An Introduction
I found a post on Reddit here that was written 7 years ago by SAM_SMITU, which means around 2018, and although it’s an archived post, I feel that my answer adds value, and it gives an interesting perspective to those who want to know what it takes to make it on their own in marketing.
First of all, and as an introduction, I got to my position by initiating and working in my own ventures. I fulfill different roles within my work. Next, I will answer the question posed by the OP based on my current situation: What does my job look like?
- Content creation: This significantly moves the needle in attracting paying customers and developing a worthy brand. Just remember that content is not only text, it’s also their prediction of visuals such as images and videos
- Writing: I often create blog posts, which is a valuable skill to have because it allows you to express yourself and share your knowledge frequently. Besides a command of the English language, you will find that the right words comprise a lot of doing effective marketing work.
- Graphic Design: Before graduating, I could choose a specialization, and the one that did it for me was graphic design. If you think about it – and my experience proves it – you can focus on your marketing job whilst having a supporting graphic designer in a medium-sized or big company. The truth is, you can work much faster in Concepts and directing by performing graphic design duties. In my case, it has been essential to create valuable marketing elements such as the images that a company posts and articles on third-party websites. It has also been crucial to creating the marketing collateral for my web design business.
- Basic SEO duties: When you’re writing a post such as this one, you often need to perform previous keyword research and check elements such as friendly URLs, etc.
- Ad creation: Although currently I’m not doing it often, it’s a great way to promote your products and services. You can do it yourself incrementally; you don’t need to be an expert to create a positive return on investment, which is good to know.
- Being great at the phone: although the internet is a fantastic place for introverts of all kinds, it’s also critical to know that if you want to sell high-ticket services, you usually need to be making and receiving phone calls. In my particular case, I often do telemarketing, which is basically a branch of direct marketing.
- Self-management: I once spent more than 2 hours looking for a document I had to attach to an email. This lesson got me to be better organized and to actively search for ways to improve in this area. The surprise is that you will find that many times, organizing yourself means you can scale your work by directing a team through the use of the same tools.
Elements to consider:
Where possible, try to keep your work within the marketing, advertising, and design realm, because it would be easy to get too much into the delivery of products and services or into the business operations area.
Working online doesn’t necessarily mean doing online work exclusively because your background may be useful for a large series of tasks, including the design of marketing collateral
In my experience, you can usually find high-paying marketing jobs in mid-sized to big companies, as well as applying marketing as an entrepreneur, and even to create extra streams of income.
You don’t need to be a world-class expert in most areas to begin with. Usually, specialists develop themselves within a job, and that is great, but you also want to know that breadth of action makes you connect the dots.
Recap
Although my work varies day by day and I try to be agile in the way I organize myself, most of my work can be catalog into content creation, writing, graphic design, basic SEO, ad creation, selling through the phone, as well as managing my work with digital and modern tools and workflows.
