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Getting into marketing without a marketing degree comes down to stacking real, unglamorous experience one role at a time until the skills are undeniable, the way Matt McCormick did on his way to director. Marketing education wasn't in the cards for him. Every time something needed doing and nobody wanted it, his hand went up.
Matt McCormick runs marketing at a big investment advisory shop in Scottsdale, Arizona, and his degree from the University of Cincinnati is in finance, not marketing. I asked him on because his path runs through admin work, insurance sales, and a random Upwork gig during COVID, which is a far more honest map for most people than a straight line from a marketing major.
How Do You Get Into Marketing Without a Marketing Degree?
Matt's route went the opposite direction from what most people expect, and he'll be the first to say it's a blur. "I don't even know if I could tell you what all the marketing ranks are throughout it. It's crazy," he told me, describing his own climb.
Insurance sales led to admin work at a national media buying agency, then an operations role taking advisor calls and opening accounts, the job right before he became director.
Each position gave him insight a degree wouldn't: what it takes to run a business before you're marketing it.
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How Do You Become a Director of Marketing?
The jump came down to Matt seeing a problem the rest of the team wasn't tackling. He heard the firm was running ads with a broken signup form and said something about it.
"I kept feeding him more and more and more marketing ideas," he said about the company's co-CEO, who happens to be his cousin, until the ideas turned into the job.
That jump drew from a separate skill as well. He found Amazon PPC work on Upwork during COVID as a virtual assistant, scaled into running client ad accounts for a small agency, and that experience was really his marketing background before he had the job title to match.
How Do You Use the Meta Ad Library To Study Competitors?
Matt's favorite free resource is the ad library built into each platform.
"Stay in the loop on the ads library on Meta and all the other platforms that are out there," he said. You can search for an ad you remember seeing and study exactly what a competitor is running right now, not just what happens to land in your own feed.
Matt admits it isn't perfect. His CEO once asked him to find one specific ad, and he scrolled and scrolled but never pinned down the name to pull it up again.
Which Business KPIs Should Every Marketer Learn?
When it comes to hard skills, Matt skips the tactics and trends. "Knowing what your business KPIs are and what actually drives in business, that's one of the most useful hard skills," he said.
The specifics swing based on your business model. A SaaS company runs on subscribers, usage rates, and retention. Ecommerce runs on cost of goods sold, profit margins, and conversion rates. Services run on utilization rate, client retention, and average deal size.
Knowing which of those your marketing actually moves, not just which leads it generates, is what separates a marketer from someone who's just driving traffic.
Watch the full conversation
Watch the full episode with Matt McCormick on YouTube for more on building a personal brand for your company's founders and why he still calls YouTube his second degree.
Watch next: How To Build a Marketing Career Without a Marketing Internship
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