First 4 Days Of My Digital Marketing Career With Little Experience, My Thoughts So Far!

TLDR:
After 6 month working with three clients and 4 days of managing the most legit meta ad campaign (that i can possibly craft) and that is starting to deliver, i finally feel like this career is for me. I'm learning what my skills are, how i can leverage interpersonal skills to understand a local business through my own workflow/pipeline and how self doubt can discourage you even when the problem is not your client.

AI DISCLAIMER: NO AI was used to write this post.

I'm making this post to look back at it in the future and probably laugh my butt off by the time i really learn to do this.

A bit of context:

i'm a musician with entry level programming experience, mostly front end. I've worked project management and programming in game development teams and have coded a few ideas for micro SaaS.

Early in January i was hired by a friend to design the web page for his food truck, that transitioned on me taking administrative tasks and run regular ads on his budget for engagement. It was pretty swell since one of his accounts already had 1k followers with many of them being personal friends of him. Before this experience of running ads for, I had managed around 2-3 ad campaigns for personal projects in game dev and music.

Everything i've learned since then has been trial and error and a lot of tutorials (and a couple of udemy courses). Learning about meta ads, campaign goals, types of creatives, etc.

Thanks to the trust I have built with the food truck owner, i was recommended to a local leather artisan who i started working with in June. I did my process as always, 1-2 weeks of seeing him at the workshop and learning how he does his craft to understand his business. When i felt i had a good idea of the marketing angle we started running ads about 4 days ago, marking a milestone in my experience. At this point is when i felt that this is my career, at least for now.

The first two ad sets were duds and a lot of fidgeting, i noticed the difference between the food truck's campaign vs the ecommerce angle i had to now learn and deliver on really quick. Then i learned a lot about qualifying leads, instant forms format, etc.

Let me take a second to talk about mental health though. I believe that due to the lack of experience and lack of weight of responsibilities that i had before starting to work with the artisan a lot of self-doubt fizzled up to my daily routine. I'm pretty sure many of us do not even think about this type of stuff when we are starting to work on a field we have little to no experience on and we actually have to deliver some result; what i learned was that the pressure i put on myself was fabricated by myself, the client put absolutely no pressure or complaints at all during the process yet i still felt like a fraud and responsible for sales. This is a huge topic in of itself but i hope my point gets across. Let me bring the topic back to the tangible aspects of digital marketing. The world and specially the internet is consumed by the fodder of gurus, hype, media, and sadly ai. It's best to really question your intentions and motives of why one pursues what one pursues and if this pursuit is in itself legit or influenced by hype.

now i am in the process of learning to convert, this in of it self is another skill and teams even have specific people that work the different stages of a funnel. In our case we are still discovering an appropriate funnel, we haven't even touched lead magnets yet and have about 51 leads, around 200 in ad spend. i would say about 4-7 are truly qualified, and about 2 already converted. guess who has to make the calls and take orders? xD

Thanks for reading this far, hope some of you would love to join the discussion and chime in.