How to Start Your Career in digital marketing
If you don’t agree with the phrase “which digital, goes to the factory!”, Then read the Digital Growth World’s blog for knowledge related to digital marketing and its trends, To find out who is digital marketer & what he does, how to get the right skills and where to look for the first customers, Read this article on how to start a digital marketing career
Who is a digital marketer and what does he do?
The field of activity of a digital marketer covers almost all elements of the company’s presence in the Internet space. He selects and evaluates sites, studies the target audience, creates promotion strategies, uses advertising tools, plans and creates content.
As a rule, a digital marketing specialist manages the activities of narrower specialists (SEOs, copywriters, designers, Brand Management, Affiliate Marketer) sets the tasks and tracks the result. If we are talking about a small company or brand that is only discovering the benefits of promotion on the Web, then an Internet marketer can immediately do all the tasks on his own and alone if he/she is a business owner and wants to take the business online.
In both cases, for successful work, the marketer must know the basics of each direction and have certain skills.
Specialties of digital marketing and the tasks that they include
1. SMM – social media marketing
- Lead communities in social networks, create, design and post content.
- Launch advertising campaigns in social networks – targeted advertising, cooperation with bloggers.
- Create and maintain a community, community around the brand. Various activities – contests, sweepstakes, etc.
2. SEO – optimization of sites for promotion in search engines
- Select the semantic core for the site – the main keywords for which optimization will go.
- Attract traffic from search engines.
- Optimize the site.
- Analyze the results – identify successful and problem areas, adjust their activity.
- Strive to ensure that the site takes the intended position in the search engine or rises as a whole as high as possible.
3. Email marketing
- Collects and segments the base for mailing.
- Create a distribution plan, generate ideas, write or control the writing of texts.
- Test various ways of presenting information and design – from the subject title to the design of the letter.
- Analyze the results, make changes.
4. Targeted advertising
- Collect and segment the advertising base on social networks.
- Create advertising teasers – ad text and photo or video illustration.
- Plan a budget.
- Set up an advertising campaign and evaluate its effectiveness.
5. Contextual advertising
- Collect and filter the base of keywords by which ads will be launched.
- Work with advertising tools Google Ads.
- Plan your advertising budget and strive to reduce the cost per click.
- Create advertising banners according to the requirements of the platform on which the advertisement is launched, test various ad variations.
6. Web analytics
- Analyze site metrics using Yandex. Metrica and Google Analytics.
- Draw conclusions based on data and think through actions to improve.
What skills should an online marketer have
The tasks of the marketer depend on the specifics of the business, the size of the company and whether he manages the team or performs most of the functions himself.
Let’s dwell on the basic skills that will be needed:
1. Creating a marketing strategy: You need to be able to think over the USP, prepare the product for launch on the market, calculate the risks, identify goals and objectives, write down actions to achieve them.
2. Market research: The marketer studies the target audience and segments it, analyzes competitors.
3. Promotion in the Internet space: It is necessary to have the basic skills of advertising and native promotion: to find and test various platforms, understand targeted advertising, plan and not “merge” the advertising budget, be able to work with influencers and find a common language with information partners.
4. Planning and creating content: A digital marketer should be able to create content plans and content matrices, analyze the demand for topics and formats, create illustrations and video content (or put the right technical specifications for other employees).
5. Resource management, organization of work of the Internet marketing department. An important skill is to properly manage available resources, to be able to organize several specialists on a staff or in a remote location, to ensure the adequate functioning of systems.
6. Analysis of the results of marketing efforts: Of course, without analytics anywhere. A required skill is to track the results of actions, note progress, pay attention to the jambs, and adjust the work based on the data received.
In addition to skills directly related to the profession, you will also need general skills (soft-skills):
- To be able to defend their point of view, listen to the interlocutor, conduct a productive dialogue with him.
- Properly plan work processes and organize your time.
- To understand people – to be able to choose a reliable person and a good specialist.
- Quickly search and process large amounts of information.
- Be flexible and ready to learn, change and improve in the profession.
How to get the profession of an Internet marketer: training options
In order to become a digital marketer, higher education is not required, you can get the necessary skills both by studying independently and by taking special professional courses.
1. Learn everything yourself
Learning without teachers – an option for those who are good at self-education – can organize themselves, do not lose their motivation to study regularly, can structure and search for large amounts of information, highlight the main thing and cut off the excess. The above-mentioned skills themselves are very useful for an Internet marketer, so if you have them, then this is great.
2. Take professional courses
Signing up for courses is a more traditional and intuitive option. You can take full training in the Internet marketing program, or you can separately study specialties. Digital Growth World a.k.a DGW provides a 2 months certified training on Digital Marketing.
Advantages of professional courses and training programs:
- You get knowledge in a systematic way, you do not need to collect everything yourself in pieces.
- An expert sharing experience with you helps you look at work from a different angle.
- Practical exercises help to consolidate the material, immediately practice what you have just learned.
- Feedback from a professional is something that is very important for a beginner. It’s better to go through all the weaknesses in the training than to get negative feedback from customers later.
It is logical that if you want to get professional knowledge in an area in which you still have little understanding, you should contact an expert. But, unfortunately, in digital marketing, not every expert who calls himself that. Here are some tips to help you avoid getting into a grief-info businessman:
1. Do not buy the prospect of quick and easy money. Bypass the proposals in which they promise to tell you how to earn from Rs 10,000 a month, working for two hours under a palm tree. Such teachers are designed to ensure that you, blinded by the prospects of free income, attend one course after another. As a rule, programs consist of stages, at the end of each you are hinted that you are about to receive sacred knowledge, but there is still not enough of some key elements that will be given in the next stage.
2. Choose practitioners. Look at the teachers, who they are, where they work, what experience they have. Give preference to practices – if a person successfully works in his specialty, has made a career, can share practical knowledge – he has a lot to learn. Internet marketing is for practitioners, theorists will not give you anything. At DGW trainers are not just regular teachers but are also people who have implemented norms of digital marketing in their daily life and have scaled multiple online businesses with time.
Also Read: How to make money online from a website from scratch?
It is also important to understand that no professional training eliminates the need for constant self-education and monitoring of new chips.
How to search for first customers
After you have received the initial knowledge and are ready to take on real projects and earn money, it’s time to look for customers. Search features will depend on which of the two paths you decide to go to – become a freelancer / remote employee or work in the office.
Freelance
If you want to work from home and look for projects on your own, you will need to learn how to organize a working day. Freelance gives you the desired freedom but imposes additional obligations – you yourself build your workflow, “pay” yourself sick leave and give leave.
Another blessing and at the same time the curse of freelance – you will have to independently search for customers and projects, agree on working conditions and payment. To do this, you need to establish an iron system to attract customers. The cheapest way is word of mouth. We already talked about how to launch this mechanism on Facebook earlier. In general, the principles are the same everywhere – get to know your potential target audience and colleagues, keep a page showing your professional look, give tips, offer your services, ask friends to recommend, collect feedback and share them on the page.
If you are scared by the prospect of catching orders with your bare hands in the turbulent rivers of social networks, but you still want to work at home under a rug, then choose a compromise option – a remote site. Many confuse it with freelance, believing that it is one and the same. However, in remote work, you have all the same responsibilities and often even the schedule that the employees in the office just shut down tasks from home.
Few Website to find freelancing projects:
Office work
Want to choose a more traditional way and get an office? In this case, your main task is to find a company that will hire a person without experience. Immediately getting a job as an Internet marketer will not be easy. First, try yourself in one of the specializations: recruiters often look for copywriters, copywriters, content managers, etc. If the financial situation allows, you can apply for a free internship in a large company – look at the processes from the inside and gain good experience.
You can try yourself as an Internet marketer in a small company or just a startup that starts. Most likely, there is no well-established marketing department there and they will let you “take it easy”. They won’t pay much, but this is a good option for gaining experience. Try to squeeze the maximum – to collect a portfolio, to make case-by-case cases. This will be your ticket to move to the next level, where you are no longer just a green beginner, but a person with experience in implementing projects and solving problems.
