While it may be a challenging time to find a job, it is a great time to pick up some new skills to add to your resume. It is up to you to take ownership of your professional development. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing tips to help you to build your own DIY digital marketing internship.
Whether you are a current college student, recent grad, or looking to make a career change to digital marketing, follow these tips to make progress toward your professional goals.
Subscribe to Marketing Newsletters
There are so many great newsletter out there to help you learn about digital marketing. Keeping up to date on industry trends and best practices will be an important element of your DIY digital marketing internship. Commit to spending time every day catching up on newsletters and reading whatever linked articles catch your attention. I like to catch up on marketing newsletters and articles while I drink my morning coffee.
Here are some of my favorites:
- Convince&Convert
- eMarketer
- {Grow}
- Hubspot
- Marketing Dive
- Search Engine Journal
- Search Engine Land
- Social Media Examiner
- Social Media Today
- Twitter Marketing
Assignment: Choose some newsletters to subscribe to and block off 30 minutes every day to read them.
Attend marketing webinars
Since you won’t be going in to an office or reporting to anyone, webinars can be a great way to learn from experts during your DIY digital marketing internship. You will start to see webinar invites come through in the newsletters you subscribe to, but here are some other places you may look for them to get started:
- Content Marketing Institute webinars
- Hootsuite webinars
- HubSpot webinars
- LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Webinars
- The Social Media Marketing Talk Show
Assignment: Attend at least one webinar per week. Try and attend live rather than watching a re-play. Ask a question during the Q&A at the end.
Schedule Informational Interviews
I have gained a lot of value from talking with people in my industry who are further along in their career than I am. The next step of your DIY digital marketing internship is to schedule informational interviews with seasoned marketers. Informational interviews are a great way to gain new perspectives, ask for advice, and connect with someone new who may be able to help you in your job search.
- Identify companies you’d be interested in working for and job titles you want to work towards and begin identifying people in those roles at those companies.
- Start by asking people who are already in your network if they would be willing to spend half an hour talking with you.
- You can also find potential people to interview through your college alumni association or by searching on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Career Advice is a great place to find more experienced professionals who have already indicated that they are open to helping more junior marketers.
- Find someone who works at an agency, someone who works in-house, and someone who is a freelancer. It will be helpful to hear about all three perspectives
- Talk with people in different industries. Marketing at a software company will look really different than marketing for a beverage brand.
- Before your meeting: do your research on the person and develop questions to ask them. You can ask them about their career path, what they do in their current role, what education they have found to be really helpful, etc. You can also ask if they have any other recommendations of people you should talk to.
- After your meeting: Follow up to thank them for their time. Connect with them on LinkedIn to keep in touch!
Assignment: Set up 3 informational interviews and develop a set of questions specific to each person you talk to.
Discover more about how to get started in digital marketing, and check back every week for next steps for building out your DIY digital marketing internship.
