How to become a successful Digital Marketer in 9 Steps
Do you want to build a career in digital marketing? then you are in the right place. We discuss how to become a Digital Marketer with no experience. We follow a practical step-by-step approach to become a digital marketer.
What is Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing is otherwise known as Online Marketing. Let us first understand what exactly is digital Marketing? Digital Marketing is all about promoting product or services online.
Any marketing that uses electronic devices to convey promotional messaging is Digital Marketing. For example, a sponsored Facebook Post or a banner ad, promoting a product or services.
In practice, digital marketing typically refers to marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. It can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads and social media posts.
Decide the Digital Marketing Goal
What is the purpose of setting a goal?
Setting a set Goal will motivate you to achieve your expectations. Moreover, in the process of setting a goal, you tend to realise what is achievable and what isn’t.
So, how do we define the digital marketing goals. Let us say, you want to become a freelance digital marketer. And you plan to generate your revenue from digital marketing consulting and selling online courses.
You will have to decide the number of online courses you plan to launch. How many customers are expected to buy your course. Decide the amount of fees you are willing to charge.
And if you have digital marketing consulting, then, decide the number of clients you plan to serve and the fees you want to charge. You will then be able to come up with a clear and financially quantifiable digital marketing goal.
How to choose the right Digital Marketing Niche
Choosing the right niche for yourself can be tedious process, but your success solely depends upon choosing the niche. Narrowing down to a niche from hundreds of digital marketing niches is hard.
Niche is a combination of Passion, Talent and Market Opportunity. Let us say you are passionate about Digital Marketing Analytics, which has limited opportunities compared to Social Media Marketing. You may not be able to monetize your passion.
Keep exploring the market opportunities. Understand the scope of popular skills in digital marketing like Website Design, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, etc.
You cannot wait until you finalize your best niche to start your digital marketing career. You better start with the immediate opportunity. For example if you are an automobile engineer, you can start with social media marketing for bikes.
While doing the engagement, situations will demand you to learn related skills like Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, etc. During this process, you will be able identify your niche which has opportunities in the market. You ensure that the identified niche suits your passion and talent.
After you have experienced a variety of digital marketing tools, you shall decide to put your primary focus on Facebook Ads for Cars and Bikes. This process of identifying the right niche may take 2 to 3 years. You better be a generalist and then become a specialist. An MBBS doctor can only become a Paediatrician.
As a beginner, never make your niche so broad. If you try to serve everybody you end up serving nobody. In your first client engagement, it would be a bad idea to do Website design, SEO and Social Media Marketing together. Focus either on Social Media Marketing or Website Design in your first engagement. Or you may focus on website design and gradually take up SEO assignments as well.
Understand Traditional Marketing
Digital Marketing is more about marketing than digital. Traditional marketing differs from digital marketing in a number of ways. The main difference is that, in traditional marketing the reach is local, whereas digital marketing has global reach. Online Ads can be seen by people belonging to all walks of life.
When we meet with a customer, you shall speak in a language which customer understand. Speak about their operations.
Before pitching your services, understand how they traditionally market their products and services. Is your customer currently uses the traditional marketing channels like newspaper, television radio and magazine?
If your prospective client is a Gym, speak about repackaging their programs, about putting attractive offers, etc. Such discussions will establish your authority in the domain.
What is Direct Response Marketing
In Direct response Marketing, we enable the prospects to get an instant response by encouraging prospective buyers to take a specific action. This type of advertising will trigger immediate action from the prospects. The goal is to generate quick leads.
Traditional marketing is aimed to raise brand awareness and promote brand image in the long term. Direct Response Marketing shows immediate Return on Investment (ROI). We can immediately quantify the responses in this type of marketing.
Direct response marketing is very commonly used in Digital Marketing. This type of advertising can also be done through TV, print media, radio, email, social media, etc.
Each direct response campaign should have a specific goal — sign up, share with contacts, register for a newsletter, etc. The prospects are given valuable freebies or offers for their instant responses. This form of marketing is typically done using a landing page, which is part of your website, intended to capture visitors’ responses.
How to build Digital Marketing Skills
Digital marketing is a career that combines Traditional Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, and much more, so you will have to equip yourself with one or more of the following skills.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of the website when people search for your products and services. Keyword Research, On-page SEO, Off Page SEO, Local SEO, etc., are sub topics within SEO.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): SEM is the act of using paid strategies to increase the search visibility of the website. SEO uses tactics that improve the visibility of the website through organic traffic. An SEM expert is expected to have expertise in running PPC Ads like Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.
Social Media Marketing (SMM): SMM is the process of creating content for social media platforms to promote your products and services. Contents are created with the sole purpose of driving traffic to your business. You shall learn to use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, Tiktok, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc
Content Marketing: Content Marketing is a marketing strategy used to create and distribute contents to your prospective and existing customers. One of the main purpose of content marketing is promoting brand awareness. Contents can be in the form of blog articles, emails, newsletters, videos, podcasts, etc.
Email Marketing: Email marketing is about sending commercial emails to your contacts for driving sales, brand awareness, etc. Email marketing uses personalized emails to convince a prospect to buy a product and service.
Digital Marketing Analytics: Digital marketing analytics tools are specialized analytic applications used to understand and improve user experience, optimize marketing campaigns, etc.
Analytics tools can help companies understand what consumers are doing online. Such tools translate customer behaviour into actionable business data. Popular analytics tools are Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, etc.,
Basic Design Skills: Visual content today gives you more exposure than written content. It is best practice for Digital Marketers to have basic knowledge in software such as Photoshop, After Effects, illustrator, Canva, etc., that would help creating visual content.
Video Marketing: Videos are taking over the internet because they are now known to have a higher engagement and conversion rate. Video marketing means using videos for promoting and telling people about your product or service. It helps increase engagement on your social media channels.
Customer Relations Management (CRM): Monitoring customer experience helps companies understand the growing needs of their target audience. Digital Marketers need to develop CRM skills which involve strategies you can use to monitor and maximize customer experience.
Communication Skills: A Digital Marketer should have the ability to communicate ideas in a way that the audience will understand. Good communication skills include variables such as spreading impactful messages, establishing trust, and building relationships.
How to implement CATT Marketing Funnel Framework
Every digital marketer wants to increase their followers, sell products and services to the followers, and make monetary gain. CATT Marketing Funnel helps you analyse the impact of your product or services on online users.
CATT stands for Content, Attention, Trust and Transaction. CATT framework describes how products or services are working in the online world. You will have to finalize your niche before implementing the CATT framework.
Content: Contents can be in the form of blogs, short videos, webinars, articles, etc. Contents are created to sell product or services which can solve the problems of a customer. The purpose of content creation is to create a discussion among online users.
Attention: Once you have created the contents, get the attention of a serious internet user who really needs your product or services. If the online users like your products or services, they will definitely share, comment, retweet etc, your product or services with their friends and followers.
Getting more attention means that more users know about your product or services. Social media is a good platform for driving attention to your contents.
Trust: Once you gain attention of the online users to your contents, you create an atmosphere of trust with your users. You can do this by publishing testimonials, webinar with satisfied users, etc.
When people trust you, they will not be hesitant to transact with you.
Transaction: Once you gain the trust of the customer, you can sell your products or services. At this stage, you can use Webinar, Video Sales Letter, etc to enable the online users to do transactions with you. Prospects are converted to customers at this stage.
How to Implement Integrated Digital Marketing Model
Integrated digital marketing combines all types of digital marketing like SEO, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, etc to work as single system.
Each digital marketing module such as SEO, SMM, Content Marketing, etc are powerful on its own. But when the modules are combined in an optimal way, the model will produce great results.
Integrated Digital Marketing should be implemented in such a way that each module complements each other, thereby increasing the strength of each and every module used in the model.
There is no One-Size-Fits-All solution, while combining the modules. It depends on the industry and the modules we are implementing.
You can execute the CATT framework in an Integrated Digital Marketing model. This CATT marketing funnel framework helps you find out where you are lacking for not having enough transactions.
How to build a Personal Brand
The concept of personal branding has gained momentum over the past few years as the job market becomes more and more competitive.
For freelancers and entrepreneurs, building a personal brand has never been more important than it is today. Anyone with access to the internet and social media can build an audience and start attracting clients for their business.
Elon Musk has established himself as one of the strong personal brand. He has more Twitter followers than 3 of his companies (Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity) combined. People prefer to interact with people rather than brands.
Deepak has created a brand called Digital Deepak. He has built this brand over a period of 10 years. Deepak is now offering mentoring programs and helping people to become digital marketers and freelancers.
For building a personal brand, you shall follow the 6 stage Mass Trust Blueprint framework. At this stage you must have identified your Digital Marketing Niche, learned the required digital marketing skills. You have started offering your services to customers.
Learn: Let us say, you have identified Shopping Ads for eCommerce Stores as your niche. Learn deeply about the concepts, facts and procedures and further narrow down to a micro niche, for example Digital Marketing Analytics for eCommerce Stores. Establish your authority over the subject by practicing it. This new skill which you have learned should solve the problems of the customers.
Work: Now, it is time to put your new skills at work. Offer your services to your existing customers. Implement what you practice in the real world to get a better understanding.
Blog: Write about what your have learned and experienced through your work. When you start blogging, you will start building your personal brand. Write about your experiences while working on the new skill. Your audience is keen to understand the customer problems you have solved.
Consult: Now you are becoming a personal brand. You have learned the fundamentals and start offering your new skills to other business instead of working for them.
Mentor: Mentor other people who would like to be you. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to a whole new level. Mentoring is like consulting x 100. Consulting is one to one, but mentoring is one to many.
Startup: Create your own product or service with the understanding that you have learned and experienced from the market. The product or service should solve the problems of your audience.
Conclusion
The need for digital marketing professionals are on the rise, especially since covid. Technology is heavily used by Marketing experts for automating the marketing function.
Kick start your career by learning the key digital marketing skills like Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Website design, etc. You shall gradually narrow down to the niche which matches to your passion.
Are you willing to learn digital marketing in a systematic fashion? I recommend you to join the Digital Deepak Internship Program.
About the Author
Joshi Rabiyath
I am a Digital Marketer, currently run a Digital Marketing Agency. Please check the Digital Marketing Services offered by us. I write about Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing, etc.
Good info for those who are looking for a career in digital marketing.