In this series, I will be showcasing the early careers of 22 marketers aged 22 and under (more or less).
- To inspire more young people finishing their studies and looking to start a new career to understand and consider what a career in marketing means (ergo: fun, challenging, rewarding, creative… awesome).
- To showcase to employers what young people are capable of, and encourage YOU hiring and training of the next generation of marketers.
- To encourage those featured below to keep doing what they’re doing. Here’s to you, your initiative and your marketing career!
In this first issue, I’ll introduce our many varied 22 marketers under 22, what they’re currently doing and how they first got started in marketing.
Kendra Mayer
Chicago, Illinois
Introduction
My name is Kendra Mayer and I’m an undergraduate journalism student at Northwestern University. While my major is in journalism, I’m also enrolled in Northwestern’s Integrated Marketing Certificate program – and I love it. These classes offer me the real-life, applicable skills I need to succeed in the marketing world.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
During my time at Northwestern, I became interested in media monitoring – tracking how much traction or ‘hits’ journalistic articles got online. Then, I took an inspiring class in on marketing and audience behavior, and I instantly knew marketing was my niche. Sounds cliche, but it’s true.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
The first major marketing project I worked on was with Asta Publications, a self-publishing services company. With the help of two excellent supervisors and a lot of trial-and-error, I coordinated the publication of the book Tales of Women Survivors: How We Became Free.
Since a portion of the profits go charitable proceeds, I did not have a big marketing budget. Instead, I used social media networking to market the book. (I learned that Instagram was the hidden gem for accessing our target audience.) I feel grateful to have been part of the project.
Elijah Clark Ginsberg
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Introduction
I’m Elijah Clark Ginsberg. I went to Emerson College in Boston and now work at HubSpot running our analyst relations program. (If, like me a year ago, you don’t know what analyst relations is, it’s similar to media relations, but is concerned with technology analysts at Gartner, Forrester, etc. instead of with the press).
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I’d never really considered marketing as a career until I got a viewbook from Emerson that talked about the marketing program. The classes all sounded like things I’d enjoy, so I decided to apply. The rest is pretty much history.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
I’m gonna skip over the guerrilla marketing campaigns for my alt lit mag in high school and say that my first real marketing project was a class project. We were supposed to come up with a campaign for RTC Skis– a niche Swiss brand.I think I mostly just faked my way through it by modelling my campaign on bits of pieces of real marketing that I’d seen and liked. That’s the nice (and perhaps dangerous) thing about marketing– we’re all exposed to so much of it every day that if you’re observant and have a critical eye, you can start in the field on day one with a fairly developed idea of what is and isn’t good marketing.
The trick is to not get cocky and to work hard until your execution skills catch up to your taste level (I’ll let you know when I figure out how long that takes– don’t hold your breath).Full disclosure: I got cocky. I made a portfolio site for myself and put the RTC Ski work up there. By some SEO miracle, my site started ranking close to the top of the page when you googled RTC Ski.
When he went to assign the same project next semester, the professor found my site and started teaching ME as a case study to his classes.In retrospect, was my personal branding offensive grandiose and obnoxious? Absolutely. Does it deserve some credit for where I am today? More than likely. So I guess my point is that you should try to avoid becoming cocky, but don’t be too humble either. You’re in marketing, after all
Jon Cooper
Gainesville, Florida
Introduction
I’m Jon Cooper, based out of Gainesville, FL. I build links. There’s not too much more than that.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
My first high school job. I was working for a neighbor doing “SEO” (read: submitting to social bookmarking sites). I thought it was pretty interesting how things worked, so I read SEO for Dummies (an OK book), and ultimately a TON of blogs.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
My first marketing project was PEOCompare.com, my neighbor’s site. I learned it from her! It went well for a while, until an iteration of Penguin recently after a lot of the links we built in ’10-’11 (obvious crap) were finally flagged. (It had a good run though!)
Danny Prol
Pamplona, Spain
Introduction
I’m Danny Prol, I live in Pamplona (Spain) and hopefully, If God wants… I am going to work for Mention Solutions SAS as a Paid Acquisition and Data Analytics Intern for this summer ’15 (June, July and August). Also, I provide consulting and advising for small startups; I primarily focus on user acquisition, growth strategy, validation, and traction.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I’m passionate about growing products and platforms that connect the world. Rising from the media and journalism world, I quickly realized my passion for growth and analytics had a home in the world of marketing.
So, in this role I can collaborate closely with designers, engineers, analysts, and other cross-functional team members to create, test, prioritize, and implement compelling growth strategies.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
My first job in SaaS world was in Stuvia. I’ve worked in Stuvia (Amsterdam) company as Ambassador in the user acquisition base. I used SEM campaigns, I handled Adwords campaigns and Facebook segmentation ads. I work from distance, remotely, I researched and analyzed competitor advertising and content strategy.
Before of this, this last summer, I’ve been working in Cambodia building and writing a blog in English, French and Spanish, which attained 73,608 views for a NonProfit French organization, Pour a sourire d’enfant. I used SEO strategies to research and implement search engine optimization. And virality was awesome…
And before, during the past year, I’ve been project manager here at Pamplona at a company called Sbals, which is a platform where top students and outstanding leaders could meet. A platform where young talented people could enrich their professional and leadership experience.
Umar Khan
Karachi, Pakistan
Introduction
My name is Umar Khan. I live in Pakistan & currently working as the Digital Marketing Manager for Social Cubix, a Washington based mobile apps company. I manage all the channels of digital marketing and lead the entire team of content writers & marketers.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
The complexity of this job. I remember, when my team lead appreciated my efforts on the 3rd project of my career. I just suggested two things; one is to change the color of main header because I couldn’t relate to it and the other thing to add a client’s testimonial with the main landing page.
I just felt those changes and reported to him. I still don’t know why he implemented those changes as I was hired a month ago with no idea at all. Luckily, we saw a significant improvements in terms of bounce rate and conversions. Then, I came to know what kind of difference we can make to someone’s business and this interested me a lot.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
My first marketing project was the aircraft charter company. LOL yeah it’s true.Luckily at the first day on my job, my senior was absent who supposed to train me. My lead gave me the overview about this project as they had a meeting on that day with the client.
He gave me a task to make an excel report on ranking changes in last 3 months. I was completely blank as there were over 250+ keywords of 3-4 sites. I started doing it manually and on my first day I did overtime just to wrap it up.
In the end, it turns out good. Client liked the report and when I told to my lead about the manual method, he busted with laugh.Then, I came to know about some ranking tools that makes the job easy.
Jack Kaufman
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Introduction
My name is Jack Kaufman, and I’m a junior at Haverford College, which is located about 20 minutes from Philadelphia, PA.
I create products and market them. Specifically, in the past I’ve written a book about entrepreneurship called The Found a Business Book and marketed it. I also co-wrote a book with Adii Pienaar called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Finding Your First Customers and marketed that to great success as well.
Currently I’m writing a new book, and this summer I’ll be interning at a software company named Wildbit in Philadelphia where I’ll be doing marketing for them.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
My interest in marketing stemmed from initial interest in entrepreneurship. When I first started learning about business and entrepreneurship, I realized that many people create interesting, exciting, and valuable products that don’t succeed.
Most of the time good products don’t succeed because the people who make them don’t know how to properly or successfully market and distribute them. From the beginning, I knew that I did not want to be a helpless product creator and entrepreneur who could not market his products successfully.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
The first marketing project I worked on was marketing The Found a Business Book. I learned how to market the book through trial and error and experimentation. For this project, I asked influential people to Tweet about the book and share it with their audiences. I shared the book with platforms and communities such as Hacker News. To help build traffic to the book’s landing page, I reached out to different media outlets to see if they would cover the book and the story behind it, and I ended up writing an article for Forbes.com.
To get sales for the book and get the word out about it, I had to hustle and use marketing strategies for the first time that I’ve come to use consistently in my work. Sometimes, a great teacher and motivator to learn is desperation. When I released this first book, I was desperate to spread the word about it, and I tried a lot of marketing strategies that were uncomfortable for me at first. This first marketing project turned out well and I’ve sold many copies of the book since starting
Alex Clifford
Faversham, UK
Introduction
Hello I’m Alex. After finishing school I’m a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I was 15. I did work experience with a guy who created magazines for the demolition industry, Barry Morgan. He was legendary! His energy and enthusiasm was explosive! (Please pardon the pun). He was such a bloody maverick, questioning everything. And he mentored me with my writing. From there it just was natural for me to do it as a career.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
I started with a old-school financial advice company that my parents used. I was interested in finance and they didn’t understand “the internet”. I told them that I’d be winning them clients off the internet left right and center… planning to learn it all along the way. Turned out, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Although I was relentlessly trying to learn everything I could online and in books. I’d promised too much, too soon. And it kind of ended in tears.
Collin Burke
Boston, Massachusetts
Introduction
Hi, I’m Collin. I’m a content marketer at InsightSquared. I spend most of my days writing about customer service analytics.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
During the fall of my senior year at Bowdoin, it finally hit me that I would soon be graduating. I had to find a job. I had to choose a career. I had to be a real person.
But I didn’t know where to start. That was until I listened to Lucy Orloski, Bowdoin alumnus and former HubSpotter, give a presentation on careers in digital marketing. I went in to the presentation knowing next to nothing about marketing. I left wanting to pursue it as a career.
I was sold. I wanted to work at a startup, wear lots of hats, and actually contribute to a business. I was confident that my liberal arts background would translate well into the world of marketing. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to start my life after college.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
Once inspired to pursue a career in marketing, I wanted to gain some relevant experience before graduating. But as a full-time student, I didn’t really have time for an internship. So I came up with a project called Bowdoin in Motion, where I created short time-lapse videos for Bowdoin’s social media channels.
People seemed to like the videos, and I had a lot of fun putting them together. One of my videos was even featured in a HuffPost article about colleges with the best campus food. However, I didn’t know how to measure the actual impact that each video had — I was mostly tracking views and shares.
Marc Guberti
Westchester County, NY
Introduction
My name is Marc Guberti, and I am a 17 year old entrepreneur, digital marketing expert, and author. I have written over a dozen books, published five training courses, and have 200,000 social media followers.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I first got interested in marketing back when I updated my blog about the Boston Red Sox. I wanted more people to read the blog, and if you want more people to read your blog, then you must learn marketing.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
The first marketing project was marketing my blog about the Boston Red Sox. I didn’t do too well in the marketing but that was because I went into it without any prior knowledge.
I decided to do research which entailed reading articles and watching videos about marketing. I have even read a few marketing books such as Purple Cow. Now, my marketing campaigns are very effective primarily because I have the knowledge and learned how to grow a targeted audience.
Smit Patel
Boston, Massachusetts
Introduction
I’m Smit Patel. I live in Boston and currently help SaaS companies with growth marketing and analytics. Writing my own book Learn To Hustle – The No BS Guide To Land A Startup Job Or Internshipalways gets me brownie points.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I learned early on that only two types of people are valued at high tech companies: those who can code or those who can sell. Selling doesn’t just mean cold calling. Marketing is also part of it. In fact most companies struggle with it. Even if they have a great product, it’s hard to grow a company without great marketing.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
During 2011, I started putting on events called FounderMatchup to help people find co-founders to build startups.Getting people to sign up for the first event was the main goal.There wasn’t a playbook to market events(or atleast I didn’t find one) so I did things which might be considered a bit “outbound” today.
- Found other tech meetups on meetup.com and messaged the organizers through the platform to partner with us. If they told their members about our event, we’d reciprocate and do the same for them.
- Put up the event on all tech events site like GreenhornConnect, VentureFizz, StartupDigest etc.
- Had our sponsors(who were service providers) spread the word since it gave them street cred.
- Asked community leaders to tweet about the event.Using all these tactics, we ended up getting over 300 registrations for our first event which was way more than we had predicted.
Melissa Wang
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Introduction
Hi, I’m Melissa Wang! I graduated from Tufts University in 2015 with a degree in psychology (and a double in communications and media studies as well as economics) and will be working at Accuen, a media agency in New York City.
I previously interned at HubSpot and ran their paid social media advertising campaigns while working on other marketing projects.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I’ve been interested in human behavior and writing for a long time and thus decided to study psychology in college while completing various editorial internships. I wasn’t really exposed to what marketing as a career would be like until my sophomore year of college. That year, a former classmate told me about his experiences running social media campaigns and writing whitepapers at his marketing job, and all of it intrigued me.
I realized that with marketing, I could put my writing skills to good use, while learning about what makes consumers tick, to craft successful campaigns. It seemed both creative and analytical, which really appealed—and still does appeal—to me.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
Shortly into my first marketing internship in the summer after my sophomore year, I noticed that the company I was working at didn’t have much of a social media presence even though many of its competitors did. I pointed this out to my manager, and she let me run with this new social media project.
I hadn’t had any professional experience managing social media before, so I spent a lot of time consulting search engines for advice—HubSpot’s blog and ebooks helped me a lot, and my manager also sent me some useful links. After initially doing some competitive research and creating the social accounts, I ended up managing the accounts and maintaining a social media content calendar for the remainder of my internship.
Emily Smith
Portsmouth, UK
Introduction
I’m Emily Smith, I live on the South Coast of England and work in Portsmouth for a company called Vertical Leap, who are a cross between a traditional search agency and a software service.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I actually fell into Digital Marketing. I have a love for writing and was convinced that I wanted to be a journalist when I was younger. Following my studies at college I landed myself an apprentice job at a small print company in Emsworth and taught myself website development in the meantime. Once my second year of my apprenticeship came around I moved onto another company in Portsmouth who taught me the basics of SEO and helped me build on my website development skills.
Soon I noticed that I was enjoying the marketing side of things more and more, I enjoyed the satisfaction of being able to see the results of my hard work. Having moved to my current job at Vertical Leap since then, I’ve learnt even more skills and am still amazed at the ever-changing world of SEO!
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
The first marketing project I worked on was for a local client here in Portsmouth who were struggling to reach out to their target audience. Having never worked on this type of thing before, I worked alongside a colleague and learnt on the job, something I found challenging yet rewarding.
We ended up getting some great results for the client with them appearing in first position for their agreed local search terms which in turn gave their business the boost they needed!
Lane Sutton
Boston, Massachusetts
Introduction
I live west of Boston and have worked on marketing at HubSpot, Sprinklr, OpenView Venture Partners, and TripAdvisor.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
Promoting my blog/website was my first marketing experience. Using Twitter, I found a community of bloggers who were impressed by my age and promoted the website while I did similarly for them. I didn’t realize the business side of Twitter until I was asked to consult at the age of 12-years-old.
I only had 1,000 followers at the time, but she needed help getting her presence off the ground. With my help, her presence grew from 0 to 11,000 [human] followers, successful blog posts that attracted people to her website, and numerous speaking engagements. I’m still working with this client today. It showed my potential and gave me a chance at being a professional at such a young age.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
My first official marketing project was at HubSpot, of all places! My first project there was to research the social media presence and develop/create a strategy to improve.
I compared the presence to competing softwares and looked at the analytics using tools including HubSpot’s Sources report, referrals from social, SimplyMeasured for various metrics and KPIs. It turned out well! I presented at the end to marketing team members and it must have been good because I was fortunate to return for a second internship!
Venchito Tampon
Manila, Philippines
Introduction
I’m Venchito Tampon, the Co-Founder and Marketing Director of LinkCore Media, a content-led link building company that provides high quality link building services to local and international clients based in UK, US and Australia.
I manage the client acquisition and lead generation phase. I also handle client communication, strategy development and internal operations of the company.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
Creativity. Marketing is a creative industry where you can utilize all your skills from copywriting to technical know-how and from design to communications.
Career potential. There is no salary constraint in the marketing niche. If you want to earn more, then hone your skills and get some clients on board. There is a high potential to easily translate your employee-type of thinking to an entrepreneur mindset, simply because you can have a handful of clients within just a year.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
All my projects that I worked on before I entered Jon’s team were mostly content writing stuff. To be honest, I didn’t learn much from it aside from the idea of “productivity”. I have to become productive, don’t easily distracted with things (social media, house chores, etc..) in order to write more articles every single day.
Well, I actually considered my work for Jon’s team as my first marketing project. Though when I entered into the company I did the entry-level type of work, eventually, I learned the process from link prospecting to outreach – which later that I knew, that it was the advanced procedures in link building (considered to be enterprise-level link acquisition).
Each task is executed in a detailed manner, thus, every team member knows the “ins” and “outs” of the project (though the company was segmented into three departments – link prospecting, content creation and outreach).
Tammy Cho
Washington DC
Introduction
Hello! I’m Tammy Cho, cofounder of Encore Alert. My day ranges between helping our customers craft their social media strategy to designing and managing our product. Our solution automatically analyzes all of a brand’s digital noise and serves up bite-sized, actionable insights that empower marketers to take real-time, data-driven actions daily.
We help marketers at mid- to large-sized brands like the Denver Broncos, Consumer Electronics Show, The Honest Company, and Georgetown University be more effective each day.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
My first taste of marketing was when I worked as a marketing consultant for nonprofits. As one of my major projects, I did a ton of research on charity:water’s brilliant marketing strategy, learning that stories relayed through great marketing are huge driving factors of action each day. I figured, what if I could also be a marketer building campaigns that would empower and inspire others to do good too?
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
After Japan suffered three consecutive disasters in 2011, a group of high school friends and I were inspired to raise money on campus to aid the hundreds of thousands of families that were left homeless. But unfortunately, we had a big dilemma–as an independent group, we had a budget of less than $100 of our personal money to make it happen.
Before we launched the campaign, we gathered marketing advice from our teachers and marketing best practices from other successful groups on campus, quickly learning that our biggest challenge would be to make sure our branding would be strong and clear enough to differentiate ourselves from the mass of other student orgs and flyers on campus. We named our campaign LoveJapan and incorporated a very noticeable pink cherry blossom theme across all of our materials, covering the school’s walls with pink cherry blossoms of donor names and facts about the disaster. We also created pink stations for students to donate and learn how to create origami pieces, and quickly spread our message using social media shareables and video commercials.
As a result, we were able to raise over $1,200 in donations. Although the number seems a bit small looking back, it was still one of the biggest fundraising campaigns of the year at our smaller school. Best of all, our campaign brought our school together in support of one cause, enabling students from every single class to participate.
Tierney Young
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Introduction
Hello all! I’m Tierney Young, the latest Account Manager for an awesome four-person digital marketing firm called CircleRank. Based in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia (I love it here), we specialize in the full spectrum of digital marketing with a strong emphasis on humanizing SEO.
I personally manage the communication, content creation, KW research, ecommerce design, and overall brand development of our two largest clients.
When I’m not working at CircleRank during the day, I’m working independently as a Digital Marketing Consultant for a Behavioral Health Physician based in Ardmore, PA at night.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
This is a tough question to answer! I have quite a lengthy list of reasons, but for the sake of not running this post into a 30 minute read, I’ll stick to the top three.
For one, my brother is also in this industry and has inspired me to become more technical through his personal success stories. He has also given me a huge leg up with my own clients and taught me just about everything I know about the importance of keywords and keyword matrices (something he is a huge advocate of). Challenge: For those of you who don’t know me, can you guess who my brother is?
Secondly, I’m a natural designer. I have always had an unremitting fascination with how brands represent and market themselves, their products, and how they communicate with their target audiences. It’s nothing out of the ordinary to find me lightheartedly criticizing poorly designed products.
Thirdly, I have a passion for writing. Whether I’m writing for a Doctor’s advice column, cranking out product descriptions for luxury seafood brands, or educating people on health and wellness, I love the gratification that comes with wording something beautifully.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
Writing product descriptions for an ecommerce client in Magento.
To be perfectly honest, this occurred when I was in seventh grade visiting my brother in Philadelphia. I probably had no idea what SEO was at the time, or that what I was writing was kind of a huge deal.
If I remember correctly, his client was pleased and the aftermath was highly profitable.
Tim Jessberger
Columbus, Ohio
Introduction
Hi, I’m Tim. I currently work as Digital Marketing Strategist for Crane Renovation Group, which is a sort of umbrella contracting company. In two weeks after I graduate, I’ll be taking the position of Digital Marketing Manager there. Currently I oversee the digital efforts for their Able Roof (Columbus, OH), Mr. Roof (Nashville, Memphis, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Louisville), and Contractors Inc (scattered across the southern US) brands. Right now we’re rebranding, but the major focus for my efforts is lead gen.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I started out in IT, but I realized that the only really limitless career path in IT was to become a software coder. I didn’t really enjoy coding, so I started working odd IT jobs and one of them was in web design, which led to SEO, which led to email marketing, which led to social media. I’m a super competitive and analytical person so I loved every minute of this new path.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
The first marketing project I ever worked on was Copperhead Clothing, a hunting clothing startup in New Albany, OH. My friend’s dad offered me the opportunity to make some edits on his new WordPress website. Eventually he wanted me to help him rank higher on Google.
Everything I learned I learned from Google, reddit, and inbound.org; business school has not really taught me anything about digital. The project went well, as we ranked for some of the big terms he wanted and I made an informational, responsive website with a bit of eCommerce.
Rhys Davies
Peterborough, UK
Introduction
My name is Rhys Davies and i work for a digital marketing agency called Zazzle Media, where i am currently working as a Search and Data Executive. My other interests include website development and graphic design.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I’ve always been interested in computers and digital marketing from a young age, something quite funny is that i used to create Bebo skins back in the day and sell my “expertise” to classmates.
Then I moved onto more creative pieces throughout my school years doing media studies and IT learning more about marketing and design. I eventually landed an apprenticeship in the SEO (search engine optimisation) industry at the age of 17 for a company called i3MEDIA.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
Working as an apprentice in an agency allowed me to work on a range of clients and projects at the same time. I learned all about Search Engine Optimisation from colleagues, videos and blogs such as Moz, Search Engine Land and Google’s Webmaster Tools Blog, among many more. I had some successful campaigns that worked well, which i can’t name for privacy reasons. However these experiences allowed me to know what works well when optimising websites for search engines.
Tori Cushing
Seattle, Washington
Introduction
Hi! I’m Tori Cushing and I’m a Customer Success Jedi for Moz in sunny Seattle. On the daily, I rock some outreach, training videos, and webinars for the lovely customers of Moz. When I’m not pushing some outreach, I spend my time Lindy Hopping, sketching or Parkour-ing… not a word.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
My mom, Annie Cushing, first showed me some data in Excel when she was 16. The problem solving of data analysis was what first drew me to marketing.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
Back in the day, my mom’s small consulting company was doing some link building with some directory sites. I know, sups old school.
Lily Mangkhalakhili
Boston, Massachusetts
Introduction
I’m Lily Mangkhalakhili. I work in Massachusetts at Belmont Instrument Corporation as a Marketing Coordinator. I dabble in a lot of different things. Sometimes I’ll work on writing website content or be thinking of the catchiest of tag lines for blood warmers. Other times you’ll spot me dressed up as a surgeon, ready to be the next undiscovered brochure cover model.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
I’m pretty sure I was in my tween years watching a K-drama of some sort that had a product presentation somehow embedded in the plot line and I was like, wow, that’s so fabulous. Look at that presentation. Look at how convincing they are. I want to wear some fancy business formal clothes and do that too. Side note: I’m not sure why I ever wanted to willingly wear business formal clothes. Let’s chalk that up to youthful, blissful ignorance.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
The first marketing project I worked on was a group based project for one of my introductory marketing courses as an undergraduate student. It was pretty textbook – basically taking marketing concepts and applying it to a company of choosing. I’d say the final results were satisfactory, but that I learned more about the company than marketing itself. But hey, it was a learning experience that helped set off many more to follow!
Bobkevin Shoo
Arusha, Tanzania
Introduction
I’m Bobkevin Shoo (One name. Yes, very indecisive parents) and I’m a 20 year old marketing and community manager at Skytel Ltd where I leverage great tools found in the modern day silicon jungles to boost online presence for our clients.
I live and work in Arusha, Tanzania (yes, we have internet and computers here) among some of the most prominent web developers and content marketers in the country.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
The evolution of technology got me into marketing. Over the last decade, the world has been reduced to the size of the smartphone in your hand and access to content became easier and faster and even more creative when it comes to delivery. I witnessed my first live-tweet event in 2008 and began pursuing this field.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
The first marketing project I worked on was when I founded my first start-up in 2014, TODdotnet (topicoftheday.net). It was a forum to discourage my peers from loitering on the internet and taking part in discussions on problem-solving in our community.
I simply implemented what I was being taught in college, tweaked my SEO skills through free resources on the net and after two months I averaged 8,000 visitors a week and ran two affiliate marketing campaigns.
Max Mackey
San Francisco, California
Introduction
I’m Max. I’m a marketing manager at DEX Media. We help small businesses get more customers through Adwords and local SEO. Specifically, I manage my clients Adwords and coordinate with web designers and SEOs.
How did you first get interested in marketing?
A professor in college got me interested in digital marketing. She owned a boutique marketing agency while teaching full-time. I really enjoyed that she had real experience to share and wasn’t just reading out of a text book.
What was the first marketing project you worked on?
The first marketing project I worked on was for the Malibu Farmer’s market. I created all of their social media content to engage with the community more. It went well, the vendors sold amazing food which helped me showcase good content. We grew the Facebook community and got over 50 reviews on yelp.
Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash
