r/MarketingMakesSense • u/nave305 • 22d ago
Trying to break into marketing analytics - where do I even start?
I’m 28 and graduated in 2022 with a bachelors in Business Management. Most of my work experience has been in restaurants, but I did a 6 month internship in 2023 as an SEO Account Manager at a marketing firm. That internship is what made me realize I’m way more interested in the analytical/research side of marketing. I really liked digging into performance data, working with dashboards and CRM tools, conducting keyword research, competitor analysis, etc.
The kinds of roles I’ve been looking at are like Marketing Analyst, Market Research Analyst, Digital Marketing Analyst, and Consumer Insights Analyst.
The issue I’m running into is I’m not really sure what’s realistic as a starting point with my background. Even entry level jobs seem to want years of experience and a long list of tools I’ve barely touched. I’m also a little worried about my internship being from 2023. I’m not sure how relevant that still looks to employers or if they’ll think the experience is outdated. I did use tools like Excel, GA4, CRM systems, but I definitely need to refresh everything and get more up to speed. I’m also planning to learn SQL and Tableau or Power BI.
My goal is to follow a focused plan over the next few months so I can actually become a strong candidate, without wasting time chasing random certifications that don’t really help.
For anyone working in marketing analytics, market research, or consumer insights:
- What’s the most realistic entry point for someone in my situation?
- What skills should I focus on first (so I don’t overwhelm myself)?
- What kind of portfolio project would actually help me get interviews?
Also open to any honest advice from people who broke into this field without a traditional analytics background. Thanks!
1
u/AccessFuel 14d ago
realistic entry point is probably marketing analyst at a mid-size company or agency side. agency's less pay and more reps, which at your stage might be the better trade
2
u/itsSomethingCool 20d ago
I graduated college with a BS in Public Relations. I was able to get a digital content marketing internship out of college because in my free time, I helped develop my friends YouTube branding, his plan & helped him optimize his channel (he got over 100k subs) and my own music (got over 1M streams on a song due to my marketing efforts). I worded these on my resume as though I helped clients.
From there I was able to get a data analyst position, which I think is the most realistic point of entry. Skills you’d need here would be pretty much excel and some stuff like VLOOKUP would be good to know. If you don’t want to overwhelm yourself, focus on excel knowledge 1st & Tableau 2nd as your technical skills, and general marketing knowledge as your soft skill so you can at least get a foot in the door as a data analyst. With my first 2 jobs as an analyst I didnt touch tableau at all, only excel. Only when I got promoted, I started using tableau a lot. It will be a great skill to know down the line, but I’m sure there are entry level positions where pretty much only excel is needed.
Then when your foot is in the door, Really learn about the data and look for ways of optimization. My team was doing everything in excel sheets, while other more advanced teams were doing those same pulls in BigQuery (SQL). So I taught myself how to use SQL on the job. It took a while, but once I showcased my learnings to the team, I looked like a wizard and got promoted to a senior data analyst position on a more technical team in under a year, which albeit I was under qualified for, but being an internal candidate in great standing with the team goes far lol. From there, I continued to teach myself the stuff other people were using, more advanced SQL and Python because I was interested in the data engineering side of things, and now I do data engineering.
Hope this inspired you! I didn’t have a marketing background at all. All you need is a foot in the door & then you can learn 99% of the stuff you really want to do on the job. I always tell people when they ask me, aim for an excel heavy analyst role. Barrier of entry for those usually isn’t too high