As a fresh college graduate with a degree in marketing, I was eager to start my career in the business industry. I only had one marketing job under my belt, a few certifications, and a lengthy portfolio. I wasn’t sure where my limited experience would lead me, but this past year I started working as a Junior Producer for ARYU Advertising and dove headfirst into learning about digital advertising, project management, and development.
Expanding My Knowledge
My boss took me under his wing to help me get started: showing me the steps to tap into the best knowledge in this field and how to convert the knowledge I did have into the tasks of my new position. Luckily, a lot of the subjects I learned while getting my degree gave me a baseline to have a general understanding, but there were many “techy” things I knew nothing about. In my new position, there was a lot to learn relating to Google Analytics and automating content. My boss gave me an outline of all of the certifications I needed to obtain to be successful:
- Google Analytics
- Grow Offline Sales
- Google Ads
- Google Ads Display
- Google Ads Measurement
- Agorapulse
I was able to complete all of these certifications in my first 3 weeks, along with other internal training topics to kickstart my new job. I am very grateful I was set up for success by my boss – who has been a great mentor in terms of educating me along the way to contribute to my learning.
Putting My New Skills into Action
While these certifications taught me how to define and understand technological terms, getting hands-on experience is what has taught me the most. As a visual learner, I have absorbed the most information and experience while working on projects and getting visual confirmation that I am on the right path. Once I used my certification knowledge on Google Analytics 4 and saw the principles in action with the accounts I was working on, it all came together for me.
Universal Analytics for Google was a thing of the past: I learned how to migrate past data into new GA4 properties while ensuring nothing was left behind. Similar to how people enjoy math because there is only “one right answer”, I’ve grown to like GA4 for the same reason. All of the answers to how your business is doing and how your audience is interacting with you can all be found in one place.
The one area I’ve struggled with is working with clients from a variety of industries. Of course, I do not have a deep understanding of every industry. So, I’ve had to do my own research for certain projects or try to understand what strategies would be beneficial depending on the type of business.
Along the way, I have learned a lot about how to approach projects to have a better understanding of each client’s needs with ARYU’s onboarding structure and figuring out what questions to ask a client to see what is important in terms of how they can grow when working with us.
Always Learning and Growing – Individually and as a Team
As an individual, I have grown in many ways. There are many other things I’ve had to learn to adapt to in my job position that I did not have experience with:
- Creating wireframes for apps and websites
- Writing and scheduling social content for clients
- Recording professional video and audio to be used for websites
- Meeting and onboarding with clients to go over a project plan
- Quality checking websites
While I’ve developed these new skills, the process has been frictionless with the help of my team.
For example, recently I had to put together a sitemap for a client’s new website as a structure to reference when putting together a wireframe. This was the second sitemap I’ve created, so I was not intimidated by it. This was the first website wireframe I have put together, and it is a beneficial step for giving the design team an outline of where certain elements need to be placed and how the website should flow.
I enjoyed using my mind creatively to envision the best outcome for a new website design, but it was not easy to build it from scratch. I was able to design a first draft in just one day, then I got feedback on spots I could improve on. Because of this experience, I now feel comfortable creating wireframes for any website page going forward!
Gaining More Experience to Move Forward in My Career
I gathered the most hands-on experience by working in project management for our development projects. This is where I learned the meaning of many technical terms while the developers showed me how to do things step-by-step on the backend of these projects.
The knowledge and education I’ve gained has been invaluable. Things that I am learning include:
- Personal Feedback: Once I got a grasp of how the development process worked, I could properly manage projects and give my own personal feedback.
- Client Communication: I learned more about client-specific things to pay attention to when I had to communicate with clients along the way.
- Making an Impact: I got a better idea of how my work directly affected my clients’ success and how I could help them make a bigger impact on the industry they are a part of.
- Implementing Knowledge: I was excited to use a lot of tools I learned while getting my marketing degree and use my brain creatively to adjust projects to how I saw fit.
- Branding: Quality checking and getting into the mindset of the brand itself when working on a client’s project has kept this job exciting and made me see why so many people speak highly of this type of work.
All in all, I am very happy to be learning all of these new skills and understanding the digital advertising world on a whole new level. It feels like I have created a dictionary worth of terminology in my brain to now utilize in my career, and I have never felt more confident.
It was only a year ago when I was unsure about where exactly I would be starting my career. This on-the-job experience has been invaluable: it has taught me that if you stick with something and dedicate your time to learning the craft, you can find a new passion for your career.
