Critical Tips To Jump Start Your Marketing Career

I was honored that a recent college graduate sought out my advice on how to get started in a career in advertising and marketing. I was tempted to advise her to run away while she still could. But we ended up talking about various tools to give her an edge over the competition.

As in any career path, advertising and marketing has many specialties/niches — the biggest challenge may be trying them all out to figure out what is your first, best destiny. Like classic marketing, it’s critical for job seekers to demonstrate a point of differentiation that sets them ahead of their peers.

Here are my suggestions for someone starting his/her professional career:

Professional Social Networking
Aside from the good old fashioned meet-and-greet, I’d recommend using LinkedIn as much as possible to make connections, re-connect with past acquaintances, get recommendations, solicit opinions and demonstrate your subject matter expertise. These connections may be able to help you out in the future. Consider it an organic resume that should be more up-to-date than the paper versions you send out.

If you want to take it a step further, try a site like Biznik. You can make connections on a local level and publish articles.

Demonstrate Subject Matter Expertise
Publishing a blog on some sort of marketing niche would help you with your writing skills and work portfolio. If you don’t have any skills yet, write about something from your gender/demographic perspective (e.g. a twenty-somethings critique of advertising campaign effectiveness). I wrote some professional blogging tips you may find useful.

Self-Promotion
Twitter.com is a great way to start attracting attention to your blog and most importantly, promoting your personal brand. (But post useful messages, not inane drivel about what you ate for lunch.)

Reputation Management
Do a vanity search on Google and Yahoo to see what is out there about you and others that share your name. You may discover you need to distinguish yourself from others. Definitely delete anything that may hurt you professionally, especially if “friends” posted photos of you on their MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, etc. accounts.

There are also sites that let you identify content by/about you from content by/about your dopplegangers. Check out:
ClaimId.com
FindMeOn.com
BusinessCard2.com

Executive Recruiters
Definitely connect with Executive Recruiters – there are plenty on LinkedIn. They typically collect 15-20% commission on your first year salary so let them work hard to get you’re foot in the door. Then it’s up to you to sell yourself.

Organized Job Search
Try using RSS Readers to organize feeds from job boards. It gives you an aggregated view, shows the most recent, identifies what you’ve already read. Plus you can view on a mobile device web browser. I like:
Google Reader
Bloglines.com

I hope you find that useful. What would you suggest?
-Roland

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