflects your interests, values, and personal style.
As a marketing specialist, you can gain experience in your chosen career by participating in an internship or volunteer work in-service training and community projects. Examples of experience include:
- Spend time to study potential costs, prices, and market research for service programs
- Training to investigate the potential of the client base using available data
- Development of an advertising or promotional campaign to promote new services
- Developing a marketing plan for global business.
Prioritize Your Education Over Entertainment
You have to be twice as good. It is just a reality. You will not be open to the same doors as someone who has more connections than the universe’s stars.
You may not have a family friend to give you this first job. Therefore, you will have to get a job and be better than your peers.
It starts with your education. It is not the knowledge that you get at school. It refers to the education that happens when you get to the real world, and what you do in your spare time.
Here are three ways that could maximize your learning opportunities in the real world:
- Look for educational content: Instead of watching hours of funny videos on Facebook, spend time on content to take your career to another dimension. From marketing podcasts to industry blogs, there are many resources you can use to develop your skills and talents.
- Find a manager who will push you: You want to be challenged. You do not want your first job to be stagnant, where you move from paycheck to paycheck.
- Join a company interested in your growth: It is essential to look for a company that wants to invest in your growth, helping your future development.
Even though each person’s situation is different, it is strongly recommended to give preference to training over comfort during the first few years.
If in a fast-growing, low-paying startup, you can learn what a person in a large company knows in eight years, it may become your competitive advantage.
1.9 billion people visit YouTube every month. That’s a huge number. A small proportion of those people on YouTube are trying to get an education. Most of the others are looking for entertainment.
Update Your Resume
If you have one or more certificates to show your fresh knowledge, it’s time to show it in your resume.
You should take a look at the appearance of your resume. Many people have always been told that your resume should look “professional,” which meant that it should be in a traditional Word document format, with no colors or pictures without creativity.
However, you should put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes and imagine you flip through a thousand resumes. Would you prefer something that looks just like everything else? Or the one that stands out from the masses?
The point is that marketing is a creative field, and your resume should reflect that.
Once you have realized that you can quit your boring black and white resume and create a new creative one, you can consider using resume writing services to help you effectively get the job done.
Then, you must ensure that your resume acts as your advertisement. You should also do your best to highlight your strengths and accomplishments and position them as an advantage for companies reading your application.
Include figures and data to show that you can manage results. Avoid listing your goals and responsibilities and instead focus on what you have achieved.
Don’t Be Idle, Build While You Wait.
You can create a blog in a few hours. You can launch the Shopify store in a few days. And you can start selling services on the site like Upwork or Fiverr.
It is easier than ever to create something new. And while maintaining growth and increasing profits is a challenge, it is a challenge that will give you an advantage.
Most people do not do anything. They are excited about ideas, but never take steps to turn those ideas into reality. If you desire to stand out from most people, actually build something, be it a travel blog or an Etsy store.
In addition to the marketing advantage, creating something will help you learn more about your strengths and the skills you may need to do the job, which you will not learn if you spend evenings watching Netflix and eating crisps.
Read The Tedious Stuff & Do The Boring Work
Marketing is filled with exciting technologies, bright conferences, and mini-stars. It is very simple to get caught up in the buzz around the latest trends and events. Boring things are something that makes up a big part of your profession.
Here are just a few boring things that most marketers are not interested in:
- Reading industry reports
- Sending emails to learn from customers
- Writing on weekends
- Code Research
- Research of analytics
- Looking for tutorials online
- Editing video, image, and audio
A tedious job can be the foundation of your career. Don’t think these little tasks and efforts don’t matter. They may not bring you instant satisfaction, but they will turn into meaningful talents, skills, insights, and results.
Apply For Any Marketing Job
It would help if you now know how marketing works and a resume that reflects this. You can now start looking for entry-level positions.
It is an excellent place to start if you are still in school or have recently graduated, as companies are more likely to hire someone with little or no experience when they are young.
You can go to LinkedIn or Indeed and apply for any job you can find (within reason). At this point, it doesn’t matter what the job is; all you are looking for here is to have at least one suitable position on your resume, even if it is not the job you dreamed of.
You may even consider taking an unpaid internship to get started. Unpaid work sucks, but the requirements should be much lower than the paid job, and there is not that much pressure because the company will not lose anything by hiring you.
You can take this time to build your resume and create connections while continuing to apply for paid positions.
Build A Portfolio And Experience By Marketing Your Own Blog and Business
Do not wait around for someone to give you a job so you can start developing your skills.
Starting your blog or website is a great and easy way to give yourself a marketing experience.
You can write about anything and then use the skills you learned in these online courses to market your blog. It should help you gain valuable experience in the following areas:
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Ads (if you decide to run some to promote your blog)
- Analytics
- Email marketing
- Social media
If you don’t like writing, you can use the same approach to start a YouTube channel or a podcast. Any content will do. The aim here is to show that you can apply your skills in a real business context and get tangible results.
Another option, if you are not experienced in content creation, is marketing your online store. If you feel ready for this, you can start your own T-shirt business or sell some of your handicrafts, for example, and bring them to the market.
While this requires a little more work and a lot more financial investment, it is still a way to build additional skills in e-commerce marketing and make some extra money if you are successful.
And if you are a student and prefer not to get a job while you are at school, then this is a great way to gain some experience at your own pace.
Clean Up Your Social Presence
Some people have said, “Never do anything that you would be ashamed of if it were on the Wall Street Journal’s front page.”
You can say the same about social networks. However, if you publish such things, take some time to put them away before you start your marketing career. Melissa Seipp, a senior marketing lawyer at DirectTV, says, “Public profiles are one factor that employers can consider when hiring.”
If there is anything in your profile that you would not want to discuss in an interview, it is advisable not to publish it in a public profile.
Today, it is too easy for an HR manager or colleague to find your page and view your messages, so take no chances.
To Sum Up
If you have a combination of ambition and curiosity, you can succeed in the marketing world. However, you should be ready to adapt when something changes and focus on your personal growth.
If you feel that you are not equipped enough to jump into this world, know that even the most successful people in the industry have been through the same things. Therefore, shake up, focus on these essential steps, and then jump in.
Nowadays, the marketing department has an essential place at the table. It means it’s an exciting time to start your marketing career. Good luck with finding the job of your dreams!