Digital marketing includes all marketing efforts that use the internet or electronic devices. Digital marketing channels include email, social media, search engines, or websites among other avenues to connect with prospective and current clients. A digital marketer develops, manages, and implements marketing campaigns that promote a company, its services, and products. He or she plays a major role in enhancing the awareness of a brand within the digital space and helps drive website traffic and acquiring company leads or clients.
If this sounds like the career you would like to pursue, you might be interested in knowing more about it. This article highlights what digital marketers do, the skills you need, and reasons why you should consider pursuing a digital marketing career.
What Is a Digital Marketer?
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Digital marketing entails selling and promoting products and services by leveraging online marketing tactics including social media marketing, email marketing, search marketing, and search engine optimization. However, when you get down to it, digital marketing is just marketing and is basically how businesses are getting their message in front of their customers and prospects.
A digital marketer identifies and evaluates new digital technologies and uses web analytics tools in measuring site traffic so that he or she optimizes the marketing campaigns, social media advertising, email marketing, and search/display advertising. Digital marketers drive relevant consumers with the goal of improving brand recognition and trust, with the intention of driving purchase intent.
Digital Marketing Methods
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- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Campaign marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social media optimization
- E-commerce marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Pay-per-click (PPC)
- Native advertising
- Data-driven marketing
- E-books
- Display advertising
- E-mail direct marketing
- Optical disks and gaming
These methods are increasingly becoming more common owing to technological advances. However, digital marketing can extend to non-internet methods that provide digital media, including mobile phones (MMS and SMS), on-hold mobile ringtones, and callback.
How Digital Marketing Works
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There are many ways that digital marketing is similar to traditional marketing. In both, smart businesses seek to develop mutually beneficial relationships with customers, leads, and prospects. However, digital marketing has replaced most traditional marketing tactics since it is specifically designed to reach today’s customers.
Regardless of what people buy, they always begin searching through the internet to learn more about viable solutions to their needs, where to buy products and to compare prices. Before purchasing products, customers are also interested in who provides the solutions and the best available options.
The internet provides these answers, which makes it a viable place to start with. The ultimate purchasing decision is based on the online reviews the customers read, the family and friends they consulted, the solutions to needs, pricing, and features they researched. As such, most purchasing decisions typically begin online.
That being the case, the presence of a company online is paramount, regardless of what you sell. This means that companies should hire digital marketers to ensure the business’s visibility online so that customers and prospects can readily access your website as they make decisions on what to buy. A digital marketer is essential for developing a digital marketing strategy that puts your business in all the places your followers or potential clients are already hanging out, and then formulating a variety of digital channels to connect with them in many ways, including:
- Updating content to keep customers updated with industry trends and news
- Social media so that they can share that content and engage with prospects and customers as followers and friends.
- Search engine optimization to optimize your content so that it shows up when someone is searching for the information you have highlighted in the content
- Advertise to drive paid traffic to your website where clients and prospects can see your offers
- Email marketing to follow up with your audiences
Skills You Need as a Digital Marketer
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The following are the skills you need to be a successful digital marketer:
Video
Videos have the potential of holding the attention of a customer on retail sites for about 2 minutes longer than average. Well-optimized videos can boost your chances of appearing on the first page of Google search engine. Besides, more than 80% of customers are more likely to pay for a service or buy a product after seeing it detailed in a video.
Videos are engaging since they are personal. When people connect a face with the product, they trust the source. It is also a versatile content to use via different platforms. While a digital marketer does not have to know about video production, they should be skilled enough to create a quick video from a laptop.
SEO and SEM
SEO is key to all levels of digital marketing, and all digital marketers should have the basics. You can leave the rest to the more technically oriented people in the marketing team with a strong understanding of the best practices to optimize the success of the digital marketing campaign. SEO and SEM inform your entire digital strategy on both content and data levels, and you will need to be able to communicate to other teammates about this.
Content Marketing
Content is the core of digital marketing and continues to be a crucial part of online marketing. However, content marketing is demanding as you have to understand how to create high-quality SEO-friendly content, and how to effectively get the audience to engage. Content takes many forms, including video, emails, web content, white papers, and e-books. You can strategize based on customer needs and goals, develop a campaign based on an effective strategy, and monitoring analytics.
Data Analytics
Google Analytics is central to a digital marketing strategy. It allows for monitoring and reporting, which affords a digital marketer the information to learn more about consumer behavior and better the marketing strategy. Digital marketers have to track huge amounts of data to understand whether the digital marketing strategy is working and what needs to be improved.
Design Thinking
It is a term used to refer to a way of approaching problems from a user-centered perspective. It encourages us to solve large-scale complex problems. There are five key phases of design thinking, and digital marketers should make use of them: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The phases can be used in a non-linear way so that you can reconsider ideas.
Be Tech Savvy
Since technology drives digital marketing, digital marketers must know the latest technologies, such as the commonly used tools and software in their focus area. Generally, you’ll need to know using basic Content Management (CMS) systems, such as WordPress.
Be Persuasive
You will need to have great people skills and be able to combine creative-problem solving with analytical thinking to help teams come up with innovative campaign ideas to drive the business forward. You should be able to convince your audience why they should pay for a product or service.
Why You Should Consider a Digital Marketing Career
There is a gap in digital skills, which needs to be filled as technology advances
- It has great versatility as there are many choices to choose from, and the ongoing learning opportunities mean that different skills can fit together in different ways
- The industry is increasingly evolving with changes that mean that there is always something new to learn and shape the marketing strategies
- The earnings are great. For instance, Creative Group has reported that SEO specialists have a starting salary of about $50,000 per year. You can earn more than your peers.
- There are a lot of opportunities for creativity, which you can use to market products, engage audiences, and solve problems
- Digital marketers are in demand. According to the Digital Marketing Institute, there are about 150,000 jobs that need to be filled between 2015 and 2020
- If you kick-start your career, you will propel your business to a better brand position and differentiation
- You can train at your own pace, even in the comfort of your home and do it your way. This is because there are online courses. You can even start your website or blog so that you build your portfolio without having to spend thousands of hours and dollars sitting around a classroom.
Conclusion
The most important rule in marketing is making the right offer at the right time and in the right place. Since most customers are online nowadays, hanging out in social media, staying updated on blogs and new sites, and searching online when they have needs, digital marketing is an effective tactic to drive sales. Digital marketing is vital as it puts you in those same channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) so your best prospects and clients can see you, learn more about you, and even ask any queries they may have about your products and services.
There are many assets to capitalize on including websites, blogs, branding assets (logos, fonts, etc.), infographics, social media channels, earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews), and online lookbooks. You should consider a career as a digital marketer since the pay is good and jobs are anticipated to grow significantly. Besides, there is a gap in digital skills that should be met as new technological advancements are adopted. We hope that this article had adequately addressed what digital marketers do, the skills you need, and reasons why you should consider pursuing a digital marketing career.