12 Steps to Start a Career in Marketing in 2026

I started with marketing around 2008. I think I’d just turned 20.

I was back home in Estonia after studying abroad, trying to figure out how to make some extra money online from my bedroom.

If you’re about to start a career in marketing yourself, at 20 or at 45, these are the 12 steps I’d take again to get into marketing (or advertising) in 2026.

I was always into computers and software, and internet marketing was quite different back then.

I know. It’s been almost two decades.

Long story short, after six months of affiliate marketing, Google AdSense, blogging and spending hundreds on internet-marketing products that turned out to be scams, I finally made my first cents.

This was it.

I knew I could make this work, and it excited me, probably more than it should excite a normal person.

In 2009 I launched my first business, T-shirts.

Let’s just say it didn’t go as planned.

I’ve been testing and learning ever since, and most of what I know about marketing I taught myself (I did go to business school).

I ran B2B marketing at LHV, one of Estonia’s largest banks, worked in growth at the fintech startup Change, ran my own small agency and led growth at a payments company.

Looking back, these are the things I wish someone had told me when I started.

One more thing before the steps: it’s never too late to change careers. Starting a career in marketing at 30, 40 or 50 is possible, and the experience you bring is an advantage.

If you’re in a hurry, skip to the FAQ at the end.

Yes, we’re all busy. Thank me later.

What a career in marketing looks like in 2026

Marketing is still a good career, but it’s a more competitive one than when I started.

Most marketing jobs are online now. TV, radio and newspapers still exist, but in my opinion they matter a lot less, and the entry-level roles are in social media, ads, search, email and content. Almost all of them involve data.

The same AMA careers report (opens in new tab) puts the number of marketing job postings still 27% below pre-pandemic levels.

Roles that mostly execute shrank in 2025 (SEO specialists by 15%, content marketers by 11%), influencer marketing roles grew 18%, and senior and strategic roles held steady.

Its advice to people starting out is to become a generalist with depth in two or three areas, and to be ready to show how you’ve used AI to solve a real business problem.

1. Ask yourself: is marketing for me? Do your homework

What does a marketing job involve? It’s a job like any other.

You have your goals, you break them down into tasks, and you do them. It can be a lot of fun, and it can be frustrating as well.

Some weeks you work like crazy and get no results. Your coworkers look at you, and you start to wonder if you even know what you’re doing.

Other weeks business is booming, everybody in the office thinks you’re a god, and you don’t even know why it’s working that well.

For me, marketing has been one of the most exciting jobs there is, because it combines three things:

1. Creativity
2. Analytics
3. Psychology

I call it the Marketing CAP.

If you’re somewhat creative, you don’t shy away from numbers, and you enjoy taking the time to listen to people and understand why they do what they do, then marketing is 100% for you.

Marketing is a broad field, though, and the job you end up doing may use only one part of the CAP. Spend a week reading about the main fields and cross out the ones that don’t appeal to you:

This list is mostly digital marketing, but it should get your ideas going.

2. Choose your field

Nobody is great at everything, and that’s OK.

Pick the field that speaks to you most, and don’t rank one above another just because the salary is higher. It’s common sense: the jobs you love doing are the ones you’ll get good at, and good people get paid well in every field.

If you want a hint about where demand is going, influencer marketing is the fastest-growing marketing job, specialists in AI search (GEO and AEO) are on the rise, and roles that only produce content or only do SEO are shrinking (AMA, above).

Marketers who can cover more than one area are in high demand. A good shape is one field you go deep in, plus a working knowledge of the two next to it: social media plus content and design, or paid ads plus analytics and landing pages.

If advertising is what draws you, the usual way in is an agency, as a junior in media buying, account management or the creative team. It’s hard work, but you see a lot of clients and budgets in a short time.

3. Research job requirements

Before you study anything, find out what employers actually ask for. Headhunters, HR managers and the companies themselves can understand the same job title quite differently, and every company needs a slightly different mix of skills.

My suggestion is to read 20 to 30 job posts for the role you want, on LinkedIn, Indeed and company career pages, and make yourself a spreadsheet. List every skill, tool and experience requirement, and count how often each one comes up.

The ones at the top are your study plan for step 4. Note the AI tools too, because more and more posts name them.

What I usually see is that the longer the list of requirements, the smaller the company, and the more hardcore a multitalent it’s looking for.

That doesn’t mean the salary is great. It usually isn’t.

Once you’ve chosen your field and you’re committed to it, look for posts that stay on point.

An SEO specialist shouldn’t be designing the graphics for every article (they might, but they shouldn’t). A copywriter or social media manager, on the other hand, should know the basics of design in a tool like Canva.

4. Get some courses (and a certificate or two)

Still with me? Awesome.

Once you know which skills you need, go and learn them. Most of the basics are free:

• Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Certificate. Eight courses on Coursera (opens in new tab), about six months at 10 hours a week, for beginners, with modules on using AI for marketing. In the US and Canada it costs $49 a month after a 7-day free trial, and financial aid is available.¹
• Google Skillshop. Free courses and certifications for Google Ads and Google Analytics (opens in new tab). Useful if you’re heading for paid ads or analytics.
• HubSpot Academy. Free courses and certifications (opens in new tab), starting with inbound marketing.
• Meta Blueprint. Free courses (opens in new tab), study guides and practice tests for Facebook and Instagram ads. The certification itself is a separate online exam you register for.
• LinkedIn Learning. It comes with LinkedIn Premium, which has a one-month free trial (opens in new tab).² The paid plan starts automatically when the trial ends, so set a reminder. If your public library offers LinkedIn Learning for Library (opens in new tab), you can sign in with your library card for free.
• Udemy and YouTube. I prefer a packaged course, like Udemy’s marketing courses (opens in new tab), for learning one skill at a time, because it’s easier to follow than browsing around YouTube. Definitely do YouTube on top, for anything specific.

If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile yet, then, oh my god, go make one.

If you’re serious about getting a job and growing a professional network, you simply can’t do without it.

5. Attend networking events

To become a successful marketer, you need to grow your network.

What does someone in marketing do besides marketing? Well, among other things, they go to events. They share what they’ve learned, show off their wins and just socialize.

Start with local meetups and marketing events.

If meeting people you don’t know makes you nervous, start slow. Go to the event and decide in advance that you won’t talk to anyone.

Just hang around, get a drink, listen to what people are talking about (not in a creepy way) and take it easy. The next time, the conversations will happen by themselves.

Online counts too. Comment thoughtfully on the LinkedIn posts of people in your field, and join a Slack or Discord community for it.

But just go to the event. Many great marketers were shy once.

6. Get some coaching from people in your network

Once relevant people are in your network, you’re much closer to an actual job than you think. Marketing is a lot about people and trust (as most jobs are, probably), and marketers are drawn to people who are ambitious and have a goal.

So share yours: you’re starting a career in marketing.

I guarantee that some of them, if not most, will want to know more. “How are you planning to do that?”, “Where are you applying?”, “What role do you have in mind?”

At this point they may see you as a rookie they can help and teach, and marketers sure like to teach. (Look at me, writing this post.)

When someone offers to help, take their advice and follow up consistently.

Marketers are busy people. If you’re not there showing up, they won’t be either.

Offer your help in return, and show it rather than tell it.

If you chose design, don’t ask whether you can redesign their LinkedIn banner. Just make one, then ask whether they’re happy with the one they have. Assuming theirs is an ugly one, you have a new (hopefully better) one to show.

It’s a good way to get coaching, and sometimes a job.

7. Start your own blog, vlog or newsletter

This one is fairly underrated.

A blog, a video channel or a newsletter shows the world your ideas, your tone of voice and your skills, and it’s the portfolio most beginners don’t have.

By now you’ve:

• chosen your field;
• taken some courses;
• grown your network;
• had some coaching.

That’s more than enough to start.

Yes, there are thousands of blogs in every marketing niche, written by people with years more experience. Not to worry, the internet is big.

Write about what you’re learning and the experiments you run, with the numbers, and you build a personal brand that a resume can’t.

If you write well, you might even end up as a professional writer or creator and say no to whatever marketing job you’re offered.

Pick the format that suits you:

• A blog on your own domain. It’s still the best portfolio for SEO and content roles.
• A newsletter. Subscribers are an audience you own, and running one teaches you email marketing on the way. Kit has a free plan to start on. For why a list is the income a platform can’t take away, see how to make money on Instagram.
• Video or social. Short videos, Instagram or LinkedIn posts, if social media is your field. My guides to growing on Instagram and promoting a blog on Instagram show how.

Use AI to research, outline and edit, but keep the examples, results and opinions your own. That’s the part a hiring manager is reading for.

And watch your grammar, which new bloggers struggle with. Run every post through a grammar checker, and ideally let someone else read it before you publish.

8. Do some free work

By now you should feel pretty confident about yourself as a marketer.

Time to make money!

Just kidding.

First you need to prove that you can get results.

“That’s hard!”, you might say. Actually, it’s not.

The average Joe doesn’t know that much about marketing, especially the newest tools and trends. Show them something new and how it will make them money, and they’ll listen.

Getting someone to listen is all you need.

1. Make a list

   Friends, family and acquaintances who run a business or hold a senior role in a company.

2. Reach out

   Tell them what you’re up to and what your career goal is.

3. Offer your help, for free

   Don’t come across as salesy. Say clearly that the work is free because it’s for your portfolio.

4. Get the green light and do the work

   Yes, it’s free, and some days that will feel demotivating. Not to worry. In my experience, good free work always turned into paid work in the end, one way or the other.

5. Report the results and plan what’s next

   This is where you shine: a clear report of what you did, what you found and what it achieved. It’s also your first sales meeting. If you did a good job, they’ll ask for more work, and this time (yes, you guessed it) it’s paid.

9. Why marketing as a career: the motivation

If you find yourself doing this work with full enthusiasm, even in the evening, that’s great. If you don’t, it doesn’t mean marketing isn’t for you.

Everybody has motivation issues at some point: to clean the room, to start eating healthier, to finish the work they started.

There’s a great book on motivation by Steve Chandler, 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself (opens in new tab). It isn’t about marketing, but it gives you a good idea of how to stay motivated and focused.

When I feel demotivated, I like to read about marketing.

Every time I read what other marketers have tried, I get a surge of motivation and think, “Damn, why didn’t I come up with that?” As soon as I’m in that mode, I wish the day had more hours.

10. Start asking for money

Once you’ve worked with people and given them your advice for free, you’ll be surprised how many of them are actually willing to pay you. Care about your work, deliver results, and people will love you for it.

You may be thinking: “How can I, with so little experience, ask for money?”

If you charge nothing or very little, people assume your advice isn’t worth much. Charge a proper fee and they take you seriously.

It’s OK to say no to people who want to pay you very little, even when you’re broke. Something better will come along.

Trust me.

A good way to set your fee:

• Ask your network whether they’ve bought this service recently and what they paid. Write the numbers down.
• Search Google for the service. Contact a few sellers on the first page of results and a few on the fifth, and ask for a quote. Some list their prices on their website.
• Compare the numbers and decide what you’re comfortable asking.
• Then double it. I’m not joking. Odds are, as a beginner you’re asking too little. The worst that can happen is a no, and a no starts a negotiation.

If your first number was already close to what the best people in the market charge, doubling it doesn’t really work.

But I guess you figured that out already.

11. Re-evaluate your position and ambition

Once you’ve closed a client and delivered what you agreed (and everyone’s happy), it’s time to ask yourself what kind of marketing career you want.

What you’ve done so far is freelancing, and successful freelancers make a very nice living, sometimes more than executives.

But it’s not all about money, obviously. People are different, and so is what drives us at work.

Think further ahead.

Do you want to be your own boss, do all the hard work, and also reap the financial benefits and enjoy the freedom? Or do you want to join a company and be part of something bigger, with less stress and more fun with colleagues?

Both have their pros and cons. Freelancing can also grow into your own marketing agency, which is a different business again and a topic for another time.

There’s a third path: building your own audience and earning from it, through affiliate marketing, sponsorships or your own products. It’s how I made my first money online.

If that appeals to you, start with how to make money on Instagram and my affiliate program database.

12. Keep learning

As with everything in life, marketing keeps changing, and AI has made it change faster.

To stay good at it, I recommend setting aside one or two mornings a week to read books and articles, watch videos and listen to podcasts in your field. Use your scrolling time to collect ideas for your blog, your own posts and your clients.

Don’t just read about tools; try them.

Sign up for the free plans, build something small and see what they can and can’t do. It’s also how I test tools for this site (here’s how).

When I first wrote this post, I kept a Trello (opens in new tab) board to track everything I was working on and planning, and to collect content and business ideas. If you like to see your goals laid out, it’s still a good free tool: the free plan gives you up to 10 boards per workspace (checked October 2026).

Conclusion

To start a career in marketing, in short:

1. Find the marketing field that suits you best.
2. Check what employers ask for, then learn it with courses and coaching.
3. Go to events and grow your network.
4. Start a blog, a newsletter or a channel.
5. Do some free work and report the results.
6. Set your fee and land your first paying client.
7. Decide whether you want to freelance, join a company or build your own audience.
8. Make learning a weekly habit.

When you’re ready to apply, LinkedIn Jobs (opens in new tab) and the career pages of companies you like are the places to start.

Career in marketing: frequently asked questions

1. Coursera's price, trial and course count, checked on the certificate's Coursera page in October 2026. Coursera says the price may be lower in other countries. ↩
2. LinkedIn's one-month Premium trial, and that the paid subscription starts automatically when it ends, checked on LinkedIn's help page in October 2026. ↩