Are you also wondering how to begin a career in Digital Marketing? You are at the right place because this handbook is for you.
You do not need to be an expert in Digital Marketing to begin your career in Digital Marketing. Your background does not matter because the beauty of this field is that there are no set rules, one needs to analyse and improvise along the way.
But you’ll need to acquire both digital marketing skills and practical experience.
That is where this handbook comes in. You’ll explore how to grow your knowledge and the different stages you might go through in your path to becoming a professional Digital Marketer.
Jumpstart your career in digital marketing with these 4 tips:
1. Make your own website
While you may not need to be an expert in Digital Marketing to get a job in the field, companies wouldn’t just hire you for the position immediately.
You will first need to:
- Gain and build certain skills in digital marketing
- Showcase that you possess such skills
The best way possible to do this is by making your own website. By doing so, you are creating a testing ground where you can learn and apply various marketing strategies. All without doing any damage to a brand’s website.
This will also help you showcase your skills and what you have created from scratch. Do not worry about being perfect from the get go. You will learn and grow along the process and be better each time.
Your initial phases of the website might look ugly but it will give you a chance to practice things like content marketing, email marketing, outreach, etc. There is no need to overthink this.
The key is to just start and get practicing. Discover your expertise and make a website using WordPress to begin with. Logos, monetisation, etc. can come in the picture a little later.
2. Select and Focus on one type of Digital Marketing
There are many ways a person can market digitally. Some of them being:
- SEO marketing
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
Now that you are handling your website on your own, it will be difficult to execute all these channels of marketing. Simply put, managing your time, resources and effort will be really challenging. Instead, just focus on what suits you best.
Not sure which channel to choose?
We’ll suggest starting with SEO. We recommend it based on a few reasons:
- It is free to start with.
- There are loads of free SEO tools around
- It is one of the only few long-term scalable customer acquisition channels
- The skills you learn in SEO (content writing, outreach, link building, content promotion, etc.) are easily transferable to other facets of digital marketing.
3. Get familiar with free Digital Marketing tools
As you are starting to understand the field of digital marketing and are making your moves, it might be difficult to subscribe to marketing tools that are expensive. But for your ease, here are some free marketing tools for you to get used to:
- Google Analytics: See data related to the number of people visiting your site, the pages they visit, the duration of their stay and hundreds of other insightful metrics.
- Mailchimp: This is an email marketing tool. Their free plan lets you manage up to 2,000 subscribers on a daily basis.
- Buffer: This is a free social media scheduling tool. Buffer helps automate the process of posting content.
- Google Search Console (GSC): With the help of this, you can see which pages are indexed in Google, the keywords your site ranks for and the websites that link to you.
4. Apply for a job that fits best
After you have found your niche and mastered the required skills, it is time to stand out and get a great job. Firstly, what you are looking for is an internship or a fresher level job.
The roles could be from a Digital Marketing agency or an in-house position for any of the brands (established or upcoming). For example, beginning your journey even at a small company that makes instant coffee will help you convert into a full time role with the same or a bigger brand.
If you weren’t aware, such positions do have a lot of competition. So standing out from the rest is what you should do. Here is what you can do:
A) Networking: As per experts, most high yielding opportunities come your way not through recommendations from friends, but from weaker ties. For example, casual acquaintances or people from a similar background as you.
Talk to such connections, find out what they are upto in the digital marketing field and help them out if needed. Promoting their work and giving them a platform sometimes helps catch the bigger fish. If they succeed you are definitely going to be a part of it.
B) Use the Briefcase Technique: All you have to do is research the company you are applying for, find out their biggest digital marketing problems and come up with solutions to fix them.
C) Market yourself: Nowadays, directly applying for your dream job might not work very effectively. People who hire are looking for the edge that a candidate should have. So being creative in the way you market yourself can help.
Something as simple as creating a resume that showcases your knowledge of a company you want to apply to, explaining the opportunities they were missing out on and then posting it on Twitter.
This may grab a lot of attention and help you land an interview. Maybe the CEO can contact you directly.
Don’t believe us? This has actually happened with Nina Mufleh who wanted to work at Airbnb.
Regardless which path you take, in order to master Digital Marketing, there are two things you should always be doing: Learning and Networking. Not only will these help you out in the long run but it will also keep things fresh for you.
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