Like many people, Anrich Brummer was almost put off the idea of more study after high school. But when he decided to try out a Bachelor of Business, a guest lecture from a local digital marketing firm kickstarted his career. He now runs his own digital consultancy, Tilde.

“In my second year of uni I went to a talk about social media marketing from one of the businesses based on campus in the Innovation Centre. I asked some questions during the lecture, and then a few weeks later the business behind the presentation reached out via my tutor to suggest an internship. This turned into close to eight years of full-time work across a range of different digital marketing disciplines.

“Traffika (now called Datisan) had a really great process of not approaching clients with a preconceived offering, but instead listening to their business problems and then applying the right strategies and tools to drive the desired outcomes. I worked across all the major areas of digital marketing, including social media optimisation and analytics, organic and paid search advertising, display advertising, web analytics and tag management (implementing third-party tracking code), as well as delivering training to businesses across these areas.

“Agency life was challenging but fun. With digital marketing you can make changes across campaigns in real-time, so we were expected to be very responsive to clients, as well as monitoring and updating campaigns as new data became available. There were also perks in working in the digital marketing space: we often got invited to conferences run by Google and Facebook, as well as building relationships with teams in those businesses.

“I've been running my own consultancy for a few years now, and so far so good! I mainly work across digital analytics and marketing tech. An average week I would implement some new tracking for a client (which often requires custom javascript), complete analysis and deep dive into issues discovered in the web analytics, create dashboards for reporting, build integrations between different tools as well as some big data stuff. It's a mix of architecture, coding and analysis really.

“I think everyone reaches a point in their career where they want to be a bit more brave and back themselves, and I certainly think the digital marketing space supports that. Finding the right people and right clients is an ongoing challenge, but so far, I've been lucky to work with an amazing group of partners across some really diverse projects. I'm at a stage now where things are feeling more secure, and I'm looking forward to evolving the business over the next few years.”