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Gain This Skill and You’ll Get Hired Quickly During Covid

With COVID flipping the working world upside down, you need to be smart in how you approach your job hunt especially if you don’t have a lot of experience just yet. Rather than be dead set on one particular job, I want to stress that that will NOT be an effective strategy during this climate. Instead, you need to focus on 2 things: 

  1. What role is in-demand?
  2. What job gives you a lot of transferable skills that you can take into other roles once the economy recovers?

As a hiring manager for a Fortune 500 company, I can tell you, we are seeing more resumes than ever before. It’s going to be very competitive out there so you MUST keep these 2 things in mind when going about your search. 

So, what job matches both of the above things you should be looking for? Digital Marketing and by a landslide! 

Regardless of if you ever thought about getting a job in marketing or not, please hear me out as pretty much anyone can get into this field regardless of your educational background as long as you can get some experience (I provided some quick ways in my last email). Much like coding has been the hot field for young professionals to go into the last 10 years, digital marketing is quickly skyrocketing to that type of demand as well. If you think about it, sales and marketing are the most important part of any company. Who cares if you have a great product. If nobody knows about it, your company will fail. That’s why companies generally spend the biggest portion of their expenses on their sales and marketing team. Furthermore, with more and more people preferring to do their own research online rather than talk to a salesperson, more and more importance (and salary) is going toward digital marketers. Digital marketing will soon act as 80% of a company’s sales team and you want to make sure you get these extremely valuable skills now especially since they are in need by so many companies during COVID. 

Why are there so many digital marketing jobs popping up right now?

Companies were already starting to see the impact of good digital marketing over the last 5-10 years and were really starting to realize that digital marketing would soon replace salespeople. This is a scary thought for people in sales as the sales department is usually the biggest department of any company. However, with new technology, digital marketing has made it possible for websites to do the work of 100 sales people at once (If there are any “The Office” fans out there, just think back to when Dwight tried to take on Dunder Mifflin’s new website).  The return on investment of having a few really good digital marketers far outweighs paying the salaries of tons of sales people. Furthemore, consumer behavior has drastically changed over the years with the internet. Consumers are no longer talking to sales reps nearly as much and just prefer doing their own research online. The material these consumers are reading online was made by the digital marketer. As you can see the importance of digital marketing has truly arrived and will only continue to become more and more important as consumers prefer doing their own online research. 

 

COVID has also definitely sped up this process of moving away from sales people and more towards digital marketers as sales people aren’t able to make their office/field visits. So much of the country is now remote and in order for companies to survive, they are cutting costs where they can (salespeople that can no longer make visits) and reinvesting their efforts in the only way they can get in front of customers now; the internet. Thus, the value of a digital marketer has skyrocketed and more and more companies are focusing on cutting back on other areas of their staff and spending more on marketing and selling in the most efficient way possible through digital marketing. If companies are going to recover financially from COVID, they are going to have to focus on bringing in money and this is al focused around digital marketing.

 

Okay, so, now you can see why companies are spending more and more money on digital marketing and why this isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. This is the new career that is going to pay big bucks and companies are going to be more and more reliant on. 



But, if being able to get a job right now didn’t encourage you enough to think about digital marketing, let’s talk about how transferable the skills are within digital marketing so that once COVID has passed, you’ll have a super strong skill set to get almost any other job you want.  

What transferable skills can you get with Digital Marketing?

In Digital Marketing, you’re going to become a pretty cool computer ninja where you’ll learn a lot of hacks on how to sell to people in creative ways, how to track exactly what they are doing online, and how to analyze people’s online behavior. Your online skills are going to flourish in so many different ways that most job roles just don’t get to experience. You’ll really feel like a computer ninja/spy coming out of this job which is a pretty neat feeling even if you have very little technical skills going into the role. The main areas you’ll want to focus on in digital marketing are: 

 

Email Marketing

You’ll learn how to break down your customers into segmented lists depending on their online behavior as well as their demographics. You’re going to learn how to use automation so that you can set up an email campaign so that it can essentially run by itself once customers take certain actions. Once again, if you ever want to try to start up a side hustle or your own company, understanding how to use drip campaigns and workflows is incredibly important. 

 

 

PPC (Pay Per Click)

You’re going to learn the importance of strategizing and budgeting while trying to get your content in front of the correct people. Growing your company, brand, instagram, Youtube account can be hard to do without spending money. Get the experience here using someone else’s money and then analyze how you can decrease your spend and get better results.

 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Here, among other things, you’ll be able to become an online spy and see exactly what keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their website and which of their blogs are getting a lot of attention. Furthermore, SEO is all about cracking Google’s online algorithm to ensure that your company is showing up on the first page when I search Google. If you ever want to have your own financial independence and start your own blog or your own company, you’re going to need to learn this so it’s great if you get this experience while at a job.

Social Media

You’re going to learn how to grow a following and then keep them engaged. You’ll learn A/B testing and you’ll do a lot of analysis on what works best for which demographics. This is a great skill to gain if you ever want to boost your personal social media following and become instafamous or the next Youtube star where you can earn a ton of passive income while doing cool stuff. 

These are by far the most in-demand areas of digital marketing right now and these are only becoming more important. I hope you can already see the value behind these 4 areas and how transferable these are to pretty much any line of work, but just for good measure, here’s a list of even more of the important skills you’ll take away from this job that us hiring managers LOVE seeing on a resume:

      • Communication
      • Creativity 
      • Project management
      • Problem solving
      • Strategy
      • Negotiations
      • Organization
      • Commercial awareness
      • Lead Generation
      • Sales
      • Budgeting
      • Problem solving
      • Research
      • Data Analysis

I hope you’re getting the point now. I certainly didn’t go to school for marketing. I was actually a history major at UCLA and then I went on to get my law degree at UC Davis. However, the most important skill set that I’ve picked up along the way was by far digital marketing. I saw the growing importance it was having in the world and I knew that if I wanted to keep up, I should really master this. Digital marketing allowed me to start a blog and travel the world for free for 3 years and it’s the main reason why I was able to skyrocket up the corporate ladder and lead a team of 500 at a Fortune 500 company by the age of 29. So, whether you ever had any thought whatsoever about gaining experience in this field, I can’t emphasize it enough as this is one of the few places you can actually get hired right now and these skills will make you incredibly employable in so many other fields if you want to change paths. Don’t let technology pass you by. This is how you keep up with changing times. 

As always, good luck out there and feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions. I’m always here to help others trying to figure out their best career path. Good luck!

Founder of JobPrepped

Joseph Blanco, Esq. rapidly climbed the corporate ladder and was leading a team of 500 sales and marketers by the age of 29 at a Fortune 500 company. He has hired and trained over 3,000 sales and marketers over his career. He has now taken his years of great experience teaching and training sales and marketers directly to young professionals to not only teach them how to be successful in marketing, but more importantly, also giving them real world work experience immediately as work experience is the #1 thing young professionals need to get hired.