Summary

If you’re looking to get into marketing, you’re going to get a ton of different answers about “how” you should get into. The certifications, the schooling, the blogs to follow and things to do. Here’s my take on how to invest your time wisely if you’re making the shift into the marketing field.

Transcript

David Bradley here. And today I want to talk to you about how you actually get into marketing if you don’t have any marketing background. Right. And I want to dig through the different suggestions that you might hear about this. And everyone has a different perspective of how to begin a first and foremost formal education isn’t entirely necessary. It depends on what path you’re taking. If you’re going to go to the self employed path, of course, it doesn’t matter if you’re going into corporate America. There might be a little weight to it. If you’re going into an agency, there’s a little bit more flexibility, but overall marketing isn’t a field that you’re required to have a marketing education informally, because most understand that there’s limited value in that. Anyhow, marketing tends to lend itself well to people who have varied backgrounds, different experiences.

So there could be value in your lack of focus as well. With your education aside, one of the first things that people will say is, well, go do the Google and the HubSpot certifications. And again, that depends on what path you want to take. So I’m going to take the perspective of if you want to run your own marketing business, whether that is as a consultant or running your own agency one day, if that’s the path you’re going down, you’re trying to get started doing something freelance. This is the perspective I’ll take here, just to clarify that upfront. So, you know, as a step one HubSpot and Google have very in depth certifications and there’s some value to them. You’ll learn. Certainly I don’t know that it is the best use of your time. If you’re looking to build your business, whether that is as a consultant freelancer agency in the marketing services space, there’s a limit.

If you’re doing all the, all of the work yourself and those certifications tend to really benefit you. If you’re getting into the nitty gritty where you’re focused on building the business marketing services business should be you know, what is the right strategy, make sure that we have the right marketing plan, that we’re doing the right things and how do we bring in new clients? And then how do we service them as well? But there’s different ways to service them as opposed to just doing it all yourself. And it’s probably best if you find a team that has some expertise already developed upfront, rather than you figuring it out as you go, because you know, all these different services that you could offer in marketing, all the different channels, they could get very much in depth, even though you can learn them. You can’t become an expert at everything.

Search engine marketing, social media, marketing, social advertising, paid search, so on and so forth. There’s too much to become an expert at everything, but you can get good at understanding the strategy of what should be done for clients. And that is a path to take. Other people say to try to learn everything, go study SEO and social media marketing and paid search and so on. Again, I think there’s a fallacy there of being able to understand it all because you can’t, you can get a surface level understanding. You can learn enough that you can know the strategy, and there’s merit to that. If you try to learn a little bit of everything, you’re going to get to that baseline, at least but it’s difficult to learn without applying. So it’s much easier to understand the concepts and the actual application if they’re put to use in some capacity.

So that’s where there’s an issue there. The others say, just jump on Upwork and those types of freelancer websites and start bidding on jobs and just go in and low ball. And again, I would be very tentative there because I’m the type of job you’re going to get on Upwork for a couple dollars an hour is going to be very different than what you’re going to experience. If you go and continue to build a real business at some point, and furthermore, you don’t want to go out there and do a subpar job. In my opinion, even if it is a very low rate, you know, that might justify it, the actual quality level to you, but I wouldn’t want to do that. And it’s difficult to say if you’re really learning in the right way, when you’re teaching yourself by reading about something and then applying it, and then assuming maybe it’s working out well enough.

And if you’re all alone doing a freelance type of thing, that’s all you’ve got. And others say to build an online business. So, you know, go develop a website, a news oriented website, publish articles, build a blog, whatever it is, go do an eCommerce website and learn marketing that way. So that addresses my main concern of can I apply this? What it doesn’t address is my other concern, do I know if I’m really doing a good job or how good of a job I’m doing? Am I following the best practices? Am I following the right blogs that are teaching me this and that? So there’s some risk there and to actually build a business online, it takes a tremendous amount of work. So to just do that as a pet project to learn from has some value, but it can be tremendous work as well.

I think doing a little bit of all of those is the right plan. So go and get the education study, maybe the HubSpot certification, I’m just gonna basic high level view of what they do. Study a little bit. Yeah, SEO and social media, and know how Google ads work and so on. Just to get an understanding of how they function, not necessarily how you go in the back end and set up campaigns and do tweaks and all of that. Skip Upwork all together. Don’t waste your time there. Some people are successful, but it’s questionable, successful and how that works. And typically I wouldn’t recommend going down that path and building an online business. Well, if you build your own business in some capacity, it has to have an online component. So I don’t necessarily just think I need an eCommerce store, but if there is something that you want to pursue, it could even just be your freelance business and getting that up and going.

And that’s where you couldn’t apply marketing concepts much more thoroughly and applicably if that’s your long term goal. Anyhow. So the right goal, if you want to learn marketing, and if you want to start your own marketing services business, well, the right strategy, there would be that you find a competent team that would deliver the client services so that you don’t have to necessarily know how to do any marketing yourself. You’re gonna have zero understanding how to pop open Facebook’s ads manager and set up a campaign, but find someone who can deliver. And you can subcontract to them where you focus on the account management aspect. And in the account management side, you’re dealing with the client. You can deal with the project management as well to make sure that things get done on time. And you’re interfacing between the subcontractor and the client you’re right in the center.

And that isn’t just a way to Mark up your costs to the client. There’s value being shared all around the fixed subcontractor. Does it have to deal with the client? And that is a heavy workload. And it’s often the real experts who love what they do in terms of delivering services. Often don’t love to deal with clients. They just want to focus on what they love to do. So that’s fine. There’s value to the client because they’re getting excellence in the work. And they’re getting your attention as the account manager. And you’re getting the value because you do have a mockup in between, and that’s where you make your earnings. And this isn’t much different than how agencies operate. It’s not much different than how consulting firms operate. There’s always a team, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a full time team or an in house team.

So if you do it this way, this is why it works out well. One, you’ve got an expert who is very good at what they do. That’s the subcontractor that you hire. And now you’re seeing not just these different things you read on blogs that you might apply and might be able to connect, but you have someone who has the experience, the knowledge, the expertise that can do that for you. And then secondarily to that, you’re getting an experience of communicating with clients to be able to explain, well, this is why we’ve done this and that your subcontractor can explain it to you. And then you then teach the clients. All right, this is how our process works. This is why we’ve done these things. And that is where you get some more value as well.

So that’s the trick. If you want to get into marketing, and if you want to start your own business, get started on it. Take the account and project manager role and find the right subcontractor, the right team to support you, to deliver an excellent service at the end of the day, and use that as applicable, direct learning in the process.

 

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