Marketing Degrees Are Worthless. Teach Yourself and Become a Social Media Rock Star.
Ask anyone with a marketing degree how much of what they learned is relevant to social media or digital strategy today. If they’re being honest and not just blowing smoke, they’ll tell you very little
Did you know that Google updates it algorithm over 500 times per year? Facebook updates its code and algorithms almost as often. To stay relevant in social media, you are constantly learning. Hell, what you were doing for search engine optimization (SEO) one minute, may get you wiped off the search engine page rankings (SERPs) overnight.
The world of digital marketing is constantly shifting and the greatest marketers are always working hard to stay on the cutting edge.
Drop Out of School
If you ask me (and clearly you are because you’re reading my post J), I don’t think university degrees are worth much anyway, certainly not at the cost that people have to pay nowadays. But degrees in digital marketing are particularly irrelevant and lack the real world skills needed to succeed.
If you want to get into social media and you don’t just want to do it as a career, you want to be fucking great at it, then drop out of school and start learning.
I’m so serious.
Now, the corporate world won’t agree right now. Look for jobs online and you’ll see stupid qualifications listed like “Marketing or Communications Degree from an accredited university”. Then they’ll add moon wishes like, “3 year’s experience with various CMSes, solid content writing ability, expert in Final Cut Pro, and underwater basket weaving.” They have no clue what they’re talking about.
Before I opened my own company, I interviewed with people like this. You know what many of them did? They’d print off questions from some Google search about “What questions to ask your social media manager”. They didn’t even understand the answers I was giving.
That’s, of course, because most people in hiring positions today don’t understand the world of social. But that will change as Millennials move up in the work force and there will be less and less inclination to value traditional degrees in the digital marketing arena. They simply aren’t relevant.
Most Influencers Don’t Have a Marketing Degree
If you listen to countless stories of various influences online, most of them got into social media after careers in other fields. It turns out it’s easy to make a name for yourself out there because so many people use social poorly.
Rather than taking the time to learn it by doing, they try to copy strategies they read somewhere else. It rarely works.
This is especially true of those with traditional marketing backgrounds that put numbers over people. The people that truly get it and succeed are the ones who build relationships online. Again, that’s not something you’re going to learn to do in a pit class at some university.
I Don’t Hire for Qualifications, I Hire for Results
Besides the fact that most of what people would learn in university is outdated by the time they get out, I’m a business owner and I’m interested in results. If you can create an online presence for a brand I’m working with that increases ROI, then I want you. I could care less where you learned those skills.
In fact, rather than qualifications on my job ads, I list “Goals needed to be achieved” instead. I want to know how you’ve achieved similar goals in the past and how you plan to continue to do so once you work for me. At the very least, how have you grown your own personal brand and accounts.
Real World Experience Is an Absolute Must
The other problem with university degrees in general is that they are heavy on theory and sorely lacking in any kind of real-world experience. That’s great that you can talk all day about the Buyer’s Journey and your Customer Persona.
I don’t care. I want to see you that you’ve actually implemented a strategy that drives real people to the website and gets them to convert. That takes skill and it’s one that can only be learned by doing.
Every audience has different unwritten rules they live by and those can even vary by platform. Etsy shop enthusiasts tend to use Pinterest for inspiration and Instagram to make purchasing decisions. Craft enthusiasts are often the opposite. You’re unlikely to find that information in a book, but you’ll figure it out quickly enough once you run accounts for the different products.
Social media, SEO, web site design, these are all bigger pieces of an Inbound puzzle that is absolutely fascinating to figure out. They all link together in intricate ways to deliver real-world results for clients, but there is rarely a common path that will get you there.
Instead, it’s test, optimize, repeat. Experiential knowledge guides you so that you learn to cut through the ridiculous amount of noise that exists online these days and find out what’s really going to work.
What About Online Certifications?
These are great. You know why they’re great? Because they’re free.
That’s right, you can get the same education you’d get in university for free online. They’ll even give you a shiny little badge to put on your resume or add to your LinkedIn profile. See?
Now, these still don’t replace real world experience. I’m certified in most of them — Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Hubspot Inbound, Hootsuite. However, that test knowledge doesn’t take you far. It’s the experiential knowledge that really teaches you how to have an impact.
Achieve Rock Star Status
Becoming a social media rock star is a lot of work. It takes time and patience, just like if you were going to university.
The truth is, we’re all always learning. Even those that feel like we know what we’re doing still have a million more things we could learn. That’s the beauty of it, there’s always something new or something you could be doing better. So get out there are start making it happen.
If you need a lil help to do that, you should really sign up for my newsletter where I tell you how to start and grow a real business. I’ve helped build 6 thus far, so I think I’m getting the hang of it.
Nick Jaworski is the Owner and Chief Digital Community Builder for Circle Social Inc., a Strategic Social Media Marketing & Web Development Agency in Indianapolis. He writes on the future trends and shifting landscape of our digital world. He is also devoted father of a beautiful little girl that speaks Mandarin Chinese, Turkish, and English. Twitter & Snapchat: @NBJaworski
