Starting a Digital Career and transitioning from college into the world of professionals is a daunting process that makes lots of us (including me) feel like we are lost at times. Impact of this part of our lives is so big that we even have a name for it: quarter-life crisis.
I might not be the best person to give advice on this (I am in the middle of that process myself) but I will do my best to share some of my ideas with you, and inspire you in tackling this transition the best way possible.
I’d like to start with something that is a little bit controversial: everyone will tell you that in a career you want to specialize as much as possible and find your niche. Now I agree that it is solid advice long term, but let's be honest: how are you supposed to choose your specialization when you have zero experience and you don't even know what you like doing.
That's why I would like to propose this:
Use this transitional time to test as many niches you can so that you get a general idea how would it be to work in each of them
I know, crazy right?
But on a more serious note, of course, employers would love if you came on every interview knowing exactly what you want to do. But life doesn't work that way and on the road to that great job, you will make lots of turns and adjustments. And that is absolutely OK.
One of the big benefits of “sampling” different areas of specialization is that:
You will come to your job prepared to cooperate with a lot of different people since you know a little bit about each of their specializations.
You will be more flexible in making adjustments early in career if you already have seeds of knowledge in different areas.
Now you might ask: OK, I believe you but, how do I test all of this and which skills should I focus on?
It's been said time and time again that the best way to get experience when a lot of doors are closed early in the career, is to run your own personal project. That project doesn't need to be a blog. You can start a YouTube channel, run a podcast, even a simple Instagram account can give you a bit of practice in marketing.
So, personal project it is but, what skills should I aim to acquire with this project you ask?
If you continue reading I got a list of 5 skills that translate well between different areas of marketing and learning them through your project will definitely help you start your career with less stress and more focus.
Branding & Storytelling
When you look at the big picture marketing is all about telling a story about your brand and finding a group of people that resonate with that story and identify with what you represent. In his book “Start with Why” Simon Sinek argues that brands too often focus on how to make a great product and who will buy that product.
Brands should instead focus on why they are doing what they do. That will help them identify their mission, and with that a proper customer segment that will appreciate what they do more than others.
Think about all your favorite brands and you will realize that they all do this:
- Nike doesn't just make sports equipment, they encourage you in fighting with yourself and tell you to “Just Do It”.
- Apple realized that lots of their loyal customers are creative types so they focused their advertising on questioning the norms and changing the world. The “Think Different” slogan perfectly captures this.
- Even Tesla doesn't “just” make electric cars, what they really want is to “accelerate the transition to sustainable energy” — not as catchy as Apple but doesn't that mission make you not just a customer but a part of a movement that will help us all stop using fossil fuels and transition to clean energy. Now, that is a powerful branding that creates true followers.
- And if you think that this approach is just for “sexy” brands don't forget John Deere: they don't just make tractors, they vow to supply the market with best quality and innovation and the “Nothing runs like Deere” slogan perfectly shows how serious they are about quality.
Hopefully, that convinces you that storytelling and branding is key to successful marketing so now we can focus on how you will learn this through your project.
The most important brand in your life is you.
Your personal project is a perfect way to build your personal brand and show the world your why and how passionate you are about learning.
Building a personal brand is a process that takes time but I linked a few guides and books for you that will help along a way:
- The Complete Guide to Building a Personal Brand by Neil Patel and Aaron Agius
- How to build a Personal Brand (Complete Guide to Personal Branding) by Tyler Basu
- Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence - And How You Can Too by Gary Vaynerchuk
Customer Journey
Unless you are in the business of selling everyday groceries people are not gonna be convinced to buy by the sole fact that your product exists. Marketing of today is based on building a relationship with the customer and using that relationship to offer him your products. Now, building that relationship is best not left to uncertainty so you don't want to leave the task of discovering your product on the shoulders of your customer.
That's why we create a customer journey map that will help guide our relationship with the customer further down the road as smooth as possible.
Customer Journey is not about pushing customers into buying, it's more about presenting them with solutions for the problems that they have.
There are lots of roads that lead your customer to your product and your job is to map them all out in a way that clearly shows how can customer progress from strangers to buyers and ideally to people who will recommend you to their friends.
Customer Journey Map is an individual thing for every brand (including your personal) but generally, brands split the journey into few parts:
- Discovery Stage: Stage when people just find out about you. This is the initial touch point between the brand and the client, and it is a crucial step for you. Therefore, you need to map all the tools that can create this initial connection, and make sure they are of the best quality. These initial touchpoints can be blogs, videos, social media posts, ebooks, podcasts, case studies etc. The most important thing here is that you give your customers an option to both continue following you, and possibly further develop a relationship. That's why you should always offer Call To Action or forms that will help them move further down the map.
- Delight Stage: So you came into contact with the client and he likes your content. Unfortunately, he is not ready to buy, but at least he is happy to continue following you. This is why it's important to produce content on a regular basis so that your prospects can continue engaging with the brand. If you do this right and focus on giving them a lot of value they might naturally be inclined to learn what is hidden behind the paywall. This is the moment they start considering becoming a client.
- Consideration Stage: This is the stage when leads are coming to you with specific problems that they need you to solve and they think your product might do that for them. The most important thing for this stage is that you showcase all the value that they get with your product. One of the best ways to do that is through guides and case studies. They will serve to showcase how your product will solve customers problems.
- Conversion Stage: So your potential customer has finally decided that he wants to buy something from you. Congratulations! Now don't mess this up. Buying is a big decision for everyone and you don't want to make it more complicated by having a confusing buying process. Optimize your sales page and all the steps in the checkout so that your client can complete the purchase as easy as possible.
Wanna learn more? Here are some resources:
- Inbound Marketing Course by Hubspot
- A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Customer Journey Maps by Conversion XL
- See, Think, Do, Care Winning Combo: Content +Marketing +Measurement by Avinash Kaushik
Digital Advertising
Ideally, you would get all your customers online without investing a single penny. Unfortunately, sometimes you need to break the bank to gain some exposure. The reason for this are the algorithms. They exist on Google Search, Social Media and all the other touchpoints between your customers and you. Sometimes they will put your content in front of the ideal customer and you will get a sale without investing money. But most of the times it would take a lot of time to reach all the potential customers this way.
That's why we have online advertising: so you can make that process much faster while defining who exactly is your ideal customer. And no, your ideal customer is not everyone with some money in their pocket.
Digital Advertising in its core is all about finding out who your ideal customers are and finding the cheapest way to reach them. Since you don't want to force people into buying, not all campaigns are focused on selling. Some of them are all about letting people know about your existence. As you remember from earlier, its all about building a relationship and this can help you boost the number of people who want to build a relationship with your brand.
In your own project, this can help give you a jumpstart with the first followers and even give you insight into people who want to interact with you.
Two big categories of online advertising are Search and Display advertising.
Search advertising is all about helping your brand stand out in the results of search queries that people put in their browsers. The big advantage of this kind of advertising is that in its nature it is focused on delivering people exactly what they need. That means that you don't just target random people but people who are interested in exactly what you are offering. This is a really competitive area so keeping prices low is a bit of challenge but you can get great results from this. One of the main platforms here is Google Adwords but other search engines like Bing also have their own options.
Display advertising is shown in a form of banner ads that you can see on different websites, social media, mobile apps etc. Display advertising is often shown based on information that websites and social media collects about users through cookies or usage information. This information allows you to target people based on their demographics, interests, location and a huge number of other criteria. Obviously, this allows you to put your brand in front of exactly the people you think will like the brand, during the time, and in the location that you choose. This lets you control a lot of aspects of your advertising and is one of the main tools in your search of a perfect customer.
If you want to learn more about this here are some resources:
- Academy for Ads by Google
- PPC University by Wordstream
- Facebook Ads: A Facebook Advertising Guide for Marketer by Social Media Examiner
Social Media Management
As I told you before, digital marketing is not just about converting people into customers. Its also about continuing the relationship down the road. That's where social media management comes into play. It is estimated that people spend around 142 minutes every day on social media. This is a time that they can spend interacting with your brand, therefore, it is an opportunity for you to delight them even more.
Social Media Mangement is not about posting random stuff occasionally. It is one of the most important channels in digital advertising so you must treat it seriously. Social Media is managed and planned well in advance. The content that you create will give you a lot of material for social media but there are ways to make even more use of your content than just posting links to your blog posts. The name of the game here is repurposing. This is a topic worthy of an entire blog post but here are the basics.
Let's say that you take your content creation seriously and you create this big piece of content full of useful information. That is a big and important first step but nevertheless, it’s just a first step. Your ebook or big blog post is called pillar content and it probably takes time to consume since you got a bunch of important information inside.
Now, people that appreciate you will take time and consume it in its entirety, but sometimes people don't have time or they prefer shorter content.
So, what you do is take the pillar content and break it into smaller pieces in different formats. You use that big piece and turn it into the infographic, one minute Instagram video or any other shorter piece that you can make from it.
And then, if you want to push it even further, you can take these smaller pieces and create micro pieces like quotes and illustrations. That's how you make sure that every big piece of content gives you a big pile of things you can post on various social media channels that you use.
As for the planning part, you will need some tools here. There are several tools that you can use here.
Trello can help you in keeping track of all your ideas and upcoming posts. A good way to use it is to make columns named:
- Backlog (for content ideas),
- In Progress
- Published
This allows you to keep track of all the content ideas that you have and also provide inspiration when you are stuck.
Another tool you need is a scheduling app like Buffer or Hootsuite because this will allow you to schedule your posts on several Social Media platforms in advance. And of course, you can use any calendar app to keep track of all the deadlines you have in plan.
Social Media management is an interesting subject and I will try to cover it further in a separate post, but until then here are some resources for you:
- Blueprint by Facebook
- Social Media 101 by Constant Contact
- How to Manage (Multiple) Social Media Accounts by Neil Patel
Research & Analytics
The last area that I want to cover is the skill of researching for new information and strong analytical skills.
Digital Marketing relies heavily on numbers, predictions, and the ability of marketers to make smart conclusions based on data. Analytics can be scary for inexperienced but once you dive in you will be a much better marketer able to contribute even more to your organization.
We can break down a job of marketing analyst into several steps (source):
- Measurement: Determining the impact of marketing efforts and ad campaigns
- Optimization: Recommending changes in tactics or spending to improve results
- Experiments: Designing and executing tests to isolate causes
- Segmentation: Identifying groups and subgroups of customers and prospects
- Predictive modeling: Building computer models to improve response rates by providing more personalized content, offers, pricing or other treatments, for example
- Storytelling: Communicating messages derived from data to inspire better decisions
Don’t worry you don’t have to master all of these areas right now. The most important thing right now for you is building a solid understanding of Google Analytics. If you choose a blog for your personal project and you use WordPress installing GA is easy: just make a Google Account and register here. After making an account just add a GA plugin in WordPress and you can start measuring your traffic.
One of the first things you should think about are some of your goals for the website. Google Analytics offers 4 types of goals:
- Destination Goals: These goals are used for measuring how many people arrive on a certain page of your website. One of the uses of this can be measuring certain types of conversions. Let’s say you have an email subscription form on the bottom of every blog post and you want to measure conversions from these forms. You can set up a thank you page for these forms and use the URL from that page in your destination goal.
- Duration Goals: This type of goal allows you to measure how much time people spend on your website and it will tell you how engaging is your website. With this goal, you set up criteria of how much time user should spend on a website to be counted. Don't set it too low because then you won't get enough information about how effective your website improvements are.
- Pages/Visit Goals: Instead of tracking a specific destination of your website, this goal tracks the number of pages each visitor sees before they leave. This goal allows you to measure things like how engaging your content is (the more pages they visit the better) or in customer support you can measure how hard it is to find information on your website (the least amount of pages possible)
- Events Goals: These goals are a bit more complicated to set up but they allow you to measure any event of your website that you want. Some common things you can track with events are: external links, downloads, time spent watching videos, social media buttons, widget usage etc.
One last thing I want to talk about are Google Analytics reports. There are few types of report types and they can all be found on dashboard. These reports are:
- Audience Reports: These reports give you information about demographics, location, interests, technology used and other aspects of your visitors.
- Acquisition Reports: How are users finding your website? Are they using organic searches, referrals, direct traffic, social media or some other avenue?
- Behavior Reports: Once on your site, what do your visitors actually do? Behavior reports provide detailed info about time spent on your site, total page views, bounce rate and more.
- Conversion Reports: Conversion reports show you how effective your website is in converting visitors further down the customer journey map.
If you want to learn more here are some links:
- Analytics Academy by Google
- Data analysis in marketing: a beginner’s guide by GetApp Lab
- Complete Guide to Google Analytics by Search Engine Journal
Conclusion
World of digital marketing is vast and there are lots of niches within it that you can explore and specialize in. In this article, I wanted to provide some skills that you can research and learn about them a little bit but don’t be pressured to tackle them all at once or go too deep immediately. Research a little bit about each one and work on them slowly.
Professional improvement is something you do throughout your whole career so take your time and experiment a lot. Also, don’t be afraid to apply to jobs early. One of my biggest mistakes is that I spent 2 years waiting to be ready and skilled enough before I started looking for a job. Never allow yourself to make decisions about how good you are and are you ready to start a career. Allow your potential employer to tell you that and use that experience to find out how you can further expand your skills.
And finally, make use of all events, meetups, conferences and similar opportunities in your area. These events are filled with experienced people and do your best to network and maybe even get a few bits of advice from them.
So to sum it up:
Be proactive, always improve yourself and start your career with confidence!
