Top tips for how to get work experience in marketing
- WP
- Aug 10, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 28, 2023
Work experience. A rite of passage. A coming of age. Your first exposure to the world of marketing, and with it, a wealth of learning opportunity. Step one on the long road to success - although it won’t feel quite like that when you’re making 10 cups of tea for the rest of the team on your first day.
We’ve all been through it. It’s the first rung of the ladder, the bottom of the hill and it’s what's expected of you. Believe me, some of the tales that you will have been told or read about online regarding work experience will be accurate. You very well may have to go on the lunch run, help to reorganise the storage cupboards or take on the photocopying pile. It’s all part of the game. But the end goal doesn’t change, this is a crucial addition to your CV and one that might help you to get future work experience - or better - down the line.
To my mind, there is still no better way for a media student or recent marketing graduate to cut their teeth than by being thrust into a newsroom and learning on the fly. But how do you actually get work experience? How do you stand out amongst the many applicants that a media outlet receives every year? It's a tough question, but this is what I did and it worked for me. So here’s my top tips for how to get work experience in marketing.
1. Apply locally
Look, being brutally honest, there’s not much point in emailing the Marketing Director at Manchester United just yet, or sending a LinkedIn message over to the Editor of GQ. Work hard and that day will come, but for now stay local, concentrate on applying for work experience in the immediate area around you.
What’s the local newspaper called that comes through the door each week? What’s the name of the local BBC or commercial radio station, or the nearby hospital radio station? Is there a professional or semi-professional sports club near to where you live? If you’re not sure then get online and research. If you live close to a city and can commute in then expand your horizons. Find names, find email addresses or phone numbers. Where possible, avoid emailing the generic hello@ or contact@ email addresses, dig a little deeper and look for actual names. Find journalist bylines and connect with them on LinkedIn, call up and ask to speak with people, guess the email address until you stop getting bounce backs, e.g. john.smith@newspaper.com, jsmith@newspaper.com etc. I’ve done it all. It works.
One slightly riskier approach that I have heard work but haven’t tried myself is to go for an informal visit. Turn up unannounced and ask to speak to someone about work experience opportunities. Daunting, yes, and old school, absolutely. You may need to wait in reception for a while, but it’s unlikely that staff would turn a young, steadfast mind away and, moreover, it means that they get to meet you - you’re not a faceless email. Food for thought.
2. Find a niche
A common theme throughout my various articles but unquestionably one of the most important things that you can do to source work experience, freelance work or full-time employment - find a niche, find something that no-one else is talking about and own it. Make it yours. Become the fountain of all knowledge on that topic. Doing this made me valuable to media outlets, I could offer them something that they didn’t have.
I’ve spoken about this before in other articles, that first niche for me was covering the King’s Lynn Fury basketball team for a local newspaper. They were competing in the second-tier of British basketball and I went to every home match and covered the game in full on the newspaper’s social media channel, wrote up a match report for the website and then interviewed the Head Coach and Captain for a reactionary newspaper article. After doing that for a few weeks, I was contacted by the Sports Editor at BBC Radio Norfolk, who wanted me to do the same for them. So I cleared it with the newspaper and, upon agreement, I was sent an iPad, XLR cable, adaptor and professional microphone by the BBC for post-match interviews and I would then send that audio across for use in their broadcast. I did that for a couple of months and was then asked if I wanted to cover some shifts at BBC Radio Norfolk - which I absolutely did - and that, really, was the start of my career. Read more about this in my article, ‘How do I get a job in marketing?’ I went from Googling that to working for Chelsea FC.
So over to you. Is there a local sports club, in your area, who don’t get much coverage in the newspaper, on social media or on the local radio station? Is there a local arts, dance, theatre group that perform semi-regular shows for the community that need photographing for local media? Is there an up-and-coming music band that need social media coverage?
Or, alternatively, does that local sports team need someone to film their matches, cover their matches on Twitter or write the match report that is sent into the Non-League Paper? Does the local Fire station need someone to photograph their community days, does the local MPs office need a social savvy individual to run their community management on Twitter and respond to voter questions?
Work experience opportunities are everywhere, it’s your job to go and find them and they could be crucial to securing your first step on the career ladder. So go and be a journalist, go and report the story.
3. Create content: write a blog, film a vlog, record a podcast
A useful practice while I was developing my knowledge of how to write, structure and publish news articles, and something that I would seriously consider if I was looking to break into the industry - write blogs.
I’m a football fan and my ultimate goal as a young man was to work in football. We didn't have Chat GPT then, so I created a blog that covered the top six teams and wrote articles about them. Nothing that other media outlets weren’t already doing, I didn’t have any exclusive scoops, but that wasn’t the point. I did this so that I could show media outlets that I was actively writing articles, irregardless of it not being about exclusive content.
I watched games on TV and then wrote match reports and compared them to BBC Sports’s match reports to learn. I wrote opinion pieces, covered deadline days' - it was a useful exercise to practice writing and improve my speed. After building my confidence, I then sourced writing opportunities online to showcase my ability to bigger audiences and wrote for a Liverpool FC fan site. I looked for local professional sports teams close to where I was studying in Stoke-on-Trent and identified the Cheshire Jets basketball team, who were playing in the British Basketball League but had little media coverage in a busy sports region. I started a blog that covered their matches and used that to reach out to the club themselves to ask about writing opportunities for their official website. They were thrilled to have someone do that work for them for free, we both got something out of it, and so I wrote articles for them while at University. That later helped me to get work experience writing articles for Cambridge United FC and then Peterborough United FC and, years later, my first job at Sportsbeat Press Agency involved writing articles for a number of known websites, including British & Irish Lions, Six Nations, Premiership Rugby etc.
I took what I was learning at University and put it into practice through blogging. I then used those blogs to show my writing ability to professional media outlets to secure work experience and then used the work that I did there to secure my next work experience at the next media outlet, and so on.
So what’s your passion? What topics can you start writing about? Create a website for free on Wix, WordPress, SquareSpace, use one of their pre-built templates and start writing. Alternatively, buy a cheap video camera and microphone and start recording vlogs or podcasts and upload them to YouTube or SoundCloud - start creating content. It doesn’t matter if no-one reads, watches or hears your work, it’s a tool to help you to practice, develop and get better and an invaluable addition to your work experience application.
4. Get work experience at more than one outlet
This is an important one. It isn’t a case of doing one week of work experience at one outlet and you’re suddenly employable, you need a number of media organisations on your CV to be able to apply for full-time work. Moreover, different companies have different styles, different approaches, different editors, so the more work experience that you can get in varied newsrooms, industries and locations the better that will be for your education.
Before attending University and while at University, I had work experience at local newspapers, at a football magazine based in Peterborough, at a commercial radio station based in Cambridge, at BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and at Peterborough United FC and Cambridge United FC as mentioned previously. I did shifts at the hospital radio station in Stoke-on-Trent, had two shows on the student radio station, wrote for the University media outlet, StaffsLive, sourced stories for our weekly Newsday broadcasts and did one shift for BBC Radio Stoke - as well as writing blog posts about football and articles for the Cheshire Jets.
I did all of this for free. In fact, I likely would have lost money to pay for travel, lunches etc. But this all helped me to secure work experience at Sky Sports, which, as outlined in my article ‘How do I get a job in marketing?’ I went from Googling that to working for Chelsea FC, was integral to me securing my first job working in media.
So be prepared to work for free, for quite a long time. But don’t be disheartened by it, it’s just a part of the process - remember, work experience is the first step on your ladder to finding a career in media.
Good luck, let me know how you get on. Remember to brush up on your tea making skills before you turn up for your first day and don't get the boss' order wrong.
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