How to make a career in digital: the first year of the life of an internet marketer

Internet marketing attracts good salaries and drive, the market is developing, the demand for good professionals is growing. In addition, artificial intelligence and neural networks in the near future do not plan to take this profession from humanity. In other words, not work is a dream. One problem: it’s difficult for a newcomer to break into digital even despite the abundance of courses and materials. Employers are not ready to enjoy the mistakes of a new digitalist and lose money.

We tell you how to survive the first year in online marketing and not break.



According to experts on the Internet, the path of an Internet marketer is as follows:


1) Get a higher education in marketing, learn how to do SWOT analysis and work with the BCG matrix
2) 5 years, optimize sites, become a context guru, learn PHP, HTML and JavaScript, learn to write no worse than Maxim Ilyakhov, get a certificate of knowledge of Yandex.Metrica
3) Congratulations! You are an internet marketer!

The plan is ambitious, but alas, stupid. It leaves more questions than answers: where to start, how to choose a specialization and where to practice skills?

To help newcomers survive in the ruthless world of digital, Elizabeth Tselyutina, an Internet marketer at IHSBM Business School, and I created a “development route”. Starting as a trainee, Lisa passed a digital intensive under the Irish DMI program and “without interruption from production” immediately tested new knowledge in her company. We hope this experience will help juniors in a short time to go from scratch to a promising specialist in online marketing.

Step 1. Training


Do not listen to Old Believers who recommend starting with classic marketing: it will fly into one ear and fly into the other. In the first year, no one will trust you to draw up a SWOT analysis and bring a new product to the market. Return to this later.

If you choose the shortest path to the profession, it’s better to splurge on a good course in digital marketing (IHSBM, Netology, Digital October). The best investment is investing in yourself, do not be greedy for knowledge, this is your career foundation.

Specialization is a debatable issue. According to our observations, those digital workers who have chosen the path "just a little bit" are growing faster. Therefore, if you don’t have a firm conviction to devote all your life to contextual advertising, it’s best to choose a “review course” that studies all aspects of Internet marketing. In addition, just by trying every digital marketing tool, you can understand what the soul lies to - SMM, campaign planning or SEO hardcore.

As for the free content available on the Internet. It will help if you already have a base and a system in your head. For comprehensive self-preparation from scratch, free webinars, seminars, blogs and books are not suitable, but they can be even more confusing and disappointing.



But during the training it is worth subscribing to verified sources: specialized media (Cossa, vc.ru, Seonews), blogs of well-known agencies (Texterra, Ingate, i-Media, Adventum, IT-agency). The task is to build vocabulary. Endless CPC, CTR, ARPU and LTV should stop scaring you. Pay special attention to case studies. To get a feel for the goals and objectives of Internet marketing, read and absorb how company N, through newsletters, increased sales by 15%, and startup X, through social networks, attracted 1,000 leads.

Step 2. Let's go practice!


So, your head is bursting with new knowledge, and a certificate hangs on the wall. It's time to practice. We draw up a resume for the position of assistant. Life hack: it’s better to do not one universal, but to sharpen each under a specific vacancy. Yes, this is longer than recklessly pressing the “Respond” button, but the exhaust is more.

If there is no purpose to get into a conservative company with employees in ties, you can write an informal resume. Having added a pinch of creativity and originality, do not forget about your serious approach to business. Creativity is valued in this area, especially for SMM and email marketing, which you will demonstrate in this way. Nobody wants to stuff the consumer with dry and monotonous posts. Perhaps this is how you save yourself from the test task.

It is believed that it is better and faster to start at the agency, but we will not be so categorical. The most important and unexpected thing - at the interview you have to ask a lot of questions! Do not look at social packages, corporate buns, or even salary. Having won free breakfasts and a salary of 10 thousand more now, you run the risk of checking contracts with contractors for a whole year or making endless banner resizes. Internet marketing is different for everyone.

Since we need a quick start in digital marketing, look for companies with diverse projects. By choosing the position of SEO assistant or contextual advertising assistant, you will perform mechanical work for a long time, solving similar tasks. Yes, you will quickly grow in one area. However, then it will be difficult for you to get a job with a wider range of responsibilities. At least in terms of salary, you cannot grow much.

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So, here is a list of questions that you can safely take for an interview to pleasantly surprise a recruiter.


1) Marketing department or project team

Find out as much as possible about the Internet marketing department, specify which tasks are solved by regular forces, which are outsourced. What is good now, and where are the failures or problems, try to clarify their causes. Maybe before you already three people were burned in these areas during the trial period, and you are the next victim, simply because the company itself does not know what it wants?

2) Business processes and IT component

Interesting marketing tasks require a systematic approach and competent project management. The team should have tools for discussion and work planning. Do Trello, Megaplan, Worksection, Basecamp use? What about Scrum and Agile? Modern marketing does not work without IT solutions: brazenly find out what kind of CRM is used in the company, what kind of service for newsletters, if Yandex.Metrica is configured and on which engine the site is made. The wider the tools used, the more interesting and productive the work will be.

3) Marketing budget or average project budget

It's simple: it should be. Yes, there are masters in guerrilla marketing on the market, but it’s better to start in projects where there are marketing budgets, otherwise you won’t try a lot of effective methods of attracting an audience. A beginner needs to “smell” projects with at least small budgets in order to feel the possibilities of online marketing.
“Any fool can do it with money” - this saying is more about PR, because a different approach works in marketing: each invested ruble should bring 10 rubles of profit.

4) How do employees grow and learn?

The company has implemented a mentoring system - immediately two fat pluses in its favor. If not, ask the HR manager how often employees are sent for training, is it customary to go to specialized conferences? In such companies, you will grow twice as fast, and perhaps more fun.

5) What are the company's plans for the near future on the Internet?

If she is happy with her contextual advertising and mailing lists, and does not plan anything else, then you will work as a robot. But what about your dream to make the world a better place? The market is full of companies that are just now discovering new social networks, instant messengers, chat bots, blogs, video streaming, with the help of which they make their products and services truly exciting and useful. That's where you need to be implemented!

Do not give up and do not lower the bar if at the first interview you met with complete bewilderment.

This means that the company has no resources for the implementation of interesting and high-quality projects, you will not get good experience here. Work just for an experience in digital is a death sentence for a career.

Be careful with the pharmaceutical, alcohol and tobacco industries - very specialized tools work here. Avoid complex b2b-companies: there is also specific marketing, traditional online tools work so far poorly. Do not put an end to these areas for good - no, it’s just that with experience gained it will be easier there.

Ideal: IT companies and e-commerce, full-cycle digital agencies, services (travel, events, entertainment, real estate, fitness).

Step 3. Practice and specialization


So, you are an assistant marketing department or junior digital specialist. If you have been given a mentor - congratulations, this is a lucky ticket. But alas, this practice is even more rare in Russian companies.

In other cases, try to control your development in the company. This is not as difficult as it seems - tell us what tasks you are interested in doing, take the initiative, ask questions to colleagues.

If possible, immediately start with social networks. Learn how company accounts are organized, what content is published there, what questions subscribers ask. Follow in what form they communicated with subscribers: was it “Hi, seals” or “Hello, dear subscribers”? Immerse yourself in the business at the same time, carefully monitor your competitors. With proper dexterity, it will take you 1-2 weeks.

Next, connect or ask to join the e-mail marketing. Having studied the previous experience, suggest writing the text of the newsletter, master the service, make test letters in it. Pay special attention to the subject of the letter - the text of the newsletter can be infinitely good, but what's the point if the topic did not work, and the Open Rate is low. It will take another week.

Now get into the context. See how your current ad campaigns are set up. Learn what time and geography targeting options are, how bids are set, and which negative keywords are used. Found a mistake? Feel free to offer your recommendations. Ask to practice compiling the semantic core for a new service or promotion. Take a week to learn Direct and AdWords accounts.

Heavy artillery went: now you can get into SEO. See what works on the content site on your site for the benefit of showing how the navigation is arranged, whether there is a blog, what keywords your site is promoting, what points from external optimization are implemented. And again, keep an eye on competitors. Weeks should be enough.

And just now it's time for analytics. Learn what and how it is configured in your account, what goals are set, what numbers are collected. Study the reports, take a look at the webviewer. Analytics is one of the most vital areas of online marketing. With it, you will learn how much of the advertising budget is wasted, and what brings the maximum effect.

By the end of the trial period, you should have a clear idea of ​​the effectiveness of the channels, the cost of leads, the budget allocation system. In addition, you should know your competitors and CA almost by sight!

Over the next six months, you need to learn how to optimize your marketing budget by analyzing the cost of one click, lead, or purchase across all channels. So you can generate for each invested ruble not 10 rubles of profit, but 20 or even 30. The management does not disregard such successes and encourages prizes.

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Here are 5 more tips to make a name for yourself in a company.


• At the very initial stage, take special care in creative and planning tasks (ideas for newsletters, posts for social networks, topics for announcements). In order not to reinvent the wheel, always find out what has already been done, and most importantly, what came of it and what not.

• At first, it may seem to you that everything in the company is not as perfect as it was told in the courses. Do not rush to criticize or recklessly advise how to do it. The first two months of work is not the time for radical proposals. Write down your observations and return to them after a while. And remember that any contentious issue can be resolved using A / B testing.

• Make checklists and check your actions - newcomers often inadvertently forget to check any box. And one such checkmark, for example, on geo-targeting in contextual advertising, can very seriously affect the quality of traffic.

• Learn to write competently and interestingly! You do not need to give out creative slogans worthy of Cannes lions, but you must write good texts for your blog, newsletters, social networks! At the same time, do not forget that each company needs its own style.

• Learn, study and study again! Digital is a non-stop development: new products, life hacks and trends. You need to follow this and have time to quickly implement it before you are ahead of the competition. Make a training plan - now it's time for blogs, books, webinars.

Somewhere after 9-12 months of hard work, start thinking about your KPIs. The salary of a good marketer is the sum of the salary and bonus, which is calculated according to key indicators. Most often, these are new lead applications. Learn to work for the result - it is great motivating, it will not let you get bored and slow down in development. And the phrase: “I got more for less” is better for the employer than any of your “crusts”.

If a year has passed in the company, and you are still only monitoring the media, responding to customer comments on social networks, posting news on the website and pieces of paper - this is an occasion to think seriously. It seems that you are doing garbage? Change the company. Think about specialization. Maybe during your work you have a favorite - then you should give it preference and devote a year or two to honing your skills in one area, for example, SMM or video blogging. Pull up the theory, hit the resume with numbers - and again into battle!

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