The #1 Thing Entry Level Marketers Should Do
I’ve worked in the digital marketing and Search Engine Optimization business for almost 3 years now. There are plenty of mistakes that I’ve made along the way, and all of them were essential in helping me grow.
However, there’s one thing that I have failed to do that would have created a lot bigger of an impact on my professional career: Creating a portfolio with case studies.
If I could go back in time, here’s what I’d do.
1. Choose a campaign to spend more time with
First off, I’d pick a client that I’m working with to spend a little extra time on. Preferably, this client would have lower traffic/followers that I’d know that I could create some good results for.
With something like SEO, it’s a bit of a longer game, so you may want to do a few of these simultaneously, making small, impactful changes to their website. If you’re an email or social media marketer, things move a tad more quickly. You can make tweaks to your posts and emails, and immediately see the changes.
2. Document what you do
The rubber now meets the road, and it’s time to experiment with different strategies. Make sure that your boss is cool with whatever changes you plan on making, but I would expect if you said to your manager, “I’d like to spend more time with this client while still taking care of my other work,” I doubt they’d mind.
Learn from the industry leaders and figure out how to apply it to your campaign. What’s the 20% of input that drives 80% of the results?
Write down all of the changes that you make, all of your thoughts, sketches, and ideas. Take screenshots of everything you’re working on, before and after. Document the thought process behind what you’re doing, and what you hope to achieve through it. Don’t filter it here, just get it all out of your head.
3. Document how it impacts the client
Whether or not what you did worked or not, write it down. Take screenshots of the aftermath, and add them to the bottom of your notes of what you did.
Now at the bottom of your notes, ask yourself some questions.
- What went well here?
- What didn’t go so well?
- What assumptions did I make that ended up not being correct?
- How did my actions impact the situation?
Regardless of what the end result is, you want to pull any an all insights from what you did. Figuring out what went wrong, and why what you implemented didn’t work is one of the best ways to grow and learn from your mistakes. Likewise, figuring out why what you implemented worked is equally important.
4. Take the best insights and create a portfolio of case studies
Now it’s time to make everything pretty. Organize the story you want to tell. Give a little background, talk about your thoughts going into it, what you implemented, why you did what you did, what the outcome was, and why it happened that way.
I’d recommend creating a website on WordPress or Notion. Notion is a great way to create a case study portfolio and online resume, and it’s completely free. You can buy a domain name for $10/year and use a tool like Fruition to turn it into a real website. Otherwise, if you’d just like to go the free route, then I’d recommend taking the URL to your Notion portfolio, tossing it into a link shortener like bit.ly, and putting that link on your resume.
Public discussion over here on Twitter, but if you’re a junior marketer and have any questions, don’t hesitate to send me an email at joe@joegoodman.me.
