How I ‘Became’ a Digital Marketer

In March 2015 , I didn’t know the first thing about marketing. I was, at best, a tolerable writer for a PR platform. By September 2015, I was the head of marketing at Hotels.ng.

It was not a smooth transition. I was literally a monkey playing chess.

Necessity being the mother of invention (paternity still under dispute), I had a lot to learn, and I had to do so quickly. In my first weeks after assuming the position, I basically kept every campaign in a hover pattern, doing the basics required to not tamper with my predecessor’s campaigns and to keep them running.

My first task was to hire someone who knew marketing. I could manage them, I reckoned, while they delivered on the metrics of success.

That proved to be a bust, as it’s interestingly difficult to find a certain kind of digital marketer for certain kinds of things. The difference between a ‘digital marketer’ and a growth hacker soon became apparent and campaigns started to bleed, our rumps were getting exposed on several channels and I was going to bed frightened everyday — fearing that the next would be the end of my career.

It wasn’t until November, after weeks of flying blind with a lump in my throat that I decided to figure out how this thing really worked.

And now, here we are.

I am writing this in response to the Frequent Questions I get asked by young Nigerians looking to become digital marketers. These are my (highly subjective) responses to questions about how I ‘became’ a digital marketer:

“I would like to become a digital marketer. How do I start?”

For the Nigerian ecosystem, it may be difficult for anyone to trust you, from the start, with a Pay Per Click strategy, and I find that the lowest-hanging fruit comes from being a content writer or a social media manager. Depending on how you think about it, these are marketing roles.

However, merely being these things does not (unfortunately) make you a digital marketer.

If you have to choose between being a regular writer and a social media manager, I’d recommend that you pick the social media manager role.

But that is not all you have to do. Which leads to the question….

“What makes me a Digital Marketer?”

It’s thinking in terms of growth. Ah, yeah, that line is just damn pretentious so let’s try again:

It does not matter how many posts, how many gifs you create, how many creatives you make or how many campaigns you run. Those things are just indicators of activity, and I congratulate you if you score very high on the activity chart.

A digital marketer is constantly active and measuring, and would not do a thing for long if it does not justify the resources that go into it.

In every company, there is a broad level growth target that you must always know. Talk to your manager if you do not know this. Ask the question: by how much do we need to grow to break even, and what are the levers for this? Ask how your position in the company contributes to that growth — and think about how whatever you are doing can contribute.

You should always think: what is the best way for me to make my channels achieve this growth at the lowest cost possible?

(Sometimes, you may come to the cold realization that your position in the company is purely perfunctory — someone said ‘it might be nice to have a whatever guy doing whatever thing’ and so you got hired. This means, of course, that your contribution has nothing to do with growth and you are a company excess. Talk, again, to your manager about this. Ask the right questions and make the right contributions. Don’t just sit there and do as ‘they’ asked until you get fired.)

If you are a social media manager for example, and you have 1000 followers who bring in 200 conversions per month, you can do one of two things:

a. Squeeze more value from your followers so you push the needle from 200 conversions to 2,000 (to achieve 10x growth), or —

b. Grow your followership to 10,000 followers (with the same user personas in mind), under the assumption that 2,000 of that number will convert and hence you’d have achieved 10x on that channel.

How would you go about this? That’s your strategy — and thinking like this is what differentiates you from social media serial gif-poster and social media marketer.

What are your top resources for digital marketing? Books?

On my most flamboyant days, I could reel off a series of books I’ve read that helped me ‘understand and act and become a digital marketer’, but the truth is they only helped me understand how to talk like a digital marketer — they did very little in making me one.

With that said, you’d find better utility on inbound.org and GrowthHackers.com. Beware though — digital marketers are some of the greatest bullshitters I have met on God’s green planet — and they tend to bullshit more than usual when they’re marketing to other digital marketers.

Half of what you’d read would be ego-stroking and nothing more. This is why the best way to learn digital marketing is to already be doing digital marketing — so you have a unique checkpoint where you need to advance and reference specific case studies and helpful contributions from people who are exactly right there.

How do I make the transition? I want a job as a digital marketer, but no one would hire me — because I have no experience!

Companies may experiment with the idea of digital marketing in the beginning, but as soon as they record traction on specific channels, they become very picky about the marketers they hire. If you are applying to these kinds of companies at this stage (with the promise of being ‘able to thrive under pressure, a team player and a quick learner’) you will get the door slammed in your face. And it’s nothing personal.

The good thing is that every company, at every stage, needs a pre-marketer (coinage by me) — the kind of people who do the elbow grease, the unsexy parts of marketing that most aspiring digital marketers do not seem to know exist. These positions include:

• Data entry/Inventory management
• Product description writers
• Review writing (for those eCommerce guys who ‘hack’ the review process. Wink wink, if they won’t tell, I won’t either.)
• Blogger roles

And so on. I’m sure I’ve forgotten many 0f them. I started as a data entry ‘executive’, and by God was it tedious. I understood it for what it was, however: entry-level access to the eventual role of a digital marketer.

‘How do I grow then? And am I growing quickly?’

You have two growth metrics to always keep in mind as a digital marketer:

1. Metrics as agreed with your manager. Depending on how serious you guys are it can range from fluff such as impressions to actual numbers as conversions (and conversions can be a fluff metric depending on how you define it.)
2. Your personal growth metric. What are the top things you need to know how to do to be ‘good’ at what you do? Do them, repeatedly until you’ve figured your own method for improving on that thing, and continue to add more knowledge under your belt.

Know all the buzzwords, then aim to use as few of them as possible in conversation. They are boring, annoying and frankly give the (surprising) impression that you don’t know anything.

In summary…

If I had to say four things to an aspiring digital marketer, it would be the following:

1. Look for and work with a team that is still figuring stuff out — there’s room to learn a lot quickly without the stuffy weight of bureaucracy.
2. There will be many things to learn and keep track of , and my personal method for not getting overwhelmed is condensing the most important things into three KPIs that, if I have my eyes on them, I can forgive myself if other things aren’t doing too great.
3. Always seek to have something impressive on the current role that serves as a merit point for the next role. If you’re a social media marketer for example, double the follower numbers. Double impressions — double CTR. Triple conversions. These are definite numbers — they may not even be worth anything, but they are sure more impressive than saying ‘I posted regularly while I was in charge of XYZ’s Facebook.’
4. Quickly define the kind of digital marketer you want to be (yes, it can and should be narrowed down — the jury is still out on what a ‘full stack digital marketer’ is) and select your poison. Do you want to be a content marketer? SEO guy? What kind, technical or content SEO? A PPC guy? A social media marketer? A metrics guy (a requirement to truly be a growth hacker)? A growth engineer (can you, at this point, spot how many times I’ve said ‘growth hacker’ without saying ‘growth hacker’?). Pick a side, any side — and pick a mentor on that side and learn everything they know. Then apply. Then learn some more.

If you have any questions for me, please let me know. I hope to write a lot more coherently going forward.

[Pardon typos — I usually proofread what I write, but not this time.]