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 specialists is growing. In addition, in the near future, artificial intelligence and neural networks do not plan to take away this profession from humanity. In other words, not work is a dream. One problem: it is difficult for a beginner to break into digital even despite the abundance of courses and materials. Employers are not ready to enjoy the mistakes of the new DJ and lose money.
We tell how to survive the first year in online marketing and not break.
The path of the internet marketer according to experts on the Internet is as follows:
1) Get a higher education in marketing, learn how to do a SWOT analysis and work with the BCG matrix
2) 5 years optimize websites, become a context guru, learn PHP, HTML and JavaScript, learn to write better than Maxim Ilyakhov, get a certificate of knowledge Yandex.Metrica
3) Congratulations! You are an internet marketer!
')
The plan is ambitious, but alas, stupid. He leaves more questions than answers: where to start, how to choose a specialization and where to practice the skills?
In order to help newcomers survive in the ruthless world of digital, we, Elizaveta Tselyutina, the Internet marketing specialist at IHSBM business school, made up the “development route”. Beginning as an intern, Liza went through digital-intensive under the Irish DMI program and “on the job” immediately tested new knowledge in her company. We hope that this experience will help the juniors in a short time to go from zero to a promising specialist in online marketing.
Do not listen to the Old Believers, who recommend starting with classic marketing: in one ear flies, in the other flies. In the first year, no one will trust you to make a SWOT analysis and bring a new product to the market. Come back to this later.
If you choose the shortest path to the profession, it is better to go broke to a good course in digital marketing (IHSBM, Netology, Digital October). The best investments are investments in yourself, do not be greedy for knowledge, this is your career foundation.
Specialization - a debatable question. According to our observations, those digitizers are growing faster who have chosen the path “just a little bit”. Therefore, if you do not have a firm conviction to devote your whole life only to contextual advertising, it is better to choose a “review course” in which all aspects of Internet marketing are studied. In addition, only having tried every digital marketing tool will you be able to understand where the soul lies - SMM, campaign planning or SEO-hardcore.
Regarding free content available on the Internet. It will help if you already have a base and system in your head. For comprehensive self-training from scratch, free webinars, seminars, blogs and books are not suitable, but they can be even more confusing and frustrating.
But during the training you should subscribe to reliable sources: specialized media (Cossa, vc.ru, Seonews), blogs of famous agencies (Texterra, Ingate, i-Media, Adventum, IT-agency). The task is to increase vocabulary. You should stop scaring the endless CPC, CTR, ARPU and LTV. Pay special attention to the study of cases. To penetrate the goals and objectives of Internet marketing, read and absorb how company N increased sales by 15% with the help of mailings, and startup X with the help of social networks drew 1000 leads.
So, your head is cracking with new knowledge, and a certificate is hanging on the wall. It's time to practice. We make a resume for the position of assistant. Layfkhak: it is better to do more than one universal, and each sharpen for a specific job. Yes, it is longer than mindlessly pressing the button "Respond", but the exhaust is more.
If there is no goal to get into a conservative company with employees in ties, you can write a resume in an informal way. Having added a pinch of creativity and originality, do not forget about your serious approach to business. In this area, creativity is appreciated, especially for SMM and email marketing, which you will demonstrate in this way. No one wants to feed the consumer with dry and monotonous posts. Perhaps this way you will save yourself from the test task.
There is an opinion that it is better and faster to start at the agency, but we will not be so categorical. The most important and unexpected - during the interview you have to ask a lot of questions! Do not look at social packages, corporate buns and even salary. Having won free breakfasts and a salary of 10 thousand more now, you risk a whole year checking contracts with contractors or making endless resize banners. Internet marketing is different for everyone.
Since we need a quick start in digital marketing, look for companies with diverse projects. Having chosen 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, later 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.
1) Marketing department or project team
Learn as much as possible about the Internet marketing department, find out which tasks are solved by regular forces, which are outsourced. What is happening now is good, and where there are failures or problems, try to clarify their causes. Maybe you already have three people burned in these areas for another probationary 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. Is Trello, Megaplan, Worksection, Basecamp used? What about Scrum and Agile? Modern marketing does not work without IT solutions: brazenly figure out which CRM is used in the company, which service for mailing lists, whether 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 of guerrilla marketing in the market, but it is better to start in projects with marketing budgets, otherwise you will not try out a lot of effective methods of attracting an audience. A newcomer needs to “sniff” projects with at least small budgets in order to experience the possibilities of online marketing.
“With money, any fool can” - this statement is more about PR, because a different approach works in marketing: each ruble invested should bring 10 rubles of profit.
4) How do employees grow and train?
The company introduced a system of mentoring - just two fat advantages in its favor. If not, ask the HR-manager if employees are often sent for training, is it customary to go to specialized conferences? In such companies you will grow twice as fast, and more fun, perhaps.
5) What are your plans for the near future with the company on the Internet?
If she is satisfied with her contextual advertising and mailing lists, and does not plan anything else, it means that you will work as a robot. And what about your dream to make the world better? 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. This is where you need to be implemented!
Do not give up and do not lower the bar, if at the first interviews you have met utter bewilderment.
It means that the company has no resources for the implementation of interesting and high-quality projects, you will not get a good experience here. Work just on the experience in digital - the death sentence for a career.
Be careful of the pharmaceutical, alcohol and tobacco industries - there are very specialized tools. Avoid complicated b2b companies: there’s also specific marketing, traditional online tools are still working poorly. Do not put an end to these areas for good - no, just with accumulated experience there will be easier.
Ideal: IT companies and e-commerce, full-service digital agencies, services (travel, events, entertainment, real estate, fitness).
So, you are a marketing assistant or junior digital specialist. If you are assigned 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 the company accounts are arranged, what content is published there, what questions the subscribers ask. Observe the form in which you communicated with the subscribers: was it “Hi, seals” or “Hello, dear subscribers”? At the same time, immerse yourself in the business, thoroughly monitor competitors. With proper skill, it will take you 1-2 weeks.
Then connect or ask to join e-mail marketing. Having studied the previous experience, offer to write the text of the newsletter, learn the service, get test letters in it. Pay special attention to the subject of the letter - the mailing text can be infinitely good, but what is the use of it if the topic did not work, and the Open Rate is low. It will take another week.
Now step up to context. See how your current advertising campaigns are set up. Learn what time and geography targeting is set, how rates are set, what negative words are used. Found a bug? Feel free to offer your recommendations. Ask to practice building a semantic core for a new service or action. On the study accounts Yandex and AdWords lay a week.
Went heavy artillery: now you can get into SEO. Look at what's on your site from the content works for the benefit of the issue, how the navigation is arranged, whether there is a blog, what keywords your website promotes, and which items from the external optimization are performed. And again we keep an eye on competitors. A week should be enough.
And just now it's time for analytics. Learn what and how set up in your account, what goals are set, what numbers are collected. Review reports, look at the web viewer. Analytics is one of the most vital sections of online marketing. With its help, 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 Central Asia almost by sight!
Over the next six months, you need to learn how to optimize your marketing budget by analyzing the cost of a single 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 leadership does not disregard such successes and encourages with bonuses.
• At the very initial stage, with extreme caution, take up the tasks for creativity and planning (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 did 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 rashly advise how to do it. The first two months of work is not the time for radical proposals. Record your observations and return to them after some time. And remember that any controversial issue can be solved with the help of A / V testing.
• Create checklists and check your actions - newcomers often inadvertently forget to put a tick. And one such tick, for example, on geo-targeting in contextual advertising, can seriously affect the quality of traffic.
• Learn to write competently and interestingly! You do not need to give creative slogans worthy of Cannes lions, but you have to write good texts for the blog, newsletters, social networks! In this case, do not forget that each company needs its own style.
• Learn, learn and learn again! Digital is a non-stop development: news, lifehacks and trends. You need to follow this and have time to quickly implement, until you are ahead of competitors. Make a plan for learning - 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 made up of salary and bonus, which is calculated on the basis of key indicators. Most often these are new lead applications. Learn to work on the result - it is great motivating, will not let you get bored and slow down in development. And the phrase: “I got more for less” for an employer is better than any of your “crust”.
If a year has passed in the company, and you are still engaged only in monitoring the media, responding to customer comments in social networks, posting news on the site and paperwork - this is a reason to think seriously. It seems that you do garbage? Change the company. Think about specialization. Maybe during your work you have a favorite - then you should give him preference and devote a year or two to perfect your skills in one area, for example, SMM or video blogging. Pull up the theory, whip up the summary with numbers - and again into battle!
We tell how to survive the first year in online marketing and not break.
The path of the internet marketer according to experts on the Internet is as follows:
1) Get a higher education in marketing, learn how to do a SWOT analysis and work with the BCG matrix
2) 5 years optimize websites, become a context guru, learn PHP, HTML and JavaScript, learn to write better than Maxim Ilyakhov, get a certificate of knowledge Yandex.Metrica
3) Congratulations! You are an internet marketer!
')
The plan is ambitious, but alas, stupid. He leaves more questions than answers: where to start, how to choose a specialization and where to practice the skills?
In order to help newcomers survive in the ruthless world of digital, we, Elizaveta Tselyutina, the Internet marketing specialist at IHSBM business school, made up the “development route”. Beginning as an intern, Liza went through digital-intensive under the Irish DMI program and “on the job” immediately tested new knowledge in her company. We hope that this experience will help the juniors in a short time to go from zero to a promising specialist in online marketing.
Step 1. Training
Do not listen to the Old Believers, who recommend starting with classic marketing: in one ear flies, in the other flies. In the first year, no one will trust you to make a SWOT analysis and bring a new product to the market. Come back to this later.
If you choose the shortest path to the profession, it is better to go broke to a good course in digital marketing (IHSBM, Netology, Digital October). The best investments are investments in yourself, do not be greedy for knowledge, this is your career foundation.
Specialization - a debatable question. According to our observations, those digitizers are growing faster who have chosen the path “just a little bit”. Therefore, if you do not have a firm conviction to devote your whole life only to contextual advertising, it is better to choose a “review course” in which all aspects of Internet marketing are studied. In addition, only having tried every digital marketing tool will you be able to understand where the soul lies - SMM, campaign planning or SEO-hardcore.
Regarding free content available on the Internet. It will help if you already have a base and system in your head. For comprehensive self-training from scratch, free webinars, seminars, blogs and books are not suitable, but they can be even more confusing and frustrating.
But during the training you should subscribe to reliable sources: specialized media (Cossa, vc.ru, Seonews), blogs of famous agencies (Texterra, Ingate, i-Media, Adventum, IT-agency). The task is to increase vocabulary. You should stop scaring the endless CPC, CTR, ARPU and LTV. Pay special attention to the study of cases. To penetrate the goals and objectives of Internet marketing, read and absorb how company N increased sales by 15% with the help of mailings, and startup X with the help of social networks drew 1000 leads.
Step 2. Let's go practice!
So, your head is cracking with new knowledge, and a certificate is hanging on the wall. It's time to practice. We make a resume for the position of assistant. Layfkhak: it is better to do more than one universal, and each sharpen for a specific job. Yes, it is longer than mindlessly pressing the button "Respond", but the exhaust is more.
If there is no goal to get into a conservative company with employees in ties, you can write a resume in an informal way. Having added a pinch of creativity and originality, do not forget about your serious approach to business. In this area, creativity is appreciated, especially for SMM and email marketing, which you will demonstrate in this way. No one wants to feed the consumer with dry and monotonous posts. Perhaps this way you will save yourself from the test task.
There is an opinion that it is better and faster to start at the agency, but we will not be so categorical. The most important and unexpected - during the interview you have to ask a lot of questions! Do not look at social packages, corporate buns and even salary. Having won free breakfasts and a salary of 10 thousand more now, you risk a whole year checking contracts with contractors or making endless resize banners. Internet marketing is different for everyone.
Since we need a quick start in digital marketing, look for companies with diverse projects. Having chosen 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, later 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.
So, here is a list of questions that you can safely take for an interview to pleasantly surprise the recruiter.
1) Marketing department or project team
Learn as much as possible about the Internet marketing department, find out which tasks are solved by regular forces, which are outsourced. What is happening now is good, and where there are failures or problems, try to clarify their causes. Maybe you already have three people burned in these areas for another probationary 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. Is Trello, Megaplan, Worksection, Basecamp used? What about Scrum and Agile? Modern marketing does not work without IT solutions: brazenly figure out which CRM is used in the company, which service for mailing lists, whether 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 of guerrilla marketing in the market, but it is better to start in projects with marketing budgets, otherwise you will not try out a lot of effective methods of attracting an audience. A newcomer needs to “sniff” projects with at least small budgets in order to experience the possibilities of online marketing.
“With money, any fool can” - this statement is more about PR, because a different approach works in marketing: each ruble invested should bring 10 rubles of profit.
4) How do employees grow and train?
The company introduced a system of mentoring - just two fat advantages in its favor. If not, ask the HR-manager if employees are often sent for training, is it customary to go to specialized conferences? In such companies you will grow twice as fast, and more fun, perhaps.
5) What are your plans for the near future with the company on the Internet?
If she is satisfied with her contextual advertising and mailing lists, and does not plan anything else, it means that you will work as a robot. And what about your dream to make the world better? 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. This is where you need to be implemented!
Do not give up and do not lower the bar, if at the first interviews you have met utter bewilderment.
It means that the company has no resources for the implementation of interesting and high-quality projects, you will not get a good experience here. Work just on the experience in digital - the death sentence for a career.
Be careful of the pharmaceutical, alcohol and tobacco industries - there are very specialized tools. Avoid complicated b2b companies: there’s also specific marketing, traditional online tools are still working poorly. Do not put an end to these areas for good - no, just with accumulated experience there will be easier.
Ideal: IT companies and e-commerce, full-service digital agencies, services (travel, events, entertainment, real estate, fitness).
Step 3. Practice and specialization
So, you are a marketing assistant or junior digital specialist. If you are assigned 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 the company accounts are arranged, what content is published there, what questions the subscribers ask. Observe the form in which you communicated with the subscribers: was it “Hi, seals” or “Hello, dear subscribers”? At the same time, immerse yourself in the business, thoroughly monitor competitors. With proper skill, it will take you 1-2 weeks.
Then connect or ask to join e-mail marketing. Having studied the previous experience, offer to write the text of the newsletter, learn the service, get test letters in it. Pay special attention to the subject of the letter - the mailing text can be infinitely good, but what is the use of it if the topic did not work, and the Open Rate is low. It will take another week.
Now step up to context. See how your current advertising campaigns are set up. Learn what time and geography targeting is set, how rates are set, what negative words are used. Found a bug? Feel free to offer your recommendations. Ask to practice building a semantic core for a new service or action. On the study accounts Yandex and AdWords lay a week.
Went heavy artillery: now you can get into SEO. Look at what's on your site from the content works for the benefit of the issue, how the navigation is arranged, whether there is a blog, what keywords your website promotes, and which items from the external optimization are performed. And again we keep an eye on competitors. A week should be enough.
And just now it's time for analytics. Learn what and how set up in your account, what goals are set, what numbers are collected. Review reports, look at the web viewer. Analytics is one of the most vital sections of online marketing. With its help, 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 Central Asia almost by sight!
Over the next six months, you need to learn how to optimize your marketing budget by analyzing the cost of a single 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 leadership does not disregard such successes and encourages with bonuses.
Here are 5 more tips to recommend yourself well in the company
• At the very initial stage, with extreme caution, take up the tasks for creativity and planning (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 did 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 rashly advise how to do it. The first two months of work is not the time for radical proposals. Record your observations and return to them after some time. And remember that any controversial issue can be solved with the help of A / V testing.
• Create checklists and check your actions - newcomers often inadvertently forget to put a tick. And one such tick, for example, on geo-targeting in contextual advertising, can seriously affect the quality of traffic.
• Learn to write competently and interestingly! You do not need to give creative slogans worthy of Cannes lions, but you have to write good texts for the blog, newsletters, social networks! In this case, do not forget that each company needs its own style.
• Learn, learn and learn again! Digital is a non-stop development: news, lifehacks and trends. You need to follow this and have time to quickly implement, until you are ahead of competitors. Make a plan for learning - 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 made up of salary and bonus, which is calculated on the basis of key indicators. Most often these are new lead applications. Learn to work on the result - it is great motivating, will not let you get bored and slow down in development. And the phrase: “I got more for less” for an employer is better than any of your “crust”.
If a year has passed in the company, and you are still engaged only in monitoring the media, responding to customer comments in social networks, posting news on the site and paperwork - this is a reason to think seriously. It seems that you do garbage? Change the company. Think about specialization. Maybe during your work you have a favorite - then you should give him preference and devote a year or two to perfect your skills in one area, for example, SMM or video blogging. Pull up the theory, whip up the summary with numbers - and again into battle!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/338662/
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