How to start a career in Digital Marketing: 8 Easy Steps
Are you thinking of starting a career in Digital Marketing? Then do not wait, it is best time, because of COVID -19 and Lockdown focus has been transferred from offline to online marketing.
Learning digital marketing is fun if you follow right process and procedures, it is one of the most interesting career choices now.
You just need to have skill set which you can build by having various courses available online and offline.
Is digital marketing an awesome career?
Definitely Digital Marketing is a great field to start a career. We currently living in a digital world and marketing expenditure of big companies are moving towards digital media and social media marketing.
Companies need to improve their reputation and visibility online because of people spending maximum time on digital platforms be it social media or something else. Very Simple reason is that companies cannot have their physical presence everywhere and digital marketing helps them a lot in reaching far most regions of the world.
For very same reason it is great profession to be in right now, because it does not require your presence at one place everything can be done online using tools.
Digital Marketing Pay
Most of the people choose career on basis of salary and digital marketing does not disappoint in terms of salary, it pays well.
In a recent industry survey by Credo they found that the average rate for digital marketing consultants worldwide is $140 per hour.
Digital Marketing Salary
Digital Marketing Salary
Digital Marketing consultant hourly average pay
But definitely it takes time to earn this much, it requires certain amount of experience, skills and exposure to demand this much. But it is possible for everyone to earn this much in their career without any doubt.
8 Steps to Successful Digital Marketing Career
Here are 8 steps which will help you in pursuing a career in digital marketing
- Basics of Digital Marketing
- Build your own website
- SEO Knowledge
- Acquire Google Ads Certification
- Learn Facebook Ads Advertising
- Google Analytics Understanding
- Live Project in Digital Marketing
- Digital Marketing Tools
1. Basics of Digital Marketing
For beginners to digital marketing, the primary step is to know what’s digital marketing and therefore the main components that structure digital marketing.
It has a number of components that cover all areas of online promotion. You need to know that it’s not one discipline but it’s variety of processes which will participate during a digital marketing campaign.
In particular, digital marketing has the following channels:
Digital Marketing Definition and Channels
- Search Engine Marketing – covers two areas: search engine optimization (organic SEO) and paid search advertising
- Website Marketing – Advertising your website on the internet.
- Content Marketing – Promoting content on various platforms such as social media.
- Email Marketing – Reaching audience with help of emailing
- Social Media Marketing – marketing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media channels.
- Mobile Marketing – marketing on the various App Store.
- Video Marketing – marketing on YouTube, Vimeo, Tiktok and other video channels
Affiliate Marketing – making sales by promoting other people’s products and getting an affiliate commission.
It is not required to learn everything from day 1, it is slow and steady process to cover all area of digital marketing
As you progress through your digital marketing career path, you’ll get an opportunity to manoeuvre with different techniques, technologies, and tools, and eventually you will be expert in digital marketing.
Resources you’ll use to know the essential digital marketing concepts:
- Executive Certificate Program (ECP) – Build the necessary skills to start a career in digital marketing.
- Post Graduate Program in Digital Social Media and IoT – Best course for holistic understanding of Digital Media and IoT
- Fundamentals of Digital Marketing – A free online course by Google which explains the basic principle of digital marketing
2. Build your own website
After basics gets clear, you have to practice it and build a site or blog for yourself.
Digital marketing is highly practice field and everything can be measured here easily. It is not at all about theory, what matters in digital marketing is how well you apply and measure impact.
Throughout your digital marketing career, you will have to promote blogs, sites and various other stuff. You will have to go by either SEO or Social Media advertising.
Starting own site or blog will give necessary confidence and exposure to both kind of marketing.
What you to do is that setup a blog or site and then work on it on daily basis to increase its rank or find a product/ service to promote on social media platforms.
It is time taking process but it will lead to solid understanding and experience which will help you in long run as digital marketing professional.
Resources you can use to create a new website:
- How to write WordPress Blog – A step-by-step Guide for Beginners in Blogging.
- How to start Business online – Tips on how to turn your blog into an online business.
3. SEO Knowledge
SEO is soul of Digital Marketing, if you need to be successful as a digital marketing professional you have to master SEO.
SEO will help you in creating an interactive website which will be loved by both users and search engines, and you can apply all these concepts on google campaign and Facebook campaigns.
It takes time build career as SEO specialist but when you done with it, you are ready to master other areas of digital marketing.
4. Acquire a Google Ads Certification
Google is not just a search engine for a digital marketer, it is one of the most important part of your job is to use Google Ads, to advertise products or services in various google properties and websites on the internet.
The fastest way to acquire the necessary skills is to get a Google Ads certification. Google has a plethora of resources to help you become a Google AdWords Expert and getting a certification is a great way to prove to your clients or potential employers that you have the necessary skills.
Following resources will help you in getting certified with Google.
5. Master Facebook Ads Advertising
Social Media marketing is incomplete without Facebook Marketing, Facebook has biggest user database among the social media platforms and that makes it most important platform for marketers. As a digital marketing specialist, you need to know various functionalities of Facebook advertising.
Facebook besides being a great social network, is now one of the most important tools for any digital marketing campaign.
Facebook is one of the most sought platforms for ORM because it has large user base so queries and comments are very frequent here.
If you have already followed the steps above and have good knowledge of SEO and Google Ads, learning how to use Facebook Ads will not be difficult.
6. Become an expert in Google Analytics
Analytics is core of any digital media activity, any digital marketing professional needs to have good understanding of analytics so that tracking and measurement can be done accurately.
In digital marketing everything is measurable that makes understanding of analytics and its tool more essential.
You can measure how many people viewed your campaigns, how many people clicked on your ads, how many conversions they generated, and many other metrics that cover campaign.
Analytics helps in making informed decision on daily basis which in result improve performance and efficiency of digital campaigns.
Your starting point is becoming an expert in Google Analytics.
The following guides can help you get started:
- What are Google Analytics Page Views?
- Google Analytics and SEO
- Google Analytics Reports for Beginners
- Google Analytics Academy
7. Live Project or Internship
Best way to grow your skill is implementation, you can have a job or internship in digital marketing domain which will your journey smooth.
This is highly recommended because it will expose you to environment of modern digital marketing agency and later on you can use those practices to start your own agency or join another company as digital marketing expert.
Freelancing is a great source of income for digital marketers and it is one of the best things about digital marketing but if you do not have work experience then doing freelancing will not yield best results because you will not be aware about exact processes to maximize revenue.
8. Digital Marketing Tools
With time Digital Marketing has evolved a lot, it has several tools which helps a digital marketer on daily basis that is why it becomes essential to learn how to use these tools.
These tools help in managing various projects and clients smoothly, knowledge of these becomes more important as you climb ladder and become manager in your career. These tools help you in managing your team and also evaluating them.
Market is full of tools you have to choose which one is right for you according to budget and your requirements. Some tools are free and some are paid, monthly fee is not that much and it also adds to your experience.
My recommended tools are:
