If you searched out this topic, and got directed to this blog, you contributed to a general digital marketing process called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This means that you used a search engine such as Google, to launch a search query through the use of keywords that are being targeted by this website. The higher a website ranks on Google and other search engines, the more likely people are to visit it. This process is just one of many types of digital marketing opportunities that you can take advantage of, and in this article, we take a look at the top 10 tips to land your dream digital marketing job.
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that the world’s businesses can in fact run without physical offices. According to Caroline Castrillon, “by 2025, an estimated 70% of the workforce will be working remotely at least five days a month”. Remote work was already popular before the pandemic, and now it has become the new normal for many digital marketers. This represents huge opportunities as it means that you can live anywhere in Africa, for instance, and work for a company based in the UK or the US. Besides, more and more workers say that working remotely helps them to be more productive and efficient. In addition, the pay of a digital marketing professional is also one of the highest in the world. The average digital marketing salary ranges from about $50,000 per year to about $69,000, for people living in the United States. In a place like Nigeria, an online marketer can earn between N100,000 and N1,000,000 per month. So there are immense opportunities to earn if you understand the concepts and decide to start a career in this young and booming industry.
What Is Digital Marketing, And How Does It Impact Businesses?
Digital marketing can be simplified into two words: Digital and Marketing. It’s that simple, a concept to wrap your head around and we suggest you take a full digital marketing course to really grasp its concept and go from novice to professional.
Check out our range of courses and see how you can use digital skills to positively impact businesses.
Digital marketing also referred to as online marketing is the strategic use of digital tools and media to market a business online. When you’re scrolling down on Instagram, and see an ad that displays a product which you need to buy, clicking the link to the advertising website is a digital interaction that might lead to a conversion. This is a type of social media marketing and it’s a great tool to get traffic to your website or blog and subsequently get conversions or sales. But how exactly does Digital marketing help businesses to increase sales, stay more productive and consistently be relevant to their customers?
In this present day and age, the massive global market created by the existence of the Internet has allowed for the establishment of many tools, systems and structures that make a way to help analyse business data, and make the best decision based on that analysis. Digital marketing solves problems, like getting basic information about your customers to target their needs, and provide a way to analyse that data to produce profitable results. There are various free and paid industry tools for analysing data, and Google Analytics is one of them.
Digital Marketing Career Paths
There are many types of digital Marketing paths that you can specialise on and make a successful career out of.
There’s also the possibility of learning all the tracks and becoming a digital marketing specialist. Learning the various skills needed to start your career, allows you to take advantage of opportunities and eventually build a profitable career as a Digital Marketing professional.
We are now aware that there are lots of opportunities to earn and make a good living off digital marketing, but how exactly do we even qualify to get noticed by companies looking to hire an expert in this field. Here are our 10 tips that can help you land that dream job in digital marketing and build a profitable career in this industry.
1. Learn the basics
Building a career in any field requires diligence, hard work and a deep understanding of the concepts that guide that field. Familiarising yourself with the tools and processes that guide the digital marketing space, will put you on the right track to becoming a respected expert in the field. Having a strong understanding of the fundamentals allows you to shine and gives you confidence when you’re finally ready to reach out and find clients. Buzz words in the industry are also good to know, as they are constantly thrown around during meetings; and learning them makes you follow conversations with ease and puts you on a professional pedestal.
There are basically two popular ways to learn the fundamentals of digital marketing: one can be a self-taught professional, taking online courses. It’s a noble idea, and it really helps to strengthen your confidence if you’re a self-taught professional in any field. The way we recommend though is enrolling in a digital marketing class and buying an extensive course. Choosing the right course for you is also important, as there is lots of fluff out there, people looking to make a quick buck off newbies in the industry. You can check out our range of courses provided by industry experts, and that will definitely put you on the right track to becoming a digital marketing professional.
2. The Riches Are On The Niches
If you’ve ever heard of the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none”, then you probably have the idea that learning many skills and trying to be an expert at them all can prove counterproductive – and often creates a huge skills gap when compared with a specialist. The T-shaped model helps to provide a means to have a basic understanding of the concepts guiding other marketing strategies, while being solid and grounded in a particular field. As a professional, having a broad knowledge of the various fields puts you at an advantage, while having in-depth and well-grounded expertise in one or two others puts you on the same plane as a specialist.
3. Finding Your Niche
This comes right after understanding the broad concepts guiding digital marketing. Niching down and becoming a specialist in one field is beneficial and makes you more likely to get hired by companies. In present times, most agencies and companies that hire digital marketers look for specialists who have developed expertise and know pretty much everything about a particular field. Niching makes you a valuable asset to any company and allows you the freedom to learn as much as you can without overworking yourself or losing your bearing. You have to find the path that you know you are passionate about though. Finding a niche and settling down prepares you for growth and opens the doors of the industry to you.
4. Become A Beast At Analytics
Yes, analysis is the key to success in this industry. Having the right knowledge on what exactly data tells us and how we can use it to improve our strategy or adjust our marketing approach is the basis of any sort of marketing, whether it’s traditional or digital. Learning the basic knowledge required to figure out how much the data in front of us affects business growth, helps us become better at telling a story with data and developing winning strategies, scaling strategies to suit business growth, and understanding where an issues arise. There are many ways that you can build your analytics skills. You should get used to reading books on the topic, and get genuinely interested in it. Some of our personal recommendations are:
- Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know about Data Mining and Data Analysis by Fosoter Provost and Tom Fawcett
- Predictive Marketing: Easy Ways Every Marketer can use Customer Analytics and Big Data by Omer Artun
- The Analytical Marketer: How to Transform your Marketing Organization by Adele Sweetwood.
- Behind Every Good Decision: How Anyone can Use business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight by Piyanka Jain and Puneet Sharma.
- A Practitioners Guide to Business Analytics: Using Data Analysis tools to Improve your Organization’s Decision Making and Strategy by Randy Barlett.
Getting a certification from a reputable Data Analytics school also increases your knowledge and skill base.
5. Get Professional Digital Marketing Certification
The industry is getting saturated with half-baked marketing “experts”, and to stand out you have to show that you know what you’re doing. Getting certified is one way to distinguish yourself from the rest of the crowd. It creates a professional force field that instantly elevates you in the eyes of recruiters. Certification is not a prerequisite to having a successful digital marketing career, but it can be a deciding factor for some high level recruiters to hire you and work with you.
If you are serious about getting certification and building a solid portfolio, check out our tailor made plans. Yes, they are created just to suit your needs and and help you reach your career objectives.
6. Build Experience By Volunteering
Doing free work is something a lot of professionals have mixed feelings about. Volunteering, although not profitable in the short term, helps you to solidify concepts and things that you have learnt only theoretically. It’s like a practice session for a concert. Musicians actually perform in front of an empty arena and use the same body movements so that they can know the dimensions of their stage and prepare for the real thing. Not knowing these dimensions can become problematic when the time for actual performance arrives. Learning how to volunteer and give your all to the process is a key skill needed to help you build your portfolio. It gives you confidence and provides valuable insights into the actual factors that drive marketing and sales. Moreover, volunteering also helps to give a huge resume boost.
Volunteering helps you to gauge your skill level and look for opportunities where you can improve and do better. There are many ways to volunteer. Indeed.com provides a way for you to volunteer and get that hands-on experience needed to take your skills to the next level.
7. Develop a Unique Resume
Find a niche, do some work, and now it’s time to make a killer resume. We’ve gone from novice, to having a resume already.
Having a way to collate all the work you’ve done and how you’ve helped to solve problems is important, as it opens you to opportunities to show how proficient you are in your field. Building a resume shouldn’t be a passive process though. You should actively decide what work goes in and what shouldn’t be shown at all. There are a few tips that can take a resume from basic to professional:
- Show the work you want to get.
- Show your best work.
- Volunteer and get real life experience
- Describe how your work helped to solve a problem.
- Highlight your key strengths and play down your weaknesses.
- Update your resume regularly to show new skills
- Keep learning new things to keep your resume fresh and exciting.
- If you’ve worked with a big client, flex that.
These tips can help you get started building out a killer resume. Your resume can be anything, from a website (which is highly recommended for a Digital Marketer) to a PDF showing your past and present work as well as clients you’ve worked with. All types of resumes have their pros and cons, and you should research more on the topic to know what works best for you. The important thing is that you have a professional resume.
8. Learn Basic IT Skills
Learning some basic IT skills can really stand you out when recruiters are searching through wads of applicants. A little (or a lot) of knowledge about the basics of the Internet, web browsers, and programming can help set you apart from others in the industry. Having knowledge about IT makes it easier to follow in conversations and integrate tech solutions into your strategy. It gives you an edge and makes you easier to work with. Some basic IT skills needed by a digital marketer include Web development, data analysis, learning how the internet works and a little networking.
You don’t need to become a professional Developer though. Having the basic knowledge of the technologies that make your strategies work is vital to building better strategies surrounding that technology. Read our blog post about HTML5 to learn about the basic concepts of the Internet and what makes it run.Learning the algorithms that rank your page or content and help you make sales is also key to building profitable techniques. The Google RankBrain and Page Rank are good starting points for learning about how Google ranks searches. The goal of this isn’t to learn how to write these algorithms or learning web development, but to understand how they all work together.
9. Interact Actively and Build Networks
Learning a skill is important, but being able to sell yourself to get clients and eventually make a profitable business is even more important. Selling your skill sets needs a market to sell to, and being social and building relationships allows you to create opportunities for the hiring conversation to come up once in a while. Beyond that though, actively build relationships with hiring in mind. Professional platforms like LinkedIn provide a targeted way to get clients without seeming too forward or coming across as awkward. Also social media applications like Twitter and Instagram help you to connect actively and build a following.
Attending social meet-ups and conventions also help to broaden your mind and increase your network. You can find like-minded individuals and even end up building business together with someone you might not have known – like Steve Wozniacki and Steve Jobs of Apple, who met at a local tech meet-up and started one of the most profitable digital businesses in the world. Building networks helps you to expand your business and mind, and is an excellent way of letting recruiters find you, so learn to intentionally socialise and create opportunities for growth.
10. Learn Marketing and Sales Skills
Practicing all the other things talked about in this article won’t get you far if you don’t know how to market and sell your ideas and business structure to potential clients. Positioning yourself and creating business from nothing isn’t the easiest thing to do, and what makes it even harder is a lack of understanding of marketing strategies and sales techniques. Knowing how to sell a product, an idea, or even your set of skills takes your hiring chances from average to highly rated. There is a distinction between marketing and sales though, and knowing the differences can help you use them profitably. So, what are marketing and sales skills? Dan Casarella says in his article for the US Chamber of Commerce, “Marketing is building awareness of your organisation and brand to potential customers. Sales is turning that viewership into a profit, by converting those potential customers into actual ones”.
By using these two concepts and processes, we can see that learning to market your skill set involves building a brand around yourself and showing that you are valuable enough. This means creating visibility and letting your potential customers get used to seeing you and your professional work. There are many marketing and sales techniques, and we suggest that you read more on the topic. Here are a few books that can start you up:
- Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World by Gary Vaynerchuk.
- Crush It: Why Now is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk.
- To Sell is Human by Daniel H. Pink
- Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth-Stephens-Davidowitz
- Blueprints for a SAAS Sales Organization by Jacco Van Der Kooij and Fernando Pizarro.
There are lots of ways to grow and develop yourself as a digital marketing expert and open yourself to job opportunities. The field is relatively young and provides immense opportunities for all members and professionals in the industry. Having consistency and being diligent with learning the concepts and creating your own workflow can help you start with a solid foundation and prepare you for growth and a profitable business in Digital Marketing.