How did I get a job in Digital Marketing?

It’s been a while since I last wrote on my own blog, and I mentioned back then that I wasn’t going to write with SEO in mind, but rather do it a bit more as a hobby, to share useful or interesting things.

With the whole pandemic, the digital marketing sector has grown quite a lot at the moment, and some very interesting job offers are appearing, but many people are struggling to find a job, especially if they are more junior. Getting started is always hard.

This is normal, because not all of us know how to sell ourselves. If on top of that we’re feeling low and think we’re not worth much, we may somehow pass that feeling on and end up not doing a good interview.

If you’re one of those people who doesn’t have much confidence, you’re going to have to start working on it.

One book that helped me a great deal was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

And a YouTube channel I also like for the advice it gives is:

But back to the subject.

In this post I’m going to tell you a bit about something that happened to me a few years ago, how I put together a digital marketing strategy focused on finding a job, what my day-to-day looked like and why it worked.

Do you want to look for a job and actually find one?

I hope this article helps you.

A bit of my story and why I needed to create a strategy

How I got started in the world of SEO

After finishing my IT vocational course around 2010, I was asked to apply SEO and web analytics during my work placement, but I had no idea what it was or what types of SEO there were.

They hadn’t taught me that on the course. My course was in application and web development, but anyway, I had to do something, so I spent the time learning and trying things out.

All of this was absolute madness, because the internet was overflowing with information.

Shortly afterwards I set up a boating website with 3 other people and took my first steps coordinating the marketing strategy and handling the SEO. I was the only person who knew about marketing and I tried to steer things based on what I read.

To be honest, we got around 400-500 visits a day, and soon a Google update came along and wiped out part of our efforts.

I eventually finished my placement and in 2013 I left the project, encouraged by other people to go freelance. I didn’t have the experience I needed, as I had only worked with and learnt from what I’d found online, blog articles and videos on YouTube.

The result of starting out as a freelancer?

There’s nothing worse than a fool with motivation, and that sentence sums it all up.

Several things went wrong here, and these are the ones I remember:

• Lack of experience: the mistake here was not having worked with others and seen how things are done. I had knowledge, but I couldn’t compare myself with others or put things in order.
• Better guidance: not having a company behind me or someone with more experience than me, not getting around the sector and meeting people who could help me, was another of my mistakes. Perhaps that’s why I now run a marketing group, so that others in my city have things much easier.
• Investment: I achieved a few small things without investment, but the truth is that while I was freelancing I was also working nights at Telepizza, because I couldn’t afford to live off my freelance work, and I’d end up exhausted. Better investment would have let me carry out better strategies or leave Telepizza and devote myself to it 100%.
• Taking risks: until I took a risk, nothing changed. Taking a risk is a difficult choice, because you can win or lose. We have to ask ourselves whether what we could lose is worth it compared with the change. Later on I did this and I won
• Focusing 100%: setting up a business and not focusing on it 100% makes it fail in most cases, and mine wasn’t a success story.

After a year and a few months as a freelancer, I finally shut up shop, as things didn’t work out for me. It didn’t matter how motivated I was or how many hours I put in, there were lots of things I didn’t do properly and they took their toll.

Even so, I learnt quite a few very valuable things that served me well in the future.

Shortly after closing, I took a Google Actívate course on digital skills. The course was very encouraging about creating your own website and gave a brief overview of the different skills in the sector (SEO, SEM, web analytics, social media, copywriting and I’m not sure if I’m leaving any out).

Motivated by this, I set up a blog and published a few posts during the first few weeks, but as usually happens, consistency is hard, summer came  and it sat idle for a few months.

A new job offer

Thanks to a friend, I got an offer to work remotely for a company in Belgium.

The company had its own CMS and was looking for developers to apply designs and build features, and the pay was good.

I was a bit rusty at programming, as I had spent too much time on digital marketing and had largely neglected the programming side.

This was the chance to take a risk and leave my current job. I had been working at Telepizza for many years by then. It’s not that I disliked it; I admit I partly enjoyed it, and sometimes I miss making pizzas and being around people, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I had been at Telepizza for many years and could have asked for a leave of absence (in case this job went wrong), but my gut told me not to ask for it, to take the risk, and that if things went badly I had to force myself to keep going and not look back.

I listened to my gut.

In a way I wanted to put myself under the pressure of what would happen if things didn’t go well, and I thought of Alexander the Great’s strategy of «burning the ships».

I started working for the Belgian company in September, but things didn’t work out. I delivered two projects but they didn’t pay me, so I decided to cut off contact.

How I found a job

It was the end of November 2014 and I knew they weren’t going to pay me. So I stopped doing things and thought.

Remember what I told you a few lines back about Alexander the Great’s strategy? Well, this was the result, move forward or die, and I was too young to die.

I wasn’t upset or worried. I knew I had no income and that I could well end up broke, without being paid and with no way back to the pizzeria. One of the scenarios I had already expected might happen was playing out, which is why I was prepared.

Not being upset or worried is key, because it lets you act and think things through more coolly and more clearly. Letting our emotions carry us away can lead us to failure, which is why it’s important to be strong and keep our impulses in check.

I stopped and thought after many years on the go and a lot of work behind me.

I remembered I had a blog, this one.

For the first time I put all the knowledge I had gathered over 5 years in order and created a marketing strategy with a fairly clear purpose, to find a job officially in digital marketing.

In the end I found 4 offers and picked the one I thought was best.

A strategy for finding a job

Right, we’ve now seen my past and how I got here. I wanted to explain my experience and my motivations, as I think it’s important to understand the context of the situation in order to achieve the goal of the strategy.

Now I’ll explain the strategy, simple but effective.

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who will interview you

The first thing you need to do is put yourself in the other person’s shoes.

If you were the one doing the interview:

• Who would you hire first if you had a pile of CVs?
• What kind of people would you prefer to have working in your company?
• What level of knowledge would you want from the people working with you?

Based on that, you can get an idea that:

• You need to contact the interviewer directly and skip the pile of CVs by catching their attention.
• You have to show initiative, eagerness to work and a certain independence in getting things done and seeing the work through.
• You have to show in some way that you have knowledge of the sector.

Steps to follow

The steps were simple, finding a job was my job at that point.

I made a list of daily tasks, which were:

• Write an article.
• Share it on social media: mainly LinkedIn and Twitter, which is where my sector is most active.
• Interact with well-known people in the sector on social media.
• Read marketing books: I read one book a week and then wrote a short summary of it, explaining from a positive point of view what it had given me and mentioning the author. That way I got myself noticed a bit more on social media and learnt new things to try out.
• Look for new job offers: I searched several job sites and tried to work out the name of the company. This is very easy, because the same company posts the same advert with the same text on several sites. Some sites show you the company and others don’t. So all you have to do is search for part of the text of the offer on Google until you reach a website where the company is shown.
• Contact the companies: one way to start the conversation is to send an email introducing yourself and asking whether the offer you found online (send the link) is still open. What happens next is that they’ll ask for your CV, so you’ll jump ahead of a lot of people.

What I spent the most time on was looking for offers. There comes a point where you’ve seen practically every job site and finding new job offers becomes a lot harder. I could easily spend between 2 and 4 hours a day on that alone.

I spent roughly an hour on the article and 1 or 2 hours interacting on social media.

Reading helped me learn bits and pieces, and along the way I tried to put them into practice or test new ones I discovered reading other people’s articles on social media.

As you can see, the strategy isn’t a complicated one and it’s within reach of any junior. The job I found didn’t come with a very big salary either, but it was a way to find work in my field, enter the sector professionally and grow little by little.

If you lost your job because of the pandemic and you fancy trying the strategy, or you need some advice, you can ask me in the comments or through the contact form.

I hope this helps 😉