Hey everyone! Getting your first digital marketing job can be really hard for a lot of people. So let’s simplify it for them—what are the two most important things someone should focus on to land their first digital marketing job?
Is it:
Getting work experience
Learning digital marketing
Getting as many certifications as you can
Networking on LinkedIn
Creating a really nice resume
I always tell people that are applying to my company that it’s learning digital marketing and then most importantly getting the right work experience you need. What worked for you when you were starting out? Or, if you’re currently looking, what challenges are you facing?
Let’s share tips, experiences, and strategies so they can get hired more easily.
Totally agree, learning the basics and gaining hands-on experience are key. I’d also add building a portfolio, even if it’s small projects, to show what you can do. That helped me a lot when starting out.
@Blayne
100% agree with you. Can you share what kind of experience you’d recommend they try to get? I always say try to get some in social, email, paid ads (if possible) and SEO. Obviously they won’t be working in all of those areas, but if you can show a company you understand how the entire funnel works from multiple angles, it makes you that much stronger as a candidate.
Certifications don’t mean much. Maybe Adwords cert can be of some benefit if trying to go in that direction.
But experience is everything. Put together case studies of projects you’ve worked on. Marketing should be results-oriented. If you can sell your history of results, you will do much better and land better jobs.
Also, tell your clients/boss how much you value ROI and hate wasting money. Too many digital marketers just push spending more money but don’t realize their clients hate hearing that. Let them know you understand and respect their budget.
@Bryn
That Adwords cert let me break into the industry. If you’re really at a loss it’s definitely worth doing (or Meta Ads or whatever other free certs, classes etc).
@Bryn
Really good point about ROI. Yeh it’s super rare to get hired if you just have certifications. I’m sure it happens every now and again, but definitely not a strategy that’s going to lead to results for many. Yeh once you have the right experience and can land interviews, definitely talk about ROI. This is another common thing that is an immediate disqualification in my opinion when I’m listening to their gameplan in an interview. If I can tell the strategies they are suggesting would just be to spend more or they’re mentioning things that likely won’t work, these are usually signs that we should go with another candidate. Really good point. Any certain KPIs you’d recommend they highlight in their interviews? I always like to hear about: for search ad jobs: cost per click, time on page, cost per conversion, CTR. For social: engagement rate, follower growth, and some sort of metric on how many leads are coming from social efforts. Any others you think they should mention?
Yeah I’d say experience as the main thing, never really cared much about the certificates when hiring. It’s important to show a track record of understanding of numbers and reasoning even if it’s for a side hustle or small project. Hands-on is key!
@Nile
Completely agree. We have so many people that apply that just have 20 different certificates but no real experience. There are so many influencers online that are just pushing getting certificates and this leads people in the completely wrong direction as they think this is now good enough to get hired. We want to see that you can actually do the job and we see that via your previous work experience. When we turn people away for this reason, I usually tell them about JobPrepped’s Digital Marketing program as a way to get experience immediately. We’ve hired people from there and I’ve personally taken their program and have been very happy with it. Others have tried Accadium as well to get experience but I’ve been pretty mixed on the people we’ve interviewed from there because it seems like a lot of people end up not getting very good internship experience. Yeh even a side hustle or project is better than nothing. Would you advise them to get experience in just one area of digital marketing or try to get it in a few areas of digital marketing so they can show they understand how several areas of digital marketing work together to move someone through the funnel?
@Dorian
Yeah totally agree. I’ve tried these courses/certificates from the media owners and it’s nothing special. The basics are good for sure but we trained our own team internally and realized this stuff isn’t rocket science. Definitely a learning curve but the lessons you learn from doing really stick with you.
Digital marketing is broad but in general for me, I think a lot is transferable. It’s all about understanding the customer and the product you have. Then you can switch in and switch out the mode of marketing to them whether it’s Google or Meta or even influencers.
@Nile
I agree. It’s all about understanding how to get in front of your target audience, how to help them with their pain points, how to get back in front of them when you want, and how to move them through your funnel so they understand your solution can fix their problem.
@Sidney
Yup. Can’t just take certification courses and expect to truly learn it. You need to be doing alongside what you’re learning as that’s how you can actually see what works. I think point b is a super good point that you make. We’ve had so many people apply for jobs with us that think just because they grew a personal social media account or a blog page, that they are immediately hireable. It’s different growing a page for an individual versus a company. An individual usually just cares about getting as many followers as possible. A business cares about getting the right followers and being able to monetize that. Super good point with “Knowing how to monetize” and I think this is one of the biggest things new people don’t focus on when trying to gain experience on their own. If you are going to start trying to blog, I’d recommend using Ahrefs or Moz (they have a free 30-day trial) so you can grow a blog in a strategic way and then you can use ChatGPT or Jasper to help with the content creation. Any other thoughts here?
Learning has always worked for me. I started my career as a content writer and later on moved forward with taking certifications for SEO, Social Media Marketing, PPC, etc. But only learning and getting certified wasn’t enough. I tried to practically apply those strategies to get the desired results.
Also, since you are searching for your first job, keep sharing your views and knowledge on LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and Quora. You can build connections on LinkedIn and Twitter to get noticed by professionals that want to hire.