Lessons Learned By A Graduate Content Marketer
Short bio/ random chit chat
Oh the journey from university to real life. It’s fun, it’s terrifying, it’s scary, it’s exciting!
My degree was PR and marketing, and though I’ve learned how to craft a press release, how to write a bad-ass marketing strategy and can have hour long conversations about the origin of PR, I’ve come to realise that I am endlessly behind when it comes to digital marketing!
Never ever have any of my teachers talked about SEO, PPC, user experience, lifetime value, crawlers, page ranking, A/B testing, hits, backlinks, landing pages, or long and short tailed keywords!
Now, just to be clear, I didn’t spend my years at university living in oblivion. I was very well aware of this lack of digital, so I prepared myself as well as I could. As a result of this — I hit the ground running (probably more of a slow jog tbh).
I’d done quite a bit of learning on my own through lots of internships, and started a paid internship the same month i graduated.
PingGo, a brilliant SaaS start-up, took my digi-tech virginity and off I was on an adventure I hadn’t even dared to dream!
I landed a content marketing job with Digital Impact, a digital agency, and since then it’s been a steep but exhilarating learning curve!
Here’s a list of the digital marketing lessons’ I’ve learned since i graduated.
Lessons I’ve learned:
No matter how amazing your content is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to push it. Learn to utilise social media and work on building links with people of power (people that others listen to).
It’s pure maths. Imagine that you have three friends who read what you write online. Each of your three friends have three friends who read what they write and share online. Get the three people on-board and you suddenly have an audience of: your three friends and their nine friends, instead of your three friends
Double, no, triple check that your hyperlinks are working! I can tell you from personal experience that there is nothing more embarrassing than sending out an email to several hundred people with a button that should be a hyperlink but links to absolutely nada!
Should you end up making my silly mistake even after reading this, then you’ve got to be quick on your feet. Think fast, think creative and act appropriate! We were quick to send out a witty apologetic email that to our surprise ended up with a far better opening, response and click- through rate than the initial email. Don’t underestimate the power of being human in a world of perfection!
Be a knowledge sponge! Your colleagues all have different experiences and all have different fields of expertise. Learn from them!
Get onboard with the terminology. After a few meetings of conversations going over my head and getting lost in terminology, I started reading up on the words that threw me off. I’m now catching up slowly, but I’m getting there.
Keep learning. Google’s algorithms change and so do people. Digital Marketing is a never ending story, and that’s what makes our jobs so ridiculously exciting! Remember to keep up with industry news or you’ll fall behind quickly!
