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Paid Search Career Paths?
It’s time for me to start thinking long term about career goals but I’m struggling to think of my options.
I have about three years experience in SEM, make good money (six figures), and have a chill in-house job as the sole member of the paid search team.
What potential career paths do I have from here? What type of positions have you worked towards?
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1 Reply
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Everyone I’ve seen has gone one of the below:
– Stay in house, end up running the performance marketing team and/or moving into broader marketing and moving up to marketing manager / director / CMO
– Move agency-side, level up to director, then stay there or jump back client-side into a more easy day-to-day role
– Find a cushy in-house role that pays well and doesn’t require a ton of extra effort and just coast. Not the highest growth career path but probably the one with the least amount of stress.
– Full time freelance. Lots of agencies farm out paid search or use freelancers to manage overflow before they hire a full time role. It can be a fairly lucrative gig where you make your own hours and set your own schedule.
– Quit and start their own agency. Usually done by people who have worked the agency side, think they can do it better, so they do. At that point you’re now a business owner and will spend more time managing clients, chasing down billing, managing staff issues, etc. than you do actually looking at an ad account.
– Build out another business as a side-gig and use ppc skills to scale that until they quit their day job Usually centered around some hobby or interest that you have. I’ve seen lots of performance marketers get into weird niches or services that they enjoy, and then they don’t need to farm out the marketing side of it to someone else and they can just bring in the profits.
– Get sick of looking at numbers and spreadsheets and dealing with clients changing direction every 3 days and they quit to go work in an entirely different industry
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