Digital marketing is a blanket term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium. Development of digital marketing since 1990s and 2000s has changed the brands and businesses way of looking and optimally utilizing it for their marketing purpose.
As a working professional there’s a question in everyone’s mind, “Why is the knowledge of digital marketing necessary for me?” ”Is it relevant to me?” “How will I be able to grow myself by using it?”
Well, there are number of fundamental reasons why people are involving in digital marketing courses.
Advantages of Digital Marketing for Professionals:
· Marketing Professional: Digital marketing is the most sought after skill for any professional, who has a role to play in marketing including media, PR, communication. It’s evident that a marketing professional without digital marketing competency will be left behind in career. On the other hand, a competent digital marketing professional can expect significantly higher growth in terms of salary and the roles s/he can get in the industry. A lot of people with significant experience in conventional marketing (e.g. brand manager) are concerned about their previous experience while considering acquiring digital marketing skills. Interestingly, they are very well positioned to take up senior marketing roles. Why’s that so? It’s not that digital marketing is replacing traditional marketing; rather the role including budget contribution of digital is increasing and marketing is becoming integrated. For high growth startups or large corporations, they need people who’ve experience in conventional marketing and have acquired digital marketing skills.
· Sales Professional: Sales professional form a large category of people who participate in digital marketing course. For entering in the market for sales professionals, it makes sense to consider switching their career to digital marketing. A sales professional can leverage his/her presence on mediums such as LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook for prospect mining or customer engagement.
· Entrepreneur or Business Owner: For any business owner, acquiring new customers is always a priority. Given the growing Internet user base, there’s no better medium than digital media for customer acquisition. Accordingly, digital marketing is one of the most critical skills every entrepreneur needs to acquire today.
· IT Professional: While a digital marketing professional doesn’t need to know technology, a good percentage of IT/Tech background students and professionals are opting to build a career in digital marketing industry. re. Other than communication skills and creativity, analytical skills play an important role in strategizing & executing successful digital marketing campaigns. Engineers or tech people inherently possess strong analytical skills and thus are successful in digital marketing industry. Also, if a senior IT professional, especially the client facing people understand digital media, they are more valuable for their organization as most of the large IT solutions today require integration with digital media. Such client facing IT managers will be more efficient in conceptualizing and developing such solutions if they understand this medium well.
· Business Head: These are the people who are accountable for growth of a business as a whole or for a particular unit. As a part of customer acquisition strategy, they work with external digital marketing agencies or with their internal digital marketing team. While they themselves don’t play an execution role in digital marketing, their involvement in creating digital marketing strategy, defining & reviewing success metrics, identifying & deploying relevant resources for content creation is critical for the success of digital marketing in their organization.
· HR or other Professionals: Since digital media plays a role beyond marketing function, its knowledge is useful for professionals beyond sales & marketing. For e.g., an HR professional can leverage mediums such as Facebook, LinkedIn for employee engagement and talent acquisition.
There are 3 other benefits of doing a digital marketing course, which justify the reasons why a non-marketing professional could be interested in a digital marketing :
Offer digital marketing service as a freelancer: One of the advantages of digital marketing service is that it can be offered remotely. Accordingly, there’s an opportunity to be a freelancer.
· To become an entrepreneur: Fortunately, entrepreneurship is gaining the respect it deserves in developing economies such as India. Digital Marketing is an important skill to realize this dream for anyone who aspires to be an entrepreneur.
· Make money through blogging or affiliate marketing: There are examples of people, who’ve been able to make significant money or build a full-time career in digital marketing.
People with these exceptional assets working in higher growth startups or digital media platform companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google can expect Rs 1 Crore+ salary as well in India.
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