As a recent college graduate with only a few weeks of intern experience, I thought that I was well prepared to begin my new marketing job and become an immediate star.
Boy was I wrong!
While college courses teach about all the conceptual aspects of a certain industry, many business basics are not covered. I learned more in my first month as a marketing rookie than two semesters of college courses! I would like to share my experiences with you so that if you ever find yourself in my situation, you’ll have a better idea of what to expect during your first 30 days as a Digital Marketer.
My first week on the job consisted of training with one of the marketing specialists who had already given her two weeks notice. In that short amount of time, I underwent an intensive crash course in marketing that covered many digital marketing basics such as internal processes, content marketing, SEO basics, WordPress, Volusion Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, reporting and much more.
The first few days as an official employee, I spent most of the time getting familiar with my clients and their respective workspace on Podio, our internal Project Management Software. Catching up on months of previous work took much longer than expected and I eventually became more familiar with the following:
➢ Each of my clients hosting platforms, which is either Volusion or WordPress,
➢ Each client’s content strategy requirements
➢ Each client’s ongoing projects and tasks, including site analytics and SEO efforts.
➢ Various web-based programs used at Optimum 7.
I found out that I knew a lot less about marketing then I thought, but felt as if I was learning quickly enough. What I didn’t understand I “Googled.” Overall, I learned a lot in my first week, but I can honestly say that I didn’t feel like I got much accomplished.
So then I began to really focus on executing the ongoing basic marketing strategies for each of my clients with the following tasks:
• One of the first strategies I executed was making improvements to a client’s meta-data. This is the information that is crawled and indexed by Google to determine search ranking. It is also displayed on the Google search page and the title of the page tab. This metadata is critical for ranking a site well on Google.
• I also implemented Wufoo contact forms for clients. These forms make it easy for clients to communicate with the company and build a database of invaluable leads for the company.
• Another task I performed was to publish blog articles onto my client’s sites as well as their respective social media platforms. Each of these articles contain topics and keywords I had researched for ranking purposes through a process Optimum7 coined as “Niche Term Research.” These tasks were not so challenging from a technical standpoint. However, it is a form of optimization that delivers results every time!
• Next, I started to take on more responsibility and work on more technically conceptual strategies. For example, I worked with my marketing team on a website launch for one of our clients. This was a huge challenge for me. Although I did my best to help wherever I could, much of the work that needed to be done was over my head. For this project, I spent most of my time managing the 301 redirects needed for the website to function properly.
• For another client, I worked with one of my team members to develop and execute a competitive analysis and traffic strategy. Developing this comprehensive plan aided me in my learning as it touched on every aspect of what we do here as Digital Marketers. While these were the two major projects I was involved in, I also learned how to create landing pages, manage backlinks and make basic WordPress and Volusion edits which furthered my digital marketing skills.
After the first two weeks I thought I was beginning to “get the hang” of digital marketing, but the following weeks to come showed me how much more I would have to learn in order to be a marketing star! Not everything was as challenging as the website launch and I learned a few strategies that I will continue to build on.
Overall, after my first month as a digital marketer, I quickly came to the conclusion that this would be a marathon not a sprint! I know that I need to stay focused on learning as much as possible and further by skill set so I can be of more value to the company. So if you ever find yourself in my position, I recommend that you keep this mindset and do not get discouraged. Every new skill you learn will make you a better Digital Marketer and further your career.
