March marked my second anniversary as a digital marketer. This was also the time for my annual review (and raise!) at Active Data Technologies. I am proud to say that I am no longer the Marketing Associate, but I am the Online Marketing Specialist. I basically do the same thing for a little more money.
With that said, I started to think about how much in the past two years that I have grown. Recently, I went to visit my old office and friends at Nagelbush. The environment has not changed much there, but their spirits have been lifted some. I am happy for those who survived the major cuts the company had to do.
At any rate, I started to think about my current position. In the past, I questioned whether I made the right decision by working at a corporation rather than an agency. An old college friend came by my apartment the other day. After college, she landed a position working at a digital marketing agency.
She came over to ask for my help on a website she planned to launch. As we went over what would be SEO friendly for the website, she took notes on what I said. At that moment, I realized that I made the right decision working at a corporation. With that said, was I lucky to have gone to a corporation or lucky to have found the right corporation?
Working at an Agency
At her position, she regularly updates multiple social media accounts with supervision. In addition, she had a taste in SEO with meta tags. That is all I know of that she had worked on and gained experience. When it comes to other areas of digital marketing, she has not had a chance to dabble it in at her job.
This is my observation about working at an agency. However, I may be wrong because I have never worked in that environment. If I am wrong, please let me know. When working at agency, each person focuses on a single (maybe few) particular duty.
For an example, most of her day is focused on updating the social media accounts for the company’s clients. She once had an opportunity to work with the meta tags. When it comes to SEO, there are numerous people in the office that focus on those areas of digital marketing.
From what I understand when working at agency, a single employee will be focused in one area of the marketing campaign. This leaves less room for that employee to learn other areas of the campaign’s strategies. Therefore, they would probably be more proficient in that area than I would, but they would not learn any other opportunities.
Working at a Corporation
When working in a company, such as my current job, I have learned multiple facets in digital marketing such as (not limited to):
- Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- Infographics
- Google Products
- SEM
- SEO
- Social Media
- Social PR
- And more..
I have been fortunate to be on multiple projects, where I have managed a portion of each of the items stated above. I did not even mention about learning HTML and CSS. My boss was (and still is) an excellent teacher when it came learning the industry. I definitely would credit the majority of my knowledge to him.
In addition, I took the time to research and implement projects on my own at home. This also helped with my education in the digital marketing industry. In conclusion, I have decided that I made the right decision working at a corporation. It had allowed me to work on multiple projects utilizing various digital marketing skills.
If I were at an agency, I would have been stuck focused on one area. I am not saying that working at agency would be bad. In fact, I would agree that my friend understands social media implementation and applications better than I do. However, I could not be more appreciative of my current position, and how much I have learned.
With two years down, here is to the rest of my working life!
This photo is courtesy of Microsoft Clip Art
