Engineer, To Space, To Marketing

“What separates good content from great content is a willingness to take risks and push the envelope.” – Brian Halligan 

Amanda Jones is a forward-thinking individual. She is full of forward tilt and has been all of her life, but was she always that way? 

Her Past

Little Amanda was curious and wanted to do everything. She was about to transfer to a four-year university and one of her areas of interest was engineering. Although she later realized that isn’t what she wanted to do, she didn’t know what she wanted to do. Now she sees that she wanted to be an engineer because she thought space was super cool. Amanda wanted to be a space scientist -which she still thinks would be pretty awesome. It was more the romance and sentiment behind the industry that drew her towards it. Another area that she wanted to go into was communications. But Amanda didn’t want to go to a four-year college for it because honestly, she found it a bit dumb. 

Then Amanda stumbled upon Praxis at a conference. Someone on a panel briefly talked about it and she found someone who did Praxis at the conference. She considers herself lucky that she found it in an unconventional way. It was through Praxis and her love of writing and storytelling that lead her towards her marketing apprenticeship.

Her Marketing Experience

Amanda’s experience in marketing was heavily focused on paid ads and copywriting. She’d have images, text, or an email chain and have to edit it and then put it through different channels. During her apprenticeship, she learned how a business ticked. This helped her gain an intimate knowledge of how important marketing is for a company to succeed.

When people think of marketing they picture a bunch of people sitting in a room just being creative. But there is an extremely technical side to marketing as well. You must be able to pull and then look through the analytics of a bunch of different channels, see the differences, what worked what didn’t, how to improve and so much more. If you take an even bigger behind-the-scenes look at marketing you will see the digital foundations are mostly marketing as well. Making sure you’re set up online correctly, being found for keywords, and that the website is running at a good speed. If people can’t find you then there is no point in making good content, or you won’t be optimized for them to share your content.

Marketing Skills

There are a plethora of hard skills that are useful in marketing. It is such a broad position and can differ depending on your rank and company. When considering the amount of software that is available the number only increases. According to Amanda a few universal skills that everyone should know are:

• Copywriting
• Social media
• The ability to test things quickly
• Something along the lines of MailChimp.

These are skills that will be beneficial as an entry-level employee. But you can carry them throughout your career whether you continue in marketing or not. 

She mentioned that the main difference between personal marketing and company marketing is you have to be specific in a company, you must know your customer and be realistic about it. When doing personal branding you have all the freedom in the world and you can be as broad as you want. The small crossover occurs when you consider the element of persuading, in personal branding this means getting people to want to work with you in a company setting it is getting the customer to want your product. 

Her Future

As of now, Amanda is working remotely as a digital marketing consultant in Virginia. She’s loving the freedom it gives her, to do more marketing-focused stuff on the side, and she has made it her goal to learn something new every day.

Amanda is very grateful for her previous experience since it taught her so much. She’s already envisioning a broader scope for what she wants to do with her life and has more tools and resources for how to do that. Currently, she is doing an online course to learn more about email marketing and is excited to be building a new skillset. She strives to contentiously diversify her work and try new things.

Her Advice

Treat your life as an apprenticeship, there will always be more out there for you to learn.