Powerful Steps and Tips to Start a Career in Digital Marketing Industry

New marketing channels are continuously coming into view and this motivates a lot of professionals to start a career in digital marketing. 

If you too have decided to become a marketing specialist in the digital world, then go ahead and create a significant impact in your life with tips to start a career in digital marketing. 

5 Proven Steps To Start a Career in Digital Marketing

If you are passionate about making a career in digital marketing, there are oodles of courses on digital marketing which are tendered as online courses and workshops.

1. Start With The Basics

As a beginner, you must stay focused on learning the fundamentals of digital marketing. Digital marketing is not a single thing, in fact, it is a combination of techniques and methods which as a DM manager you will use to promote your website, product, service, channel, etc. Some of them are listed below:

• Social Media Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing 
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Video Marketing

As a manager, you need to learn how to use each channel and combine various strategies to gain the desired results. Hence, the first step or tip is to start with the basics.

Recommended Courses  

1. Digital Marketing Specialization Program by Manipal ProLearn
2. Digital marketing Certified Professional suite by Simplilearn
3. Digital Marketing Specialist Masters Program by Simplilearn

These full-fledged programs will help you learn the core of digital marketing and you can have real-time exposure to the latest strategies, platforms, and tools. 

Apart from this, you can also follow sites that will help you get started with digital marketing:

SEO	Moz, Search Engine Land, Neil Patel
Social Media Marketing	Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today
Content	Hubspot, Content Marketing Institute, Search Engine Journal
PPC	WordStream

2. Select a Career Path

Now that you have a basic understanding of what is digital marketing, search engine optimization, PPC, content, and other streams, it is time to choose a career path and set your missions. Some of the basic career options are:

• Digital Marketer
• Social Media Marketing Manager
• PPC Expert
• Social Media Marketing Manager
• Content Specialist
• Search Engine Marketing Expert

These are some of the most popular career options from which you must select as per your area of interest. Also, it is essential to know about what are the key roles that the profile demands. Thus, to give you a fair idea, we have listed roles of different digital marketing profiles.

Digital Marketing Executive Job Roles and Responsibilities

• Look after digital marketing campaigns
• Handle website, social media and email marketing channels 
• Plan ways to increase website reach 
• Play an active role in meeting the company’s digital marketing goals
• Develop and maintain digital marketing reports
• Strategize SEO marketing and content promotion
• Improve KPIs and meet ROIs

PPC Analyst Job Roles and Responsibilities

• Study Pay Per Click Media performance
• Handle given ad budgets
• Project spending pattern
• Forecast spending trends
• Analyze and visualize data
• Analyze TG (target group), Ads CTR (Click-through rate)
• Test and optimize keywords
• Plan Ad text optimisation 
• Optimise landing pages

Social Media Marketing Executive Job Roles and Responsibilities

• Enhance social media presence of company, brand, or person
• Outline a social media marketing strategy 
• Handle social media campaigns
• Optimize company pages
• Maximize the visibility of social media content 
• Play an active role in maximizing website traffic  and marketing returns

3. Gain Practical Exposure

Once you are sure about the stream, it’s time to gain practical exposure which will come from a job, online or freelancing projects. Though it sounds very epic, digital marketing profiles require a data-driven approach, a basic understanding of technical aspects and practical exposure. Thus, you must start a job to get market exposure and learn on-job digital marketing practices.

Practice These Interview Questions:

• Digital Marketing Interview Questions and Answers
• Social Media Interview Questions and Answers
• SEO Interview Questions & Answers

Once you are prepaid, it’s time to take up a Digital Marketing Quiz to check your confidence before going for an interview. 

Remember no matter what you plan to be, but when you are into digital marketing you should follow what Matt Cutts (Administrator at U.S. Digital Service (USDS) once said:

“You must always think about what the user is going to type”

4. Learn Digital Marketing Tools 

Digital marketing tools are an essential part of digital marketers’ lives. They save your time, help you make data-driven decisions, fine-tune your marketing efforts, and empower your campaigns. Thus, it is crucial to learn and keep yourself updated with the latest digital marketing tools. 

Recommended Courses

• Marketing with Ahrefs
• Digital Marketing Masterclass – 23 Courses in 1
• Digital Marketing SEO SMM and Google Combo

5. Keep Upskilling Yourself

The only way to grow a career in digital marketing is to keep yourself updated. As an early starter, it is advised to take up popular digital marketing certifications and get certified. Because

“You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything.”

 –Beth Comstock, Vice-Chair of General Electric

Taking up a certification course is also recommended as a lot of companies prefer to hire certified digital marketers over others. 

Below is the list of some of the most popular digital marketing certification courses:

• Google Ads certification
• Google Analytics Beginners
• Google Analytics Individual Qualification
• Social Media Marketing Certification Course
• Email Marketing HubSpot Academy
• Nurture Leads and Customers With HubSpot
• SEMRush SEO Toolkit Course
• SEO Fundamentals Certification Course by SemRush 

These skills will aim you to gain experience and guide you to climb on leading digital marketing profiles with increased salary. Look at the salary comparison data of different digital marketing profiles. 

Apart from this, we have also listed some common digital marketing tips that help you to become a better digital marketing expert:

11 Workable Digital Marketing Tips to Grow in Your Digital Marketing Job

1. Cater to the needs of every customer and identify their needs 
2. Have thought leadership content and make it user friendly
3. Carry out marketing campaigns on multiple channels such as mobile, email, website etc.
4. Gain in-depth knowledge of SEO tools and techniques, marketing concepts, web analytics and content marketing
5. Stay up-to-date and check out blogs that have the ins and outs of digital marketing
6. Find a master of digital marketing and consider his/her experience whenever you hit a wall
7. Implementing the latest digital marketing techniques and work on grooming your digital marketing skills
8. Gain a basic understanding of HTML and CSS as it will help you save a lot of time. Bumping into nasty bugs or doing some research on competing sites, you don’t need to be a programmer.
9. Learn WordPress as it enables you to create different sorts of websites with no or little programming experience. Creating a blog, social network, landing page or E-commerce, anything can be done using WordPress
10. Use PPC advertising and pick up the pace through Facebook Ads, Adwords and any other network
11. Acquire profound knowledge of image and photo editing as it will be an added advantage to your marketing career. You should know graphic art, image dimensions and texts.

The Parting Note

These were some of the most effective digital marketing tips and strategies that you must learn to start a career in digital marketing. Plan your learning path and with the help of these tips showcase the most in-demand digital marketing skills on your CV to advance your digital marketing career.