8 Ways to Land Your First Marketing Job (With Actionable Steps)

Digital marketing is an art and a science. It’s a highly-competitive field and growing more and more in demand. Finding your first digital marketing job can be tough if you’re not prepared to differentiate yourself from your competition. I started positioning myself long before I interviewed for my first job. While graduating from school, I built a 6-figure online business and constantly worked towards improving my craft in my free time. Once I graduated and started seeking corporate job opportunities, I was fortunate enough to earn 3 job offers to choose from. To this day, the work I do is highly valued by organizations because I understand what’s important to them and deliver on my promises.

From the outside, it may have looked like I got these opportunities handed to me, but I think it’s important to discuss the work that went on behind the scenes for these opportunities to readily present themselves at the beginning of my career. By outlining the steps I took, I hope to help new grads or anyone looking to change their career the ability to get the dream marketing career they’ve always wanted. The goal isn’t to brag about my accomplishments but to empower others with actionable steps that I know are powerful and work.

Understand The True Value of Digital Marketing

Once you understand this – it is life-changing. Not only for your career but for all the companies you work for.

This may seem really basic, but I’m surprised by how many of my peers don’t “get it.” If you ask a group of marketers, “What’s the goal of digital marketing?” you will get all kinds of answers. Some may say “to generate online awareness of the business.” Others will say “to generate leads” or “connect with potential buyers.” You will get a slew of answers. None of these are wrong, but all of these things should be pointing to the “Mac Daddy” of what digital marketers should do: To help generate profit for the business.

There are always some exceptions to this. But you should always be communicating and driving value. If you can’t drive profitable campaigns that lead to sales or assist sales in closing deals, you probably won’t have a job for very long. Digital marketing is not just writing blog articles about rainbows and unicorns, creating pretty social media graphics, and taking photos around the office. Sure, that’s part of it, but if you’re not focused on the business’s bottom line at the end of that tunnel, you’re missing the point. Those blog articles need to meet customers at each stage of their buying journey, social media should drive awareness and a following that you can eventually convert into customers, and those office photos should build trust and awareness that will entice someone to purchase when they’re ready.

Takeaway: Marketing should be a revenue-generating function of any company that supports sales.

Make sense?

Graduate with a Marketing Degree or Certificate

I could write an entire article about this view alone. You don’t need a marketing degree to be successful in marketing. Some of the most important skills you’ll learn won’t come from school. However, when it comes to getting your first job (without having many connections), it’s VERY helpful to have that degree on your resume. More and more companies are getting the hint that a degree does not equate to a high-performing employee, but until we get to that place as a collective society, degrees do hold value.

 I’ll add that most of what I learned about marketing was NOT from my degree. It was about what I chased AFTER the degree. The university is a great place to make new connections and learn critical thinking. This is where the value lies. Not only that, but some people NEED the structure that University provides and need to be “fed” information. Many people simply won’t go out and actively learn what they need to know on their own whim. I believe my degree helped me in “checking the box” as decision-makers were looking at my resume and deciding whether or not to interview me!

Takeaway: You don’t NEED a degree, but if you don’t have one, you better have a very impressive portfolio to support your skillset.

Research What Companies Are Looking For

One of the most valuable things you can do when applying for that first marketing job is to look at job descriptions. Before I graduated, I scoured TONS of marketing job descriptions and paid special attention to the “Responsibilities” sections. This will tell you EXACTLY what you need to know how to do in order to get the jobs you want. I noticed there were a lot of skills that I didn’t have at the time (heck, I didn’t even know what “PPC” was!). Note the trends that you see here. 

SEO, PPC, A/B Testing, Google Analytics, WordPress, etc., were fairly consistent across many descriptions.

“How am I supposed to get these jobs if I’ve never done any of these things?” I kept asking myself.

Instead of being a victim of the job description, I decided I would teach myself every single one of these skills that I didn’t know, and I did it through proofs of concept (which ended up turning into my first 6-figure online business). 

Takeaway: Make a list of marketing skills you’re not comfortable with that you see across the job descriptions you look up. You can also make a list of skills you are comfortable with.

Build a Proof of Concept

Once you hone in on the skill gaps that you’re facing, it’s time to prove that you can improve on them. This means being able to CREATE your own experience (even if you don’t have any yet!). In my experience, I didn’t yet know about WordPress. So I taught myself how to build a WordPress website. I picked a niche I was passionate about, decided how I would make money off it, and got to work. I worked in a software company for a few years, and I learned from the developers there that Google is your BEST FRIEND. There are no longer any excuses for not knowing how to do something. So, jump on Google and get started!

Find ways to tie marketing concepts together. For me, I built a WordPress website to showcase my WordPress skills. I also wrote down “SEO” as a skill I didn’t know yet. So, I researched how to do technical and on-page SEO and wrote articles for my website. I wrote 1 article weekly and got a few of them ranking on the first page of Google for fairly difficult keywords. Boom – I could put a checkmark by SEO and WordPress.

You can keep extending your new skillsets using your website as the foundation. For example, if email marketing is a skill you need, create a Mailchimp account and start getting subscribers to your site to send email campaigns. The possibilities are truly endless!

Takeaway: Take time to understand your skillset limitations from the list you created while researching job descriptions. Come up with ways that you’re able to execute these skills to practice them (example: Build a website). You can add these to your portfolio of skills now!

Spend Your Own Money to Learn PPC/SEM

I’m pretty serious about this one. At the end of the day, as marketers, we need to prove a positive ROI for our campaigns. There is no better way to learn the value of an organization’s budget than by learning on your own dime. 

You might be thinking, “but Christy, I’m in college, and I’m BROKE! How can I waste money running PPC ads?” I was a broke college student and still made this work. I did it by learning how to make PROFITABLE ad campaigns. In the step above, I had built a website that I had monetized, so my ads needed to drive a positive ROI (otherwise, I might be eating Pop-Tarts for dinner). If a campaign wasn’t profitable, I learned quickly that I needed to change something. Looking back now, my only true regret is not spending MORE of my own money on PPC since my return was so high.

I’ll share a life hack with you since you made it this far in the article. One way to create profitable campaigns is this…

Look up companies that have affiliate or referral programs. This means that for every person you refer that buys something, you get paid a commission. For example, let’s say Company ABC sells wallets, and you sign up and get a unique referral link. For every person that buys a wallet with your unique link, you will make 20% of the purchase price (typically around $10/sale). When you look up the cost-per-click, you may notice that it’s only around $0.05 per click. This tells us that we could have a good ROI on this campaign. Now, simply sign up for Google Ads, and create ads that target what I like to call “purchase-ready keywords” using your referral link. A purchase-ready keyword will be something like “Buy Company ABC Wallet” or even “Company ABC waterproof wallet.” Words like “buy,” “purchase,” or “sign up” declare an intent and typically have high conversion rates.

To this day, I still look at every business’s budget as my own money because of performing this exercise. I think it’s a mindset that not many people have, and it’s valuable in landing your first job to understand this.

Takeaway: If you have a website and monetization strategy, create a Google Ads account and begin running ads to the website. Do you have a Facebook Page? You can also do this with Facebook Ads.

Help Out Your Friends or Family

If you look around, many people you know need help with digital marketing. It might be your neighbor who has a landscaping company or your friend who is a hairdresser. Opportunities for digital marketing are everywhere! If you don’t have experience yet, helping someone out (for free or low cost) can be a great way to build your resume and show your competence. 

By offering to help someone for free, you accomplish a few things. The first is that you have a new connection AND a REFERENCE for your new job. This person will be able to vouch for you when interviewing for your first marketing job. You also gain a portfolio example, and you get to try new things! Since you’re working for free, typically, you’ll be allowed to experiment a little in order to help showcase a wide range of digital marketing competencies. This takes some time, so I would recommend doing this while still in school or cutting out time during weekends to work on it.

Takeaway: Help a friend, family member, or local business with marketing initiatives. The possibilities are endless. Help them set up their social media, create and optimize a Google My Business profile and generate reviews, help them create or improve their website, etc.

Get a Legit Marketing Internship

I have seen WAY too many “sheep in wolves’ clothing” marketing internships. They are either sales jobs disguised as marketing jobs, or they have the person filing paper and not doing any real marketing. I think an internship is a great way to get real-world experience before jumping into a salaried corporate role. But it’s important to find the RIGHT one!

Ensure you ask the right questions about the internship and the skills you’ll learn. These skills should be relevant to digital marketing. If you don’t do your due diligence here, you might find yourself selling fancy knives door-to-door…If you land the internship and find yourself doing many things that aren’t digital marketing, I would bring it up to your supervisor or run the other way.

Takeaway: You can find marketing internships directly by emailing companies you’d like to work for or seeking them out on a job search site such as LinkedIn. 

Embrace the Office Life (Initially)

With the WFH option becoming increasingly popular, I am a pretty big believer that the best place a new grad (or entry-level marketer) can be is in the office. There will always be opportunities in the future for WFH. Marketing is a highly technical and creative field, and you’ll get social interactions, industry knowledge, and whiteboard sessions that you won’t be able to experience working from home. Some may disagree, but this has been my personal experience.

Also, perhaps the most important, in terms of career progression, out of sight can also mean out of mind. By showing up, interacting with leadership, participating in meetings, etc., you’ll be able to be top of mind when the time for a promotion comes. Please don’t underestimate the power of being in the office at the start of your marketing career. I’ve lately seen peers being passed up on raises and promotions because they chose WFH while their peers decided to come into the office. Is your career or home comfort most important right now? You may be forced to choose.

Wrapping Up

So, what do you think? Are there any other pieces of advice you’d add to the above? These are simply recollections of what has worked well for me and what I personally find lacking when I interview marketing candidates and when I’ve spoken to my peers. 

Try some of the above actions out, and you might just surprise yourself…!