My Journey into Marketing
When anyone asks me how I ended up with my career, I almost always say ‘accidentally.’ I studied English Literature and Classical Studies at university, and never dreamed I’d end up running meetings about ROI. Or even knowing what ROI means.
At school, I started freelancing for an independent publishing company run by my best friend’s grandma. They wanted to invest more in their social media presence, but needed extra hands to run their Facebook community and to start their Instagram account. I had no experience or qualifications other than being a teenager who knew how these platforms worked. After just three months, we tripled sales of the back catalog and I’m still not sure how that happened! I wasn’t looking at data, I was just posting pictures and writing captions! But it gave me a taste for marketing and was my lightbulb moment, ‘hey, I might be good at this.’
This experience helped me land my first ‘real’ marketing job in London for a marketing agency in the property industry. Then to help me move to Madrid (a city I fell in love with thanks to Ryanair’s ‘Big Brexit Sale’ and a €13 return flight) I transitioned back to freelancing. Without this flexibility, I’d still be living in London and probably suffering from a vitamin D deficiency.
After freelancing for a couple of years, I landed my first job in EdTech and discovered the magic of ✨high consideration marketing ✨. Because selling someone a life-changing bootcamp and a €13 plane ticket are very different endeavours.
Types of Marketers
The first thing to understand about what it’s like to work in marketing is that no two jobs are the same. Literally. You can be in the same company with the same job title sitting at the same desk, and still be doing very different things!
Here are some of the different specialties of marketing, and keep in mind that each one of these has their own job ladder all the way from intern to VP…
Growth Marketing: building relationships and establishing the brand within a specific market or region.
Product Marketing: finding product-market fit, bridging the gap between the marketing team and the product team
SEO: managing Search Engine Optimization, both technical and creative
Copywriting: writing everything from emails to website copy, often a cross functional role
Events Marketing: running everything from free webinars to big conferences
Content Marketing: creating free resources like podcasts, quizzes, or blogs
Organic Marketing: marketing efforts that are ‘free’, like publishing a blog post or running a webinar
Paid Marketing: creating ad campaigns, both display and social media
All of these roles will look very different depending on what kind of company you’re in. You might find yourself in a more generalist role where you’re managing multiple things at once. The longer you’re working in the same company, the more you find yourself acquiring skills and ‘collecting’ responsibilities. This is more common in startups, where boundaries between roles are less rigid.
The role you have will also look different depending on what kind of company you’re in. B2B, B2C, B2B2B, SaaS…whatever you’re in you’ve got a lot of acronyms to learn!
When you’re first starting out, you’ll probably find yourself in a more generalist role, like ‘Digital Marketer’, ‘Growth Marketer’, or ‘Marketing Assistant’, unless there’s something in your background that particularly lends you to one route or the other.
A Day in My Life: Content Manager
Here's me writing this very blog post! Extra meta!
To give you an idea of what an early-career job role in marketing looks like, here’s what an average day in my life as a Content Manager looked like. This is when I had three years of experience under my belt, and had been working at an EdTech startup for one year:
9:00 AM - Going through Slack messages and emails from US/international teammates that came through while I was offline.
10:00 AM - Daily standup, aligning with the rest of the team.
10:30 AM - Blog writing.
12:00 PM - Checking data and making a presentation for the Head of Marketing
1:00 PM - Lunch
2:00 PM - Writing copies for social media posts, reviewing designs with the Social Media Manager
3:00 PM - Giving feedback on designs for new website pages
3:15 PM - Ad hoc request from the CEO, write copy while pretending to pay attention in a meeting. Get asked a question and have to pretend I was paying attention. Awkward.
4:00 PM - Hosting a podcast episode, interviewing the guest for a live audience
5:00 PM - Uploading episode recording to YouTube, preparing the transcription to turn into a blog post tomorrow
6:00 PM - Finishing off emails and replying to messages before the day end.
Remember that this is just what a day in Content Marketing looks like! If you’re not particularly creative and are looking for a more data-driven day to day, trust me, there’s plenty of that to go around. Mathematicians and scientists are just as important for marketing as the artists and writers.
Paths into Marketing
Just like all roads lead to Rome, all paths can lead to digital marketing. In fact, having a different experience to others in your team can be hugely beneficial as you bring different perspectives to the table. I’ve learned more from my Ironhack colleagues who used to work in the luxury fashion industry than any big marketing influencer!
So it’s not so much about your background, but the skills you have. Here are what I consider to be the most important:
Soft Skills
Marketing is similar to other industries in that your soft skills are what can make or break your career. These are absolutely fundamental not just to getting hired, but climbing the ladder.
Collaboration: This is the #1 most important skill by far! You always need to be able to work well with other people, whether it’s the rest of the marketing team, the leadership team, the product team, the customer success team…basically every team! You’ll need to be able to beg for favours, brainstorm ideas, work asynchronously across different time zones, and say no when necessary.
Communication: Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Some would call this ‘office politics’, but really it’s just knowing how to deliver your message to a certain audience. Delivering bad news to a CEO and asking a busy data analyst for help are much easier endeavours when you know how to talk to people.
Creativity: This is an obvious one, but I don’t just mean you know how to create a nice looking poster. I also mean being able to find new solutions to old problems, and to think outside of the box. You’ll have a lot of problems to solve, and if you can do it with creativity, you’ll stand out from the crowd.
Adaptability: You can’t sweat the small stuff in marketing, because things change all the time. Campaigns get cancelled, the product changes so you have to re-do the webpage you’ve just finished building, someone has a ‘genius’ idea that has to be launched by the end of the week. You’ve got to be able to change gears without getting grumpy about it. When you embrace change as exciting, you benefit much more than if you dig your heels in.
Hard Skills
Soft skills matter, but that doesn’t mean you can just knock on your dream company’s door like, ‘Hey! I’m a nice person who knows how to collaborate. How about that Marketing Manager role?’ You’ll need some hard skills:
Tools: There’s far too many to list here, but the main thing to know is that if you have familiarity with at least each main type of marketing tool, you’ll stand out. The categories are; data analytics (like Metabase), design (like Figma), content management (like WordPress), email management (like Mailchimp), customer management (like Salesforce), social media management (like HubSpot) automation (like Zapier), and ads management (like Facebook Ads Manager).
Project management: No matter what kind of marketer you want to be, you need to be able to run a campaign or a project from end to end. Big campaigns are like a house of cards, and one little wobble can bring the whole thing down! Every team needs an on-the-ball project manager to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Data analysis: You’ll do less of this at the entry-level and more as you become a leader, but there’s no role in marketing that doesn’t benefit from data analysis. Even if, like me, you’re not maths-minded.
AI literacy: I don’t mean that you need to use AI all the time, or be constantly tapped into ChatGPT. But you need to understand the AI landscape and how it impacts marketing. When should you make the most of AI, and when should you hold back? Are you using it ethically? Are you missing out on an opportunity to get faster and more efficient? Will there be some kind of pushback/fallout to using it the way you are? These are things you need to know.
Challenges and Opportunities
Image via Liz Willits on LinkedIn
OK, real talk. You’re not going to be Emily in Paris. Marketing is amazing, a real mix of art and science. But it’s not as glamorous as it’s made out to be! As you grow in your career, you’re going to face some challenges, but also some opportunities. I couldn’t talk to you about the realities of working in marketing without going into them.
Challenge #1 - Leaders who don’t understand marketing
This is (luckily) something I don’t currently suffer from! But it’s incredibly common for those at the top to not understand what it’s like in the trenches. What we do is seen as ‘easy’, possibly because it’s creative. How hard can posting to social media be, everyone does it!
This means you might be met with unrealistic expectations. I once had someone say, ‘we’re not launching anything new this week. Do you think we have time to launch a new podcast season?’ This would be about two month’s worth of work squeezed into four days so…no.
Opportunity: This is where you can flex your stakeholder management skills and learn the wonderful art of saying ‘Not Now.’ The two most beautiful words in a marketer’s vocabulary (except maybe Meeting Cancelled). If you’re able to plainly communicate what’s possible in a way that’s well received, you’ll build stronger relationships with your leadership team.
Challenge #2 - Data Dependency vs Data Smart
Data is the lifeblood of marketing, but it is possible to over-rely on it. Sometimes things in marketing are hard to track, and results can be interpreted in different ways. At some point you have to stop agonising over the data and just do the thing!
Opportunity: Getting more data literate is your best move here. But if that’s not your jam, then suggest setting a specific deadline for decision-making, where everyone knows that you’re going to go in one direction or the other by a specific date. The data people can argue about what direction that is until then. This can save you going around and around in loops!
Challenge #3 - Wearing too many hats
There may be more generalists in marketing than other areas. If you’re a good content manager, you’ve got the skills needed for product marketing, and may be asked to take over some extra responsibilities. If you’re a good data analyst, you might find yourself taking over some tasks for paid marketing. If you’ve got a glowing personality chances are you’ll be asked to host events or star in video campaigns, no matter what you are! Uncontrolled, this could lead to burnout.
Opportunity: It’s the beauty of marketing that you have this flexibility and opportunity to learn. The more you can do, the further you can go. But for your own health and wellbeing it’s important to keep this in check! Maybe you’re someone who would rather do a few things really well, than do everything without much gas in the tank.
At entry level it’s easy to want to say ‘yes’ to everything, and to feel like you don’t have the power to say ‘no’. But you do, if you can learn how to properly wield it. Ask for capacity assessments, or for a priorities review. Demonstrate in a tangible way that you’re doing too much to fit into your forty hours, and suggest what to cut back and what to focus on. This is how you can tailor your working week more to your liking, and stay sane!
That's not to say the challenges aren't worth facing! Sometimes marketing can lead you to weird and wonderful places, like the time we went to the YouTube Works Awards. It's like the Oscars but for paid video campaigns. Chanel performed SloMo and there was a lot of free sushi...it was fun!
What Now? Resources and Further Reading
If you’re ready to launch your career in digital marketing, here are some things to help you get started:
More articles
📰 All Roads Lead to Marketing: How Different Backgrounds Build Great Careers
📰 Digital Marketing Job Titles: What Do They Mean?
📰 Advice for Marketers of the Future
📰 10 Things Only a Digital Marketer Would Know
📰 Learn Digital Marketing with Ironhack’s new Bootcamp
About the Author
Ellie Merryweather is the Organic Marketing Lead at Ironhack, overseeing Social Media, Events and Webinars, SEO, and blogs. (A blog about the person who runs the blog…that’s the sound of a fourth wall smashing.) In her seven years of experience working in marketing she’s been a freelancer, an account manager for an agency, a content manager, and a department manager. Based in Madrid, she specialises in copywriting and loves to yap.
