So You Want To Work At An Agency?
Well, I celebrated my one-year mark working in the marketing agency world in July, and wow, what a year it’s been. It’s been amazing to look back and what I’ve learned and still have to learn. It’s been a year filled with figuring out what I was good at it, and what I wasn’t, and it’s been a great year to be humbled. If I could use one world about my first year in the agency world, it would be, “Challenge.” Or, at least that’s what it’s been for me. The thing about a challenge, though, is that it doesn’t mean or allude to, that it can’t be done. What was remarkably difficult in my first six months has become much easier, almost second nature, and I guess that’s how learning and growing works.
So, you say you want to work at an agency? I get asked for advice all the time now about this very thing, and although I don’t know it all, I know what I’ve learned, and here are some good things to think about as you look to land that sweet agency job. They’re in particular order:
Talk to people who work there, or who have worked there. When I first decided to move into the agency world, I met with five or six folks who worked in the agency world, and asked them what I needed to know or think about when looking to gain a job with their companies or in that space. Ask as many questions as you can, try and identify things that you need to work on, or things that you need to learn to give you a better chance. My talks with Katie Melick, Rene Smith, Julianna Bowman and Chad Elkins were key and crucial as I made the decision, and I owe a debt of gratitude to those folks for their words of wisdom and help.
Learn as much as you can about the business side of marketing. What I knew in terms of organic marketing, I didn’t have a clue about related to the business side of marketing. I didn’t know or understand metrics, data, insights and how to measure ROI for every dollar that get’s spent on behalf of a client. Also, structure. I had a very organic understanding of social media and strategy, but lacked the ability to put structure to it, and that’s what a client (or even project manager on your team) needs. It’s okay to have a great idea for how to activate advocates for a brand, but if you can’t put it into a structure that answers the questions “What, Why, and How” you just have a great idea no one but you can use.
Look beyond the flair. Don’t look at the Ping-Pong, foosball and pool tables, the nap rooms, or the weekly beer carts, look at the overall agency experience. Take away all of those frills and ask yourself if you’d still work there. Because the reality is, you will probably be so busy that you will have no time for foosball, and you’ll never have time for a nap in the nap room. Yes, the break room fully stocked with snacks and drinks, even beer, is great, but if you aren’t happy with what you’re doing, and whom you’re doing it for, it will be of no real value. Ask folks who work there how often they get to take advantage of those perks.
Clean your social house. If you want a job in social media at an agency, make your personal accounts public, and tidy up your pages remembering that your future employers are using social media to identify and hire people more and more these days. I’ve found this to be very true, both those who’ve hired me, and those I’ve hired. I recently hired two great interns for the Fall semester, and part of the hiring process was taking a look at their social channels to see how they were using it and what they were saying. Update your LinkedIn profile, and post updates. Share articles or other things that you’re learning from, or things you think will help make you a subject matter expert in the area you’re looking to gain an agency job in.
Consider that smaller might be better. Just as no one person is the same as the others, no agency is, and I think that many of the bouncing around from agency to agency affirms this fact. While the lure of the larger agency with the larger brands might be really compelling, consider the smaller agencies with the smaller brands, perhaps at least as you start out. When I started out, I was blessed to have been gained a job from one of the best agencies in the country, with some of the most amazing people, with some of the largest brands in the world including Coca-Cola. I had a great teacher in Teresa Caro, who really helped me learn structure, and from Lindsay Howard, who helped me learn to tidy up my work overall. But the amount of stress and work became unhealthy, and I made the hard decision to leave. I don’t regret a day of working at Engauge, and will be ever grateful for the opportunity and what it gave me. With that being said, after moving to a smaller agency, with smaller brands, I’ve found a more perfect place for me. I left an office of close to 200, to an office with 20. At the end of the day, I leave my work at work (besides checking our clients social channels once at night), and I’m not stressed out. I don’t feel like every mistake is life or death, and because of that, I’ve only made a couple of mistakes since coming to Dalton Agency, and those were small and easily fixable. I now spend extra time looking at things before going to the client or account teams, because I don’t feel rushed. I now have extra time to work on overall strategy, on looking deeper at metrics to see what’s working and what’s not, and at keeping current with trends and updates from platforms.
Learn all you can about paid social media. There’s no longer a free lunch for brands with social media, and you gotta pay to play. Learn as much as you can about boosting Facebook posts, about promoting tweets, about targeting and geo-fencing posts. Learn about ad spends, about bids and about estimating budgets for paid media. Also learn about how to measure your results from paid media and how to report that to the client. You’ll also need to know and understand how to use insights and metrics to write and change copy and post times, as needed for the posts you’re paying to promote. I believe as Facebook further ratchets down their algorithm for reach (which can’t go much lower), brands will continue to get pushed out unless they pay. With Twitter, as more and more people continue to use the platform, actual reach will continue to decrease as tweets get pushed down the timeline much faster because of the sheer number of tweets that people are posting (meaning chances of actually seeing the post diminish greatly), paid will be where it’s at. Now that Facebook owns Instagram, I imagine it won’t be long before paid ads there are more available using targeted posts. And as always, these platforms change their policies and offerings weekly, so you have to stay on top of it. Learn all you can about paid social media.
Network, Network, Network. Join your local AIMA, Social Media Club, and attend as many meetings and events you can. Look for smaller conferences you can attend and take classes. Not only will you be learning from the classes, but you’ll be putting your name and face out there for potential employers. Identify people in your area who are really good at what you want to do and introduce yourself. Volunteer at some of these events and conferences. Meet as many people as possible, and show a genuine interest in them and what they do. Don’t be like one of those guys you see wandering a room practically begging for a job, passing his card out to everyone with only one goal. Be real.
I hope this helps, these are just some of the things I’d recommend. If you have other questions, post them below!
