How To Find A Job In Digital Marketing

Upon leaving University with a 2:1 in Business Management, I started my real entry into the business world. Five years on and I’m now the digital marketing manager at Eventa.co.uk, however it hasn’t all been a straight forward path. Considering I’m now currently in the process of employing a number of graduates for digital marketing roles, I felt it was important to share exactly what I’m looking for and how to stand head and shoulders over your competitors for the role.

Understanding of Coding

You don’t have to be completely savvy with all forms of coding, or have built your own site from scratch, but a basic understanding of HTML and CSS will definitely put you in a strong position. If you aren’t yet comfortable with HML, I would recommend heading over to Codecadamy and learning the introduction course.

All of the courses are free on this site and are very easy to understand, slowly walking you through each and every process. From here, they also offer a number of other free coding courses, such as for PHP, Javascript and J-Query.

Blog

Having a blog will illustrate a large amount of strengths to an employer. Firstly, they need constant updating, so they require dedication and time management skills. They also require a certain level of technical skills, while more you understand about running a website, less you will need to be taught when you join the company.

If you are running a blog, you will no doubt have learnt a number of basic SEO rules in order to improve the rankings of your website on search engines, which will be important to any role in digital marketing.

Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools

The next tip requires you to have a site in place, but I would strongly recommend getting comfortable with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. Both of these are free to use and are fundamental to improving your understanding of how your site is performing and any issues that may be occurring.

It is highly likely the company you join will have these in place and you will be using them on a regular basis. If you find them confusing at all, watch some YouTube video tutorials to walk you through the layout and how to get the most out of them.

Adwords

I would recommend setting up an account on Adwords and getting used to the system and the layout. Whether you take a role around PPC or not, it can be very useful to have an understanding of the platform. To learn more, I would recommend doing the AdWords training. Start with fundamentals and then once you are completely comfortable here, you can decide how much time you want to dedicate to each different area, whether focusing on video, display or shopping.

Social Profiles

The first step is a clean-up job. This isn’t to say you need to delete all those shady University pictures, however you might want to check your privacy settings, while I would definitely make your profile picture presentable as the employer will almost certainly check nowadays.

The next step is to start building up a profile on a number of the social profiles, such as Twitter and Google Plus. I would also recommend building a page on Facebook, a business page on Google Plus and building a community on Google Plus.

Beyond this, there are some tools which you should get comfortable with, such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Buffer. The list of social tools is endless, so if you enjoy social media and want to consider a role specifically focused on this area, gain a greater understanding of them all.

Algorithmic Updates

It wouldn’t be surprising in an interview to be asked about Google Panda or Penguin. If you are sitting there confused then it will instantly highlight you are not up to date on the SEO industry. Take a look through Moz’s list of Google Algorithmic updates and learn about each one.

Understanding of SEO

SEO is a very deep topic, you could be reading and writing for years on the topic, however you’re not expected to be an expert on the topic. What does surprise me in the past when interviewing graduates is that a number of them hadn’t even heard of SEO. If I have to explain what SEO stands for, then you clearly aren’t the right person for the job.

Read up on how to increase your rankings, focusing on seo tasks such as: Meta Data, Internal Links, Link Building, duplicate content issues, page speed, canonical links, keyword analysis, schema, robots.txt, XML sitemaps and HREF Lang.

Tom Bourlet is a Digital Marketting Manager at Eventa Group. You can find out more about Eventa here. Remember, if you would like impartial advice and support towards your career aims, whether it is marketing, management, marine biology or museums, you can contact us for advice and support.

Image taken with thanks from Morguefile.com (thegeometricfox, laptop.jpg, <http://mrg.bz/dkylBw> [accessed 08/06/2015].