How do I prepare myself as a marketing professional?

JoomShaper is the company I am working at this moment. They have a few vacancies at the content and marketing department. A family friend of mine asked for some guidelines about preparing herself as a marketing professional. While I was gathering links for courses and certifications, I thought I must share this with everyone ?

Please note that most of the links are from HubSpot Academy and they are available free of cost. I am not affiliated with any of the course providers.

Content Marketing

I believe content is the heart of any kind of marketing plan or campaign. So, if you want to become a marketer, you must know how you can write things, communicate with your audience, and how to present your stuff. So, I believe this a must for everyone.

I personally recommend everyone to start with the free certification course of HubSpot Academy.

You should also do the Search Engine Optimisation course to understand how you can make the strategies to reach more audience for your content. Please remember content marketing is a very big aspect of marketing and people have a dedicated team only to brainstorm and draft content ideas. It can be anything but not limited to landing pages to present product information, sales pages, pre-order forms, blog posts, video scripts, podcasts, webinars, product documentation, technical documentation, PDF guides etc.

And guess what? These days search engines and social media platforms and listen and see your audio, video and images and rank them in their search algorithms. So, SEO knowledge is a must!

Tips

1. You are going to learn about new jargon and abbreviations and things you have never heard before. Take notes and search about them.
2. If you are confident, then just going through the videos and attending the exam directly is recommended. If you fail, then read through the lesson resources and attempt again.

Digital Marketing

This is quite a big thing and you will keep learning new things every day throughout your career. So, don’t panic seeing a huge number of topics that are covered in digital marketing. Each of the social platforms is different and caters to a different kind of audience. So, we need to understand the community regarding their needs and wants, where they hang out and how they communicate with each other.

You can get started with the Digital Marketing course from HubSpot and then do the Digital Advertising 101, which is helpful to get started.

Social media marketing is also an important part. So you can do that as well to increase your chance to stand out on the applicant’s list.

HubSpot also has courses on each of the social media platform marketing specifically. Those are quite small in terms of the time required to watch the videos. I highly recommend doing them to get some basic idea.

Email marketing is one of the mandatory channels for software businesses. So, that would add an added advantage to your profile.

Google also has a course on Digital Marketing on the Digital Garage. I personally like their digital garage platform and the cute animated videos. They have covered a lot of basic staff on their courses. You should definitely check them out!

Official Certifications

Google

As it is the primary source of traffic for the world, we should start with this one as a marketing professional. Google now has a Skillshop to display all its courses and certifications in one place.

I recommend doing the Ads and Analytics course first. The others are essential but please have a look and go through them if you’re curious.