How to go from graduate to owning your own marketing business
A graduate of the University of Northampton’s business school, Penni Stanton, Director at Kabo Creative, took the leap and set up a website design and digital marketing services company
The University recently held a new event for their marketing students, and I was lucky enough to be the first speaker at the new Marketing Mashup. Put together by senior lecturers in the business school, the event showcased five real-world examples of people who have gone out and had a successful career.
Filling up the business school’s largest lecture theatre, I was blown away by the career-focused attitude of the students. Engaging, keen to get ahead and ready to step on to the career ladder — the current marketing students are, I’m sure, going to take the world by storm.
As an ex-student of the business school myself, I spoke to the students about my journey from graduate to business owner, focusing on what would have helped me along the way. I’ve shared the presentation here, to help anyone who thinks they might want to run their own marketing business one day.
The gig economy and jobs for life
Between 2000 and 2016 an extra 1.5 million people became self-employed in the UK according to the Trends in Self Employment report. The world of work is on the change, with more people looking for ways they can control their own income stream, beyond the standard salary arrangement of the 9 to 5.
Just a few generations ago, a ‘job for life’ was a well-known entity. You’d leave school, college or university, find a trusty employer and settle in. Loyalty was a two-way street, where you could expect your employer to keep up their end of the deal.
Fast forward to today, and the average worker will have held 10 jobs before they are 40. If you start your career at age 20, that’s on average a new job every two years.
With the trend is self employment, be that full time or a side gig, expected to keep growing we can expect more of today’s university students to go on to be self employed. With that in mind, what can they do to prepare themselves for all of this increased responsibility?
Work for someone before you work for yourself
When you first leave university you have a lot to learn from the world of work. A degree is a brilliant exercise in learning how to learn. Once you’ve got a degree under your belt you know how to figure out complex problems, solve challenges yourself and get to grips with new information.
Business is a whole new game with it’s own set of rules. If you don’t venture in to established offices and learn how and why they work, you’ll never make it on your own as you just won’t understand what makes people tick.
How does invoicing work? How formal should a business email be? What marketing tools are actually used in an industry?
Six business lessons to master before you set up on your own
If I went back in time to when I first graduated, the following tips would have helped me in my journey to becoming a business owner.
1. Land a job
The first step is an obvious one, but the competition can make it hard. To stand out from the rest of the graduates a placement year can be a brilliant option. Having hired marketing graduates myself, I’ve found those who completed a placement are much more ‘work-ready’. I was more likely to interview a placement student, and more often than not we hired those that had done a placement over those who hadn’t.
If that isn’t an option, there are still plenty of things you can do to stand out. Go set up a simple website and start blogging on relevant topics. You will pick up a huge amount of industry terminology and practices doing this. Or do an internship.
When it comes to picking a role, try to get something varied. It will give you the opportunity to learn more, and work out what interests you the most.
2. Grow your network
If you’d like to run your own business one day, your network is everything. Knowing people in your industry who might recommend you, or hire you, will make all of the difference.
Connect with everyone, your boss, your coworkers, people you meet at events. Find them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other platform they hang out in. It is the modern day equivalent of the little black book.
3. Skill up
Jobs don’t stay still anymore. That couldn’t be more true in marketing. What works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow. You need to learn the base skills for your chosen specialism, and then you need to learn who are the leaders in the field.
Take every opportunity to learn more, from courses with institutes such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing or the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing, to specialist courses or free online training. Attend conferences, local networking events and read up on the blogs of specialists.
4. Practical lessons
When I first entered the real world of work, my boss told me to get on the phone and drum up some leads for the sales team. I was horrified. It felt awkward. But it gave me a hard lesson in business.
Theories and ideas are great, but businesses need to generate revenue. If you haven’t learnt how to do that, you aren’t going to survive as a marketing employee let alone a business owner.
If you end up in B2B, as many marketing graduates will, then buddy up with your sales team. These brave men and women are the life blood of any business, actively going out and closing the deals that all the marketing team’s hard work has driven towards them as prospective leads. Watching how they interact with customers, and what they actually do to move them towards buying will provide you with valuable lessons that you’ll need when you have to do it yourself.
Business finance is another lesson you’ll need to get to grips with. Understanding how payment terms work, what taxes are applied and what the industry norms are will help you when you come to creating your very first invoice as a business owner.
5. Leave on a high
No matter how awful you may think your boss is, never leave a job in a negative way. Past employers are a key part of your network. You never know who they might talk to, or how their opinion of you could reach your future clients especially in such a digital world.
My company’s first paying client was actually a previous employer. That was a vital part of our cashflow as we went through the many hoops of setting up a business.
6. Do the presentations
I will let you in on a big secret. No person completely loses that nervous feeling you get before presenting to an audience. Standing up in front of a group and talking about your expertise is tough. However, the more you put yourself through it, the better you will be.
When you run your own business you’ll need to gain brand exposure, meaning speaking opportunities are just that, a great opportunity. Equally, to close a deal you may find yourself pitching your services to new clients in boardrooms.
As an employee, take every single opportunity. You are practising on somebody else’s paycheque — make the most of it!
A marketer’s skillset
At university you’ve learned a lot of theory, and theoretically applied it to real life business. When you enter the world of work, the pace of change can be surprising.
Unless you land a job at one of the largest companies, then your marketing budget is not going to be able to compete with the big players if you follow their strategy. You’ll need to learn the ins and outs of strategies, tools and tactics and then come up with ideas to try and find a new way to help potential customers find your business/products/services.
“The Internet is going to change marketing before it changes almost anything else, and old marketing will die in its path.” Seth Godin
In my 7 year marketing career to date, the internet has continued to revolutionise how marketing works. Search Engine Optimisation has evolved from aggressive link building networks and keyword stuffing, through to content marketing and voice search. Video marketing has hit the scene and we’ve all had to go and learn how to edit video, optimise it and get it online. I’ve learnt to write HTML to sort out my email marketing, then I moved on to CSS to tweak my website, and finally Javascript to make sure I can measure what I’m doing.
The lesson here is don’t expect to stop learning when you leave university. To have a successful career in marketing, you need to always be learning, testing and experimenting.
Nobody cares about your matrix
The sooner you learn this one, the better. I left university very proud of myself. I was young, I’d achieved a first, and I had a wealth of new knowledge about how marketing worked. Or so I thought.
The hard lesson is that nobody cares. If you start mocking up a matrix to solve a problem, or discuss some airy fairy marketing principle in a meeting, you aren’t going to gain the respect of your peers any time soon.
Marketers are supplied with a budget. It is a marketer’s job to use that budget to do something that results in a return. For most businesses this will mean spend £x and bring in more than that in sales. You need to be able to prove a return on investment.
Step forward to owning your own business and this becomes even more of a big deal. Want a client to keep using you? You’d best be able to show them how you are helping them to meet their goals or they’ll leave you for somebody who can.
The sky is the limit, but there is no safety net
When you have a full-time marketing role you have the benefit of a solid monthly salary. You can pay the rent, go on holiday, get a nice car. Equally, you can’t earn more without putting in the years and working your way up the career ladder.
If you run your own business, you have no upper limit. You can get more clients, raise your prices as your expertise grows, and grow your business. However, you have no guaranteed income at all. If you don’t have a good month, you might not be able to pay the rent.
Both options have benefits and drawbacks, but in my opinion you would be mad to take the risk if you weren’t already experienced. Your early career can help you to learn what you are good at, where to learn more and who might buy these services from you.
I now run a small two-woman agency which builds websites for clients and helps to grow their website traffic and conversions. If you’d like to end up here, this is what I recommend you start doing today:
1. Land an agency job
Agency jobs typically won’t be as well paid at entry level as client side for a graduate. However, in an agency role you are going to pick up the core skills of running a marketing business much more quickly. You’ll learn what clients want, how they interact with agency’s and how much they pay for services.
2. Set up a WordPress website
You can buy a domain for £5, and host it for a couple of pounds a month. The cost is pretty much negligible. The experience will set you up from day one.
Create a website about anything — something you are interested in, your journey as a young marketer, it really doesn’t matter. Start blogging, get on social and learn how to build your network as a brand, try and figure out the basics of SEO.
Everything you do here will teach you the words, phrases and skills that your future employers and future clients will expect you to know. It will speed up your process of learning core skills, and make you more likely to land a job. Win win.
3. Listen to podcasts
Podcasts are an absolute goldmine of information and they are free. Top leaders in marketing regularly release podcasts about changes to the industry, new tools and techniques and what’s working for them.
Listen to them as you drive, at the gym, while you cook. It doesn’t really matter, just find some and start listening.
Here’s five of my favourite podcasts right now:
· Marketing school — Neil Patel & Eric Siu
· Inbound after hours — Digital 22 Online
· Duct tape marketing — John Janstch
· MozPod — Moz
· Copyblogger FM — Sonia Simone
4. Learn to code
Is HTML, CSS and Javascript a foreign language? Modern marketers need to understand code. If you are good at it, you’ll earn more. It’s that simple.
I was lucky enough to land a marketing role at a software company, and I sat with a huge room of developers. That was a lightbulb moment in my career, and I immediately cracked on with learning and manipulating websites.
Code Academy is a brilliant website I’ve recommended time and time again. You can start learning right now, for free.
5. Start networking
Networking can have a bit of a bad rap. I get it, there’s nothing I hate more than the old style networking. You walk in to a room, it’s a bit like speed dating but everyone is bald and has a badly fitting suit. Business cards are thrust in to your hand while people rush through their ‘elevator pitch’ before moving on to try and flog their wares at somebody else.
It doesn’t have to be like that. Try and find events that attract people like you. People that have an interest in a topic and want to learn more about it. Meetups are a great way to find these kinds of events.
Go along to as many as possible, connect with people you meet on LinkedIn or Twitter. Be helpful! This is the biggest tip. If you know somebody who could solve a problem another person has, introduce them to each other. Going out of your way to help people will make you memorable, and will make them much more likely to refer business to you in the future.
Social media is another great place to network. Never go on there hard selling, it just doesn’t work. Share content you find interesting, join in on discussions, and be useful. It will all pay off in the long run.
