Digital Marketing Career: A Road Map For You

With the increased use of the internet, business owners are now finding their customers in the online world. This led them to find a way of marketing their businesses online instead of using conventional marketing strategies. This new way of marketing is known as digital marketing. This article will help you learn how you can build a successful career in digital marketing and you can start working on this life project of yours right from today. In fact, reading and internalizing the information present in this article is your first step in your digital marketing journey.

There will be millions of jobs in this field in the coming years, and this is the best time to start a career in digital marketing. You should start building your career in digital marketing as the job scope, revenue, and demand for digital marketing are continuously growing.

Best professional courses for a successful career today

• Technical Writing Course
• SEO Course
• GST Course
• CAT Coaching
• Investment Banking Course
• Content Writing Course
• Digital Marketing Course

What exactly is Digital Marketing?

As previously mentioned, it is a new method of marketing to help you promote your products and services in the online world. In this, you can advertise using different platforms like social media, search engines, emails, apps, videos, etc.

The Internet brings billions of people into your reach. So, you must have a website for your business to find them. Learning digital marketing will help you with all this and get you many loyal customers.

There are many elements of digital marketing like SEO, CCP, etc. As a starter, you should focus on mastering one element followed by others (one by one). But before we learn about digital marketing and its elements, we must learn about the basics of conventional marketing strategies.

Wondering why?

People who have come from the traditional marketing era have the skills of the old marketing strategies under their belt. This may help them combine both old and new marketing strategies and come up with a masterpiece of marketing methods. This may make you feel like lagging.

So, why not first learn about the old methods and then focus on the new ones.

What is branding?

Branding is a marketing practice in which a business owner associates a unique symbol or a name to identify his business. This helps him establish his own brand in the market.

Need vs Want vs Demand:

Need: The necessity of something. Things, without which people can’t survive.

Want: The desire for something. People can live without these things but need them for satisfying themselves.

Demand: Ability and willingness to buy something. People have money for this thing, so they buy these things, and their demand increases.

You should be able to recognize under which category your product falls.

4 P’s – Product, Price, Placement, and Promotion:

Product: This includes your brand, services, and packaging.

Price: This includes the discount, offer price, and credit policy.

Placement: This includes the market, channel, and distribution.

Promotion: This includes advertising, publicity, and sales promotion.

Reach vs Frequency:

Reach: It is the number of people you have targeted with your marketing message.

Frequency: It is the number of times you have targeted your audience with your marketing message.

There is also something called “segmentation” in marketing strategies. In this, a business owner breaks down his entire market/customers into different segments based on different parameters like,

• Demographic and geographic information (customers’ location, age, gender, etc).
• Psychographic and behavioral information (for example, teenagers, young adults, and old people have different psychology or thought processes and perceptions of life; hence different marketing strategies are needed for these three different age groups).

After dividing the market into different segments, they plan the marketing strategies specifically for each segment.

Push and pull marketing:

• Pushing involves you pushing yourself to get the customers by promoting or advertising your products and services.
• Pulling involves attracting your customers by providing services they badly need. You don’t have to push marketing.

These are some of the fundamental concepts of conventional marketing strategies. You can also go further deep and learn more about it. You have so many free resources available online. So, take advantage of them.

Now, let’s move further and learn about digital marketing. This will help you form a solid foundation to launch your digital marketing career.

The profession of digital marketing:

In the digital marketing field, one can work independently or get hired somewhere. As a hired digital marketing professional, you would be answering primarily to your employer. Your employer company would deduce tax from your salary. If you invest any money for your job purpose, your employer will take the responsibility of reimbursing all the expenses or bills.

To cut short, as a hired staff member or an employee, you have fewer responsibilities and associated risks concerning the projects done and revenue generated. Basically, your career path gets narrowed down and you would be just working for the projects related to the job titles offered to you.

On the other hand, when you work independently, things get different. In this scenario, you can work directly with the actual client. Along with this, you will be fully responsible for everything. You have to make sure that the project is done within the given time. You have to ensure that you get monetary benefits. Also, you are responsible for all the risks associated with your work and be able to tolerate loss in certain cases.

When you work independently, you are the boss, you are the employee, you’re the accountant, you are the project manager, and you do the advertisement and everything. You are responsible to get the potential clients and get the projects done. But, when you reap profits, it is you who gets the entire share.

Working independently lets you earn substantially higher than you would earn as an employee.

Now let’s learn about what skills you should have to become a successful digital marketer.

• When you start as a beginner, you should focus on learning. Get all your concepts cleared before you jump into doing projects. Pick up a digital marketing concept, learn all the basics (theoretical part), and apply it practically by running dummy projects. This is the strategy you should use to learn all the important digital marketing channels like SEO, PPC, Email, Content & Social media.
• Work on improving your analytical skills. Learn basic data analysis. This will help you understand how your projects perform. For example, if you are working on your website promotion, you can see how well you have marketed your website with the help of an analytical tool (like Google Analytics). This tool shows you all the data about your website performance in terms of reaching the audience. So, you should be able to understand all this. Therefore, learn some basic data analysis skills.
• When you are learning the above-mentioned skill, go ahead, and work your ass off for learning Google Analytics. It’s easy. It won’t take you much time.
• Learn all the basic operations of MS Excel. This skill is useful in almost every field of work.
• You should be able to operate your website through WordPress. Trust me, it is very easy. Just learn the basics, it enough. It will take a maximum of 30 min to learn. I learned WordPress basis in 10 min and so could you.
• Get creative. Almost all of us have a hidden designer within us. So, wake that designer up. Go and explore the internet and learn some designing skills if you need them. In my case, I designed my website with my own creativity. It turned out beautiful. I just worked on learning the concept of color themes (what color combinations look best). Just go to WordPress. You will find the designing part. You can then decide how well you can design and how much you need to learn the designing concepts.
• Work on creative thinking and objective thinking.
• Learn some tech stuff. This is something you will learn along your digital marketing journey. You don’t have to complex courses for this. You will learn tech concepts as per your need in your journey.
• Another important thing you should learn is to be able to adapt yourself to any kind of environment you might go into. In fact, this is necessary to live your life and to survive any kind of job environment. So, don’t underestimate this.
• Now the most important thing of all – “Marketing skills”.

These are a few skills that you must learn for an awesome Digital Marketing career. Now, let us look at the scope.

Scope:

Starting with a job in digital marketing will act as a stepping stone for your successful career even if you want to work independently. In this domain, you will find evergreen jobs. This field is recession-proof.

Now, let’s see what exactly the responsibilities of a digital marketing professional are. Also, we shall discuss how easy or difficult it is to get the job and what special skills you would need as a starter.

So, let’s have a look!

Job roles of a digital marketing professional:

• You may get projects involving the development of marketing campaigns. This should be done knowing that your marketing campaigns should help you get good leads. Good leads are the customers who are potential buyers or help you somehow grow your business.
• You may also get involved in the development of marketing strategies that will help build a good connection with the customers.
• Doing tasks involving monitoring and planning of social media marketing and observing the progress of your marketing performance on different social media platforms.
• Creation of SEO-based creative content to attract and engage the customers and boost the business.
• Analyzing performance data related to your business website using tools like Google Analytics.
• You must have the ability to keep the customers happy and content using your marketing strategies. This will help build a good relationship. For this, you need to be creative and always update yourself with the latest trends and technologies.

The Typical Digital Marketing Career Path/ Job Positions:

Digital Marketing:

There are two types of roles in this:

• Executive role: Involve in developing marketing strategies to build a business. Run different marketing campaigns and ensure the availability of creative content every time for the website.
• Manager role: Involve in tasks related to branding (building a brand in the market).

Digital Marketing career in Social Media:

Jobs roles in this area following the given hierarchy:

Social analyst professional → Social media executive → Social media manager → Head of social media → Head of digital media.

Digital Marketing career in SEO:

As a beginner, you can work as an entry-level communications professional. When you gain some experience, you can take other higher-level roles like SEO analyst followed by SEO manager and then SEO head.

As an SEO executive, your work primarily involves the creation of keyword-rich content that easily ranks search engines. Your ultimate goal is to rank the website on the search engine result page with the help of the content on the website. This will increase traffic to the website. Since digital marketing is going to stay forever (until we humans are alive), there is always a high demand for SEO professionals.

Social media experts manage social media platforms by utilizing marketing skills to enhance the company’s online presence. This improves communicating your services to the target customers/audience. They are responsible for the content that is posted online on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. The content should help generate revenue.

Digital marketing career in Content Creation:

If you have a background in journalism or good at writing in English you can start writing for various websites. You can start with learning copywriting. There are so many free courses available online that can teach you copywriting. When you combine your creative writing skills and copywriting skills, you can make masterpiece content to publish on websites.

After this, you can further move on and work as a content manager, followed by the head of content marketing.

In this field, you have to write SEO-based articles, blog posts, newsletters, sales letters, YouTube video contents, product descriptions, etc.

Digital marketing career in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):

For the success of any business, the potential leads have to be converted to buying customers. This is known as conversion.

A conversion rate optimizer/professional is responsible for implementing systems to increase the conversion rates of the leads.

In this field, an entry-level professional is involved in projects related to marketing research and digital sales. With some experience, one can work as a CRO specialist, manager, or head.

Digital marketing career in  PPC Marketing:

You can begin as a PPC executive and then get promoted to the PPC manager level upon gaining relevant experience.

PPC refers to pay per click. In PPC marketing, the PPC professional is responsible for the management and oversight of the money being invested in the advertisements. When a company advertises its products and services online, it gets traffic through those advertisements.

Whenever a customer clicks on the advertisement, the company has to pay money for that click. So, a PPC professional is involved in managing the advertisement costs.

Digital marketing career in Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing is an ever-growing career path. In this, one is involved in promoting products of other companies or business owners’ products and services through affiliate links. When someone buys such products through your affiliate link, you earn some percentage of the profit. There are many websites providing affiliate products like Amazon, ClickBank, etc.

As a beginner, you can start as a search & analytics executive. When you become proficient in this, you can move on to work in higher-level roles like an affiliate partnerships manager or head.

Earning potential in Digital Marketing:

The sky is the limit for making money in the digital marketing field.

Your earning depends upon various factors:

• Your skills. Nothing can stop you if you have excellence in your work. You can earn so much with your skills.
• Whether you are working as an employee or independently.

As a beginner, you can earn around 3 to 4 Lacs per annum in India. As you grow you will earn more and more. There is no limit. Your skills will decide how much you earn and how fast you grow.

Some people are making millions with digital marketing jobs. This is due to their excellent skills. You have to prove your skills with projects; market yourself and grow along the journey.

In developed countries, the earning potential is even more.

You can start your career in this field after earning a Bachelor’s degree. But don’t panic if you don’t have any degree or you can’t afford to get a degree. A degree is not necessary to become a digital marketer. There are digital marketing heroes who don’t have any formal educational background, but they are among the topmost digital marketers in the world because they worked on their skills. But if you can get a degree, then you should go for it. This will help you have a smooth start.

This profession is awesome. It has plenty of room for growth. It is up to you to find ways to keep yourself abreast of all the latest knowledge and changes in this domain and keep yourself always updated. Work on the excellence of your skills. This way you can give huge value to your customers or your employer.

Conclusion,

To conclude, digital marketing has a very bright future. You will never regret your decision of choosing this field. With the continuous development in artificial intelligence and automation, it has now become easy to reach the target customers with low cost and time.

With the digital transformation of all the businesses in the world, digital marketing is the need of all these businesses. This ever-increasing demand indicates that this profession will have a really great future.

So, work on your skills, get involved in projects and grow limitlessly.

Now we have reached the end of this article. Hope this article helped you to gain insights into the digital marketing career.

Please comment down below if you have got any questions to ask.

Keep learning!

Frequently Asked Questions- FAQs

Q1. Does digital marketing as a career has risk?

There is no free lunch. Like everything else digital marketing as a career also has its own pros and cons. Learn and grow and learn to grow is the key.

Q2. How worth is seeking a career in digital marketing?

It’s totally worth, unless you don’t stop exploring and learning. Now everything is digital so it’s totally worth planning a career in digital marketing.

Q3. What is the academic eligibility required to enroll in digital marketing course?

Minimum 12th grade pass in any field.