Digital marketing is a booming industry which helps companies in marketing their products/services online. Compared to traditional marketing these are some key benefits which makes this marketing strategy more effective and affordable.
Why Digital Marketing is Growing?
1. Can target huge number of audience
2. Can target audience with specific features
3. Very affordable
4. Measure the results of campaigns effectively
5. High engagement rate for ads
How To Become Digital Marketer ?
You need to have knowledge of the following components of digital marketing:
- Search engine optimization
- Paid search
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
- Content writing
- Inbound marketing
- Conversion rate optimization
- Web analytics and reporting
Each of the above domain comes with their purpose and responsibilities. Let’s dig further into the actual job of a digital marketer.
Your role would be to create a strategy to market either your company’s service or products online, using social media, SEO, content and inbound marketing, paid ads, email marketing, and measure and analyze the results.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The job is to help the company rank for keywords which the audience normally searches for on the search engines. This involves doing keyword research, using webmaster tools, doing user experience optimization and getting pages indexed to rank higher on search engines and to get free traffic from there.
Copy Writing
Copy writing is used to create keyword rich content on the website regarding sales page copy writing, website content, blogs, info-graphics, e-books, and whitepapers. It includes reaching out to a new relevant audience in the form of guest posting, PR, native advertising and syndication, which falls in the domain of content marketing.
Paid Advertising
Getting ranked on the higher pages of search engines organically is no easy task. It may take long for a less established website to get ranked on the first few pages for a given keyword. Until then, you cannot just sit waiting for qualified leads. With paid search in the form of Pay-Per-Click (PPC campaign), Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Impression (CPI) your advertisement appears when anyone looks for your services or products on Google and other search engines.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing involves creating and managing conversion funnels, lead nurturing, drip campaigns and conversion rate optimization. Now you may wonder the difference between content and inbound marketing. While inbound marketing is to create a strategy to attract new users and retain the existing ones, content marketing focuses more on executing that strategy.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites.
Social media marketing has two aspects – spreading owned content organically on social media channels and running paid campaigns. You have to choose the most effective platforms, the right content formats and target the right audience for paid campaigns.
Email Marketing
Email marketing isn’t something marketers do just because they can and it’s easy. The tactic is very effective at helping business owners and consumers stay connected. In fact, consumers often seek out email marketing campaigns from their favorite brands and local stores. As a digital marketer you’ll have to regularly manage newsletters and email campaigns, add intriguing subject lines, make the content of the email interesting and drive back traffic to your website. Your knowledge should extend to using email automation tools for sending and tracking these emails.
Conversion Rate Optimization
The digital marketer has to optimize and increase the conversion ratio at every stage of the marketing funnel. Tools such as CrazyEgg’s Heat Map and Optimizely’s split testing are used to convert visitors into leads and finally paying customers.
Data and Analytics
Data collection and analysis gives greater insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The actionable insights help you make more informed decisions based on your customer’s life, actions, preferences, and desires.
Now that you know the opportunities and roles involved in digital marketing, it’s time you start preparing to become a digital marketing consultant.
Resources to learn about digital marketing are:
1. Certification courses
- Digital Vidya’s CDMM Course
- UpGrad’s Digital Marketing Program
- Digital Academy India’s Certification Program in Digital Marketing
- AIMA’s Digital Marketing Course
2. By reading the blogs of digital marketing influencers
- Neil Patel
- Rand Fishkin’s Moz blog
- Sujan Patel
- Larry Kim
To become a successful digital marketer, you need to develop skills such as:
- Creativity: You need to come up with creative campaigns, conversations, and ideas to differentiate your brand from your competitors.
- Analytical ability: Analytical skills are critical to measuring what’s working and what’s failing.
- Willingness to experiment: The domain of digital marketing is ever-changing. There are no set rules to succeed. You should be open to experimenting new and unexplored ways to run campaigns.
- Copy writing: The job of the digital marketer involves copywriting for sales copy, A/B split testing and to create keyword rich content.
- Good knowledge about technology: You should have knowledge about the basic HTML coding, the search engine, and social media algorithms.
Conclusion
You could either take up a full-time job as the digital marketer of a company or take up consulting or freelance opportunities as a part-time digital marketing consultant. India has a big future in digital marketing and you should make sure that you capitalize on this opportunity.
Note: One problem we may have in future is that there will less jobs for freshers as the industry gets mature and supply for digital marketing professionals exceeds the demand.
Look at what happened to engineering and software industry, which has very less chances for freshers now as the industry had saturated. Also due to automation most of jobs are replaced with automated software’s.