How to Break Into Digital Marketing: Career Tips for Graduates

As part of our official B Corp commitments here at Clicky, we recently threw open the doors of our Manchester HQ and invited a group of recent graduates in to meet the team, have a brew, and pick up some honest advice on breaking into our industry. We called it Grad Day.

We feel strongly about this. AI is both a big threat and a huge opportunity (depending entirely on how you choose to use it), and youth unemployment in this country is far, far too high. If a single morning in our office can help nudge a few new careers into motion, then it is a morning very well spent.

Rather than death by slideshow, we ran it as a proper working session: a couple of hands-on workshops, a deceptively simple icebreaker, a Real or AI guessing game, and plenty of time for questions. Here is what we covered, and the advice we kept coming back to, in case it is useful to anyone else trying to get a foot in the door.

First, a word on people and AI

We opened with the thing that is on everyone's mind. Even as the world fills up with LLMs, autonomous agents and hyper-automated workflows, the human element is still the competitive advantage. As we put it on the day: people buy from people, or from the brands that have earned enough trust to be treated like one.

In sales and business we talk about the Trust Gap. AI gives you efficiency, speed and data, but it cannot yet provide the shared risk and the empathy that long-term partnerships are built on. That balance, AI-powered but human-led, ran through everything we did.

Lesson one: don't assume, ask

Joe kicked things off with an icebreaker that doubled as a lesson in user research. Without asking anyone a single question, he handed out chocolate. Trouble is, not everyone likes chocolate, and someone in the room could easily have had a nut allergy. He had a product and he forced it on people based on nothing but his own preferences.

It sounds trivial, but choosing features, or campaigns, or anything at all based on assumptions is a genuinely costly business. A little bit of research goes a long way, and it rarely needs to be expensive or time-consuming. That instinct to check before you build is one of the most valuable things you can bring into any marketing role.

The UX workshop with Hayley: friction kills conversions

Hayley walked the group through user experience and made a point I love: marketing gets them to the door, UX gets them to buy. Brilliant ads pointing at a confusing website will fail. A beautiful website with no traffic will fail. You need both.

For the practical bit, we handed over a real-world scenario: a Meta campaign driving traffic to a landing page for a luxury kitchen brand, with a frustratingly low conversion rate. In pairs, the grads had ten minutes to work out why. They did brilliantly, spotting a form buried right at the bottom of the page, too many form fields (why ask for an address just to download a brochure?), distracting links pulling people away from the main call to action, missing trust signals and testimonials, and low colour contrast on the form itself.

The takeaways: reduce cognitive load so you don't make people think, and remember that every unnecessary form field, every distracting animation and every missing trust signal gives a user a reason to bounce.

The AI workshop with Ollie: speed, with a human at the wheel

Ollie took the group through how we actually use AI day to day, mostly for two things: research and efficiency. Profiling audiences, scanning competitor messaging and spotting trends in seconds, then automating the repetitive bits like data formatting and meeting summaries so the team can stay focused on strategy.

We also played Real or AI, a quick guessing game that proved just how convincing (and how confidently wrong) AI-generated content can now be. Then the grads paired up and used an AI tool to build a customer persona for a fictional dog-subscription box called BarkBoxed, getting under the skin of who the customer really is and what frustrates them day to day.

The lesson was deliberately balanced. AI speeds up human processes, but it can be confidently wrong, so you still need the knowledge to fact-check it. And the quality of what you get out is set entirely by the quality of the prompt you put in, which takes real, industry-specific expertise to get right.

Our honest advice for breaking in

When the grads asked how to actually get started, two pieces of advice came up again and again.

From Hayley: agency life is fast-paced and highly collaborative, so show enthusiasm and a genuine willingness to learn. That attitude gets noticed far more than you would think, and it is the one thing that cannot be taught.

From Ollie: step up and lead. Brands know AI matters, but a lot of them still don't know how to actually apply it. If you can bridge that gap, you become an invaluable asset from day one.

Why we do this

Becoming a B Corp was never about a badge on the website. It was a commitment to use the business as a force for good, and opening our doors to the next generation is one of the most direct ways we know how. The industry has been brilliant to us over the years, so the least we can do is hold the door open for the people coming up behind us.

A big thank you to Joe Marshall, Hayley Roberts, Jon Cotton and Ollie Nicholls for taking the time to plan, run and share what they know. It clearly meant a lot to the grads, and it meant a lot to us too. 💪

There are a few photos from the day over on our LinkedIn post. And if you are a recent graduate weighing up a career in this industry: go for it. It is a brilliant one to be part of, and there has genuinely never been a more exciting time to start.