Where is the best place to get marketing experience before an internship?

Any opportunity to sell something and to work with customers can give you great marketing experience. Whether a local store or your campus bookstore, having the opportunity to talk to customers and understand their needs, and to alter your sales pitch based on what they need/want is great marketing experience. Do you have the opportunity to run promotions in the store? To merchandise the products in a new way to catch shoppers' attention? Do you get to promote an event or promotion on social media? Any activity you get within the sales and marketing realm at any job can give you great talking points on a resume and in an interview. If you start your own babysitting or landscaping operation and use digital, print, or other more traditional forms of promotion to promote your business, gain customers, measure their satisfaction, etc you can gain great experiences. Using free or low cost sites like squarespace.com or weebly.com to build your own website, and then promoting that through social media is also a great experience. You can learn more hard marketing skills on sites like udemy.com, generalassembly.com, and lynda.com. You may get free subscriptions to these sites through your university- make sure you check before paying! Promotional products gigs can give you great sales and marketing experience for a great hourly wage as well. Check local job boards, Craigslist, and your Campus job posting to find these sort of promotional opportunities.

All of this advice is great! One more thing I would like to add that you can do, something I did that helped me a lot, is to think about marketing topics you are interested in and write LinkedIn articles about. That way, when you apply to internships, you can provide samples of writing and also a form of digital marketing experience.

For example, I wrote an article about the search functionality experience on some e-commerce websites and compared and contrasted them, ultimately choosing a winner. Didn’t take long to write but I’ve used the article as writing sample I’ve been asked for at a lot of marketing jobs I was applying for.

You have been given some excellent advice from Stephanie. Another suggestion may be to look at the non-profit or advocacy organizations . They often need effective marketing and lack sufficient funding to do it well. Even the simple things like providing awareness through social media, website engagement, etc would be very beneficial for their cause and probably very rewarding for you. You may not be paid much or anything at all, but you will gain valuable hands-on experience.