Sara
Haw can I practice marketing online till I find an internship but not only digital marketing
Haw can I practice marketing online till I find an internship but not only digital marketing #marketing #internship #advertising #social-media #business #online-business
7 answers
Pankaj Kumar
Pankaj’s Answer
It won't be possible to practice online marketing without spending any money and without having any products to sell. In order to do online marketing you can work on honing 3 skills:
- Data and analytics: This is the core of everything what we do in online marketing. Best part of online marketing is that its highly analytical and anyone with good understanding of data can learn and execute online marketing quickly. Focus on honing your analytical capabilities and if possible learn SQL and Python which will help you in going beyond a traditional marketer
- Core marketing skills: I am going to cover this below. There are many resources available online for this.
- Data visualization: Companies invest lot of money in online marketing and its easy to understand and see effect of that investment through data. Though it varies between company to company but some of the generic things which we like to see are: 1)year over year trend 2) month over month trend 3) week over week trend for all the core metrics like spend, impressions, visitors, conversion etc. There are many tools which are available for data visualization. Most commonly used one is excel where you can create charts and tables but few automated tools like tableau is also highly used in the industry and knowing them would make you more valuable.
Couple of things which you can do to learn core online marketing skills are:
- Search Engine Marketing: Google has many resources online to learn adwords and understand search engine marketing. Here is one online link which you can use to learn search engine marketing https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9029201?hl=en
- Subscribe to search engine journal which publishes multiple articles daily to keep marketers up to date with recent things in search marketing. You can read articles to stay up to date. Here is the website https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
- Search Engine Optimization: There is no one place where you can learn SEO but subscribing to search engine journal will help you. You can also read Neil Patel's blogs which are pretty good (https://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/).
- Facebook advertisement: Facebook has lot of resources to learn marketing on their platform. You can go through some here https://www.facebook.com/business/marketing/facebook
On top of these if you can get access to Google analytics that will help you understanding online marketing world better. Lot of information here but hope this gives you some direction.
Brandon Farraye
Brandon’s Answer
Hi Sara,
I agree with Pankaj in that it will be hard to practice marketing without having a product or service to market, but what you can do is begin observing all the campaigns that are targeted to you. Online marketing, or digital marketing, is present everywhere you go on the internet, particularly on social media. If you are active on Facebook or Instagram, start to pay attention to the ads that you see and ask "why am I seeing this?". I would also recommend signing up for as many email marketing programs as you can. Go to your favorite brand's websites and sign up. Pay attention to your inbox to see how they talk to you, when they send you emails, what the content is, etc.
As someone who works in digital marketing, I am always looking at what other companies are doing. It is a very good practice to benchmark yourself against brands you like and those that you compete with.
So for you, I would recommend you begin making notes of all the places and types of marketing you see online. That will surely help you as you get into the field of digital marketing.
Hope that helps! All the best,
Brandon.
Mark Wilcox
Mark’s Answer
I once sold a $5,000 hot tub on Amazon.
Because of a book review I posted.
That had nothing to do with hot tubs.
And I don't sell hot tubs.
You can practice marketing with affiliate marketing. Amazon and Clickbank are simplest to get started.
All you need is a basic website. And then sign-up for an account on Amazon or Clickbank.
Then you can practice driving traffic to that website.
I wouldn't recommend SEO. Because you will want to show quicker results and SEO often takes several months to see results.
But you could practice driving traffic to the blog using social media. Or even in-person.
This would give you practical experience in the important parts of marketing:
1 - Researching and choosing a market
2 - Finding out how to reach that market
3 - What messages that market responds to
You might even make a few dollars on top of it :).
Mark recommends the following next steps:
Simeon Snow
Simeon’s Answer
Jean Seney
Jean’s Answer
https://www.facebook.com/business/learn
Best of luck!
David Weight, MS
David’s Answer
Apart from that, I would recommend you get in the weeds and try some things out. You don't need to have a product to sell, or money to invest, to learn some of the basics. Start an instagram account for travel photography or inspirational quotes. Use free tools to create posts (I recommend Canva) and research your hashtags. Focus on building your following and engaging with users. All of the skills you would use for a paid job, you can build on your own.
Next, use as many of the free trials or tools as you can and get comfortable with them. You can set up a Google Adwords campaign for free (just don't pay to run them). You can familiarize yourself with social ads by creating dummy groups and looking at the various targeting tools. Common workplace tools like Hootsuite, Buffer and others have free versions that you can use. Find the tools you're seeing in high demand and learn as much as you can about them. You'd be surprised how much you can benefit from learning these platforms even if you have never used them.
Once you get some of these skills together, you can always reach out to non-profits or local small businesses and offer your help for free. Most places won't turn their nose up at free help so if you want to build your skills "in the real world" you can go out and find opportunities. Think of these as internships; yes, you're working for free, but being able to say "Yes, I've done that before" makes you more attractive to future employers.
Eric Salsa
Eric’s Answer
There is a good amount of "influencers" now being a form of digital marketing themselves. From personal trainers to hobbyists to fashion experts, there is no shortage of people offering advice on something they are passionate about. This may be a very cheap way of learning the hard-knocks of building an audience from the ground up, and what goes into content marketing.
Gary V is a good follow if you like the media angle of digital marketing: