Marketing is for enhancing your product or service reach to wider consumers. Earlier companies were using only traditional approaches such as TV and radio ads, newspapers, magazines, billboards, exhibitions, seminars, pamphlets, flyers, and word of mouth. However, with the advent of the digital era, a new form of marketing has emerged commonly known as digital marketing. It uses channels such as search engines, websites, emails, webinars, newsletters, slideshows, blogs, mobile apps, social media, and many more. So digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in terms of channels used which are mostly digital.
This article lets you know the importance of digital marketing and the skills that you can gain, through different certification programs like Google Adwords certification, to become a digital marketing expert.
Importance of Digital Marketing
Both forms of marketing, traditional and digital, are being used simultaneously nowadays. However digital marketing has many advantages over traditional marketing. Some of the key benefits are as below:
- The traditional marketing is limited in reach and promotes your product or services locally. Digital marketing has a global reach as it is online.
- Digital marketing cost less compared to traditional marketing such as television and radio advertisements. It saves substantial money spent on advertising.
- Traditional marketing is one way, i.e. you do not receive any feedback or receive it after a considerable amount of time. With digital marketing, you can easily track a lot of data such as the number of people viewing your webpage, location, age, gender, type of product viewed, time spent on your webpage.
- In the traditional approach, due to very limited or no feedback, modifications in advertisement strategy may be difficult and a costly affair. But with digital marketing, a lot of data can be later analyzed using tools and indicate the performance of your advertisement strategy. In addition to it, all this can be done in real-time. It saves a lot of time, effort, and money.
- Further to this, analysis of data can help you with finding customer purchase patterns, customer needs, trading seasons, and target a higher conversion ratio.
- Greater satisfaction as it targets specific customer traffic and does not need you to bother customers by calls at odd times or bombarding with a lot of advertisements while watching their favorite movies or tv shows.
- Since reach and conversion ratios are higher in the case of digital marketing higher revenues are generated with the same money spent compared to the traditional approach.
With all the above advantages of digital marketing along with a push to digitization worldwide, marketing would evolve more in digitals forms. This will further create new career opportunities to pursue. Along with high demand digital marketing also offers high earning potential ie salary or incentives. Some advantages of working as digital marketing experts are as below
- Digital marketing experts can work in various capacities, it depends on your interest and skill set, you can be a good content writer, subject market expert, analyst, or designer.
- Various roles and skill set requirements allows to you learn new things continuously and appear for certifications.
- Digital marketing experts need to work online and it makes life very comfortable and easy as you can work from office or home based on your needs.
- As already mentioned digital marketing field is ever-evolving and with the advent of AI and machine learning, it will further grow with roles and innovations.
- You can meet a lot of new people with various skills such as content writers, designers. developers, video editors, marketing experts. It adds to your overall growth and understanding of new skills and technologies.
Digital Marketing Skills
Some of the prominent digital marketing roles include Content Manager, Content Writer, Web Developer, Web Designers, Social Media Manager, Search Manager, Analytics Manager, Pay Per Click Manager.
In order to leverage the opportunities, you need to first work on your broad topic i.e. technology, business or creativity, develop skills in the selected topics, and work on resume. Skills to include are depending on the type of topic you are interested in, here are some of the skills set required
- Content writing: Digital marketing expert needs to write, review, and edit the articles written on various topics. Good command on the English language is along with awareness on various topics is very important.
- Communication skills: Good communication and negotiation skills are required in order to work with various suppliers and internal stakeholders to get work done effectively right first time within defined timelines.
- Data Analytics: With a huge amount of customer data such as location, age, visits. Analytics need to gather, clean, reduce the data to meaningful outcomes.
- Data Visualisation: After data has been processed, one needs a good visualization tool and a deep understanding of the tool to prepare the report.
- HTML, CSS: It is a skill required for the design and development of web applications/ web pages.
- Video Editing: A digital marketing expert needs to work on creating, editing videos, animations, and upload a video on youtube. It is all required to create training videos on various topics.
- Digital marketing tools: A digital marketing professional works on the content and require keyword for backlinking. Some popular tools include Google Adwords for PPC marketing, Google Keyword Planner, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs.
- Image and design: Digital marketing experts might work on blog writing and webpage content. Tools like Piktochart, SlideShare, Adobe Photoshop are useful.
- Email: Tools like Gmail, outlook which can help you manage emails and communication within or outside the organization effectively.
Hope this article has provided you all the understanding of digital marketing and its associated roles. I can safely presume that you have a better understanding of what is required to be in the digital marketing field. In addition to it, you can relate the topic of your interest and assess yourself.
Having read all these skills, you should immediately build and add the required skills to your digital marketing resume. It will definitely keep you ahead of all candidates appearing.
