How to start a career in Digital Marketing?

What Is Digital Marketing?

Any marketing that uses electronic devices to convey promotional messaging and measure its impact. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or another device. It can take many forms, including online videos, display ads, and social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to “traditional marketing” such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail. Oddly, television is usually lumped in with traditional marketing.

If you want a deeper dive than that, try reading this article Tech 101: What is Digital Marketing?

Get to know the basics of digital marketing

Beginners should first understand what is digital marketing and the main components that make up digital marketing.

It has several components that cover all areas of online promotion. You need to understand that it’s not a single discipline but it has several processes (channels) that can participate in a digital marketing campaign.

seach engine marketing– covers two areas: search engine optimization and paid search advertising.
web marketing– promoting your website on the internet.
Content Marketing – how to use different types of content in your digital marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing – marketing products or services using email.
Social Media Marketing – marketing on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media networks
Mobile Marketing – marketing on the various App Stores (Google Play, Apple Store)
Video Marketing – marketing on YouTube, Vimeo, and other video channels
Affiliate Marketing – making sales by promoting other people’s products and getting an affiliate commission.

A good digital marketing manager should have the necessary skills to work with ALL the above channels.

but don’t worry you don’t have to do all that in just one day.

As you progress through your digital marketing career path, you’ll get a chance to work with different techniques, technologies, and tools.

The marketing tools to use

ANALYTICS

Digital analytics in the marketing context refers to the tools used to analyze and report on marketing data collected through the digital channels on which your brand holds a presence. These channels might include social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. They might also include your display or search ads, email, affiliate marketing sites, or many others.

Some companies use Hubspot, others Google Analytics, and there are plenty of other lesser-known platforms to track site traffic as well. Still, learning your way around Google Analytics is a great place to start if you’re new to digital marketing.

EMAIL MARKETING PLATFORMS

Email marketing is a form of marketing that can make the customers on your email list aware of new products, discounts, and other services. It can also be a softer sell to educate your audience on the value of your brand or keep them engaged between purchases.

HubSpot email marketing, Omnisend, SendPLus, Benchmark email, Mailchimp are tools that offer similar features. If you’re working in digital marketing, chances are you’ll wind up using one of them, so learn the ins and outs of at least one of these platforms ASAP.

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT

Social media management is the process of analyzing social media audiences and developing a strategy that’s tailored to them, creating and distributing content for social media profiles, monitoring online conversations, collaborating with influencers, providing community service, and monitoring, measuring, and reporting on social media performance and ROI.

Different companies use different social media scheduling tools. There’s MeetEd, Hootsuite, Later, Buffer. Most offer free trials, so you can see how they work by scheduling some mock campaigns.

SEO RESEARCH

search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google show it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something.

Many sites recommend using Google keyword planner for SEO research, and it’s a great tool to get familiar with. That said, the giants of SEO include Moz, ahrefs, and SEMRush. All of these platforms are pretty expensive, but they do offer free trials if you’re feeling particularly driven to explore what they offer.

URL BUILDERS

The Google URL Builder was designed to help Marketers improve the success rate of their Ad Campaigns. With these tools, you can now analyse the daily performance of your Ad Campaigns in your Google Analytics Dashboard rather than waiting, till the last day of the Ad Campaign to analyse the results.

The Google URL Builder allows you to add a Tracking Code to your URL, and it’s this code that monitors the performance of your Ad Campaigns. This Tracking Code is a combination of your Campaign Parameters and your Campaign URL.

The Skills You Need to Get Hired as a Digital Marketer

Technical Skills

THE BUYER’S JOURNEY AND SALES FUNNEL

On the most basic level, digital marketers need to understand how to “attract, engage, and delight” (this is how the marketing platform, Hubspot, puts it, consumers, to carry them from the “I don’t know anything about this brand or product” stage to “I’m all in.” This process includes using techniques to better understand your customer (personas, user research, etc.) and strategies for optimizing the sales process (via email marketing, retargeting, etc.).

DATA ANALYSIS / ANALYTICS

Digital marketers need numbers to understand whether their various campaigns are working. But more importantly, they need the skills to interpret those numbers in order to adjust their strategies and launch new campaigns. And, most importantly, they need to be able to explain that data to other members of their team who may not fully understand the purpose of digital marketing.

CONTENT MARKETING / CONTENT STRATEGY

Content marketers and content strategists specialize in using compelling storytelling to reach new audiences. They do that through blog posts, email campaigns, guides and ebooks, and even other types of media like video and podcasts.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Most of us use some form of social media every day. Social media marketing involves strategically using a brand’s social channels to promote and sell its products. Those strategies might include anything from product promotion to channel-specific giveaways to paid ads (you’ve probably seen those on Facebook and even in your Instagram stories).

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Brands rely on traffic from search engines like Google (and, fine, Bing) to increase brand awareness and drive new leads. SEO is the process by which brands finesse the content they write to make it as appealing to Google as possible. The better the content, the better the search result for the most part—but there are plenty of nuances, which explains why “SEO specialist” is a full-time job.

With SEO you’ll learn how to create websites that both users and search engines love, and you can apply the same concepts to improve your Google Ads and Facebook paid campaigns.

PAID ADS

“Paid ads” is another term for buying media placements on various channels to promote your products. This includes social media ads (like the sponsored posts you see in your Instagram feed) but also display ads (like the ones you see at the top of search results in Google).

GENERAL TECH SKILLS

It also helps digital marketers to acquire some tech skills as well, especially since many digital marketing campaigns require working with a web development team. Some great supplemental skills to consider: HTML & CSS basic design principles and UX/UI, and photo-editing basics. Here’s a full list of seven tech skills every digital marketer needs.

Soft Skills

Curiosity

I love when an employee wants to learn more. There are so many aspects of digital marketing and so many little niche areas. Craving more knowledge about how it all fits together truly makes you better in any role.

Tenacity

If you give up easily, digital marketing is probably not the field for you.

You may work to rank a site and an update crushes you, or you may pitch ideas that get rejected. You may be called in to help figure out why a site isn’t doing well.

Every day there’s something new, and that’s what keeps it all interesting.

Willingness to Listen and Learn

I have been wrong so many times it’s crazy. My employees (and clients) know to argue their points with me if they think I’m wrong, and I’ve learned to really trust what they say.

I’ve had clients give me instructions that I don’t think will work out but I try them and have been surprised quite often. Thinking you know everything means you don’t have the opportunity to get better.

Strong Work Ethic

Obviously, you really need this in most careers but with something like link building, you are never going to do well without wanting to work hard as it’s very frustrating and tedious at times.

When marketing fails, it can be extremely difficult to start over. You will encounter lots of roadblocks in some form or another so it’s critical to keep trying and not give up.

Get Trusted Certification

Anyone can get into digital marketing without a university degree, but the candidates who are getting the best positions are those who have a certification in digital marketing. There are classes you can take that will help you to prepare for the certification exams, and if you are really serious about digital marketing as a career, you should get certified as soon as possible.

This is going to make you stand out in a crowd of digital marketers who may be experienced, but definitely not certified

Know the Latest Trends

Digital marketing is a career that is always on the move and always changing. If you are choosing it as a career, you need to keep up with the latest trends. The needs of this industry vary over time, and if you fall behind, someone else will be waiting to take your place.

Attend virtual seminars, take online classes, and do your best to stay ahead of the game rather than simply keeping up with it.

Create an Online Presence

Content Marketing Related Vector Illustration. Flat Modern Design for Web Page, Banner, Presentation, etc.

These days, when it comes to landing a job in almost any field, you might as well not exist without an online presence. For obvious reasons, this is especially true of digital marketing: a prospective employer is going to look online first to learn about applicants, and if they can’t find you, they are going to move on to the next person who has a curated image.

Create your own digital marketing blog, social media accounts that are linked to websites you have built, portfolios, etc. Show them what you are really capable of.

Future of Digital Marketing

In today’s world of the internet, Digital Marketing is the only and most guaranteed way of marketing, which is popularly being the most preferred space for marketing communications and related interactions.

The future of marketing is way beyond traditional marketing and now, marketing is majorly based on the Digital Sphere. The scope of Digital Marketing provides some of the most powerful techniques of marketing where traditional modes of marketing fail.

Digital Marketing scope in the future of marketing will not only thrive in the most result-oriented fashion but also let businesses survive. Following the latest updates, including new techniques of Google and combining future trends in digital marketing will let your inbound marketing acquire great benefits for you in 2018.

It will be worthwhile for you to climb on to the digital bandwagon when the time is right as Digital Marketing sure remains the most effective way of marketing in the future too, either business-wise or career-wise