Why You Should Start Your Marketing Career with a Small Business

Marketing is not just about advertising or selling a product. It's about understanding your target audience and helping them connect with what your company or client has to offer, usually helping that customer with a pain point (which we discuss in our SEO blog here). 

Marketing is critical to any business (you’d think this would be obvious but just look at how many companies cut marketing as the first expense when a recession hits), and it's important for marketers to understand all aspects of why their business or client exists in order for them to promote it. That's where working at a smaller company comes in handy! Here are some reasons why starting your marketing career at a small business will benefit you:

American hustle culture brags about being able to “wear multiple hats” and to be overly-busy as a badge of honor (the opposite is also true, but we won’t get into that). You don’t want to do this for the rest of your life, but when you’re young, have energy, and a brain that’s open to learning, this is the perfect time to try this out. 

Think of it like doing your “general” classes in college. You may find out you really like art, or biology, even though you went into college wanting to be an engineer. Same with marketing. You may think you want to be a social media manager so you can just scroll through social media all day, post some cute pictures, and chill on the beach. But then you find out there is so much more to it like content scheduling, targeting, different types of posts, creative asset creation, integration with other campaigns and objectives, and more. It's a lot to manage, you may not like that.

This is where your first marketing job in a small business comes in. You’re not just learning SEO or social media, you get exposure to all areas of marketing. You’ll become a jack-of-all-trades, and that means you get to learn how everything works together in the modern marketing world. You'll also quickly realize that there's no such thing as an "easy" marketing job. In fact, it's probably one of the hardest jobs out there because there are so many things going on at once! But don't let this be an excuse for procrastination—you can still manage your time well and deliver great work if you stay organized and focused (more on this later).

With a small business, you'll be more independent. You'll have to make decisions on your own and take responsibility for those decisions. You’ll be patted on the back or high-fived for successes and may be yelled at for failures. You have to take both in stride and own up to them. 

You will make a lot of mistakes in marketing, as the entire industry is built on the concept of experimenting with different hypotheses. This will teach you how to lead and how to speak with clients and bosses and tell a story with your data, even if it’s a failure. Turn the failure into a learning opportunity and make a plan to update the next campaign based on what you found; rather than just telling your boss the numbers were bad this month.

After awhile of juggling everything yourself, your boss may hire on an assistant for you (as mine did a few times over several jobs). This will give you your first taste in marketing leadership over people, and help build your project management skills. You’ll assign tasks and goals to your assistants based on what you think you can do and what needs to be done overall. Divide the work out to the best of you and your assistant’s abilities and then assess the results. If your assistant falls short, don’t condemn them. Teach them what they did wrong, what they should have done, and have both of you learn from the mistake. Your assistant is your responsibility, so don’t play the blame game with your boss; own up to the mistake since you are in charge of marketing and move on from there making it a learning experience.

The biggest selling point of working for a small business is that you'll be involved in many aspects of the business and your opinion will matter. You will be able to see how your work directly impacts sales, marketing and finance/budgets. This means that if you make a mistake, it won't cost a lot because the company isn't huge (most of the time).

You will be able to influence key decisions in budgets, targeted audiences, campaigns and platforms to work on, and sometimes even in how the work process at the company flows. Making sure that the customer has a smooth journey from their first awareness ad to the end of the funnel as a sale or lead should be a high priority.

Also, since big businesses have many layers between marketers and CEOs (or CFOs), you might not have as much influence on major decisions at those bigger counterparts, making your ideas (like the smoothing of the customer journey) easier to swallow at a small business.

One of the best things about a small business is that you get to know all aspects of the business and how they work together. You'll have a better understanding of how marketing works and effects sales, production, distribution, training, finance, and reporting/planning. I would dive deeper but those in and of themselves need a large amount of room to explain.

You’ll also see many different types of businesses as you work in a few and study others as competitors. This will help you understand what type of marketing would be best for your clientele; and in a couple months/years, what is best for you to focus in on.

These are just some of the reasons why I advocate for starting your marketing career with a small business. Working for a smaller company gives you the opportunity to learn more about businesses and how they work, which will help prepare you for future positions at larger organizations. 

Doing it also allows you to wear many hats at the start of your career, so you don’t have to do it down the road. You’ll be given the chance to gain experience in different areas like sales, financial planning, and customer service - as well as marketing. Finally, working within smaller companies means that everyone knows what everyone else does—and because of this knowledge sharing environment it's even easier to get involved in building up leadership and project management skills!

I worked as a project manager for a startup gun shop online, then a marketing manager for a multi-website retail store selling hundreds of different products leading a small team (but doing everything myself as well), then a marketing manager for a small real estate company (just myself again on the side of the other job), and then a marketing manager for a cleaning service company with only one employee in my marketing team besides me. I’ve been, I’ve learned so many things like I mentioned above and more which has helped me to flesh out my overall knowledge and know what I wanted to specialize in.  

So start your job search with the small companies, it'll be worth it!