Zero to Hero Steps to Become a Digital Marketing Specialist

Are you curious about how to become a digital marketing specialist? Well, it is not that easy for everyone!

In this blog, we are going to cover all aspects from the basics and how they can help your company progress to becoming a digital marketing specialist – even without a degree!

You will also be learning all the key steps for a successful career in digital marketing you need!

In the digital world of today, having some background knowledge of online marketing is essential for your business.

The digital marketing specialist’s job description in any company is to build an online presence and awareness for the target audience of a company. There are many channels and tools that digital marketers use to develop marketing strategies.

We will discuss the exploration of marketing channels in-depth and how to improve your skills and knowledge in SEO, social media, email marketing, and paid campaigns.

Digital Marketing Industry Insights

Let’s begin with some digital marketing industry insights to be aware of how companies take this industry very seriously for their growth.

Can you imagine how many billions of dollars companies are planning to invest in digital marketing over the next few years?

Follow the graphic below to get more information about worldwide digital marketing ad spending in 2022!

Source: https://www.emarketer.com/content/worldwide-digital-ad-spending-2021

By 2024, industries are ready to spend around $645 billion on their digital marketing strategies.

That being said, there will be a lot of job opportunities for digital marketing specialists around the globe!

What Soft Skills Do You Need to Become a Digital Marketing Specialist?

Before diving into the most important technical skills, there are required soft skills you will need to become a digital marketing specialist and eventually an expert!

Modern marketing involves so many different skillsets that beginners should work on it.

These are the most essential talents that any industry will look for it in you such as communication, leadership or adaptational skills and more.

Let’s have a quick look at what soft skills you should have before becoming a digital marketer.

Growth mindset

The digital marketing industry continuously growing and new technologies are coming at all times.

The growth mindset will motivate you to keep learning new technologies and software that will make your life so much easier.

Analytical thinking skills

We don’t want to scare you, but you will mostly be bombarded with a lot of data in any part of the digital marketing channel.

So, you will need to understand what data to read and take an action accordingly.

This is also not about only reading data as well. Analytical thinking skills will also assist in content creation to improve your online performance.

Multitasking skills

Having a can-do attitude will help you to make a big difference.

Sad but true, employers will expect you to do multiple tasks at the same time.

We know that you are not a magician, but employers or your clients will think you are!

Problem Solving and Creativity Skills

You would be the type of person who is constantly looking for ways to find a solution to build strong branding for your company.

Problems are part of any growing business and a good thing, there are no problems that cannot be solved with the power of creativity.

Along with your creative skills, you will overcome any challenges as the solution

6 Key Steps for a Successful Career in Digital Marketing

There will be some specific digital marketing terms that you will need to know to begin with. Once you are familiar with those terms, your life will be much easier to become a digital marketing specialist!

Let’s find out the steps for digital marketing to begin with!

1. Learning digital marketing key strategies
2. Excel your SEO knowledge
3. Developing social media marketing skills
4. Managing paid campaigns
5. The importance of e-mail marketing
6. Data analysis for digital marketing strategies

1- Learn Digital Marketing Strategies

Learning digital marketing strategies is your main key step to learning how to become a digital marketer. A digital marketing strategy can also be looked at as a plan outlining how your company or business will reach its marketing targets with the use of social media and various online channels.

There are two different channels used to connect with our customers;

Outbound marketing – a more traditional method used to reach a wide audience (generally initiated by the marketer without your approval) for example email spam, tv and radio ads, text messages, cold calling etc.

Inbound marketing – enables you to attract your target audience via uniquely designed high-quality content appealing to your ideal customers and qualified leads. Examples include blogs, forums, social media, podcasts, video guides etc.

• Consumer-driven
• Comprehensive
• Solvent-based

After understanding your buyer profile, there is a very trending and comprehensive approach to creating a digital marketing strategy easily. T-shaped marketing is the best way to connect different digital marketing channels.

2- Excel Your SEO Knowledge

SEO is a common term within the digital marketing world and the fundamentals are relatively straightforward. Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing your visibility in search engines by not only generating traffic to your website but quality traffic with a higher buying potential.

We recommend you have a look to start learning search engine optimization to be able to rank #1 for search terms. Here is the beginner’s guide to discover essential SEO techniques.

There are some free and paid SEO tools that you can also use to get organic rank on Google and other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, etc.

Free SEO Tools

1. PageSpeed Insights
2. Google Analytics
3. Google Search Console
4. Google Tag Manager
5. Pre-post SEO

Paid SEO Tools

1. Spyfu
2. SEMrush
3. MOZ Pro
4. Ahrefs
5. Yoast Premium

The overall goal? Increase in the level of traffic to the website in question with the use of keywords whilst meeting search engine guidelines.

3- Developing Social Media Marketing Skills

Without making the effort to use social media in your marketing strategy you limit your business/company to its ‘usual’ customers only.

Those already familiar with your brand most likely already search for the same keywords you rank for.

Therefore, the main advantage of social media is an improvement of brand loyalty, awareness, higher conversion rates, and increased inbound traffic.

If you would like to learn how to become a social media marketing specialist, our article will be supporting you to improve your social media marketing skills.

Top 10 Social Media Marketing platforms of 2021;

1. Falcon
2. Brand24
3. Sendible
4. Visme
5. Audiense
6. Buffer
7. Pablo
8. Sprout Social
9. Hootsuite
10. Agorapulse

The skill-set required to be a social media marketer begins with excellent communication.

To interact with co-workers and engage with customers when representing an organization it goes without saying that strong customer service skills are essential.

This is also crucial to build relationships with influencers and be the voice of a brand.

Interactive content with innovative and creative thinking is the best way to keep your customers interested and wanting more. Strategic thinking is a bonus considering you are competing with millions of others in the same industry.

Writing ability and content curation plays a critical role even though a lot of your social media may be dominated by images and videos.

Producing posts, blogs, tweets etc with magnetic content is necessary to get customer attention enough to click.

4- Managing Paid Campaigns

PPC Advertising (also known as pay-per-click) is a model utilized to drive traffic to websites in which the advertiser pays the publisher each time the advert is clicked.

The reason why these are so effective is that you can control who your ads are shown to and when (therefore the people searching already have high intent to buy).

Check this article to get more ways to optimize your paid campaigns!

Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an online advertising platform developed by Google back in 2000. Advertisers bid on certain keywords to display service offerings, product listings, brief advertisements, or videos to web users.

It can place advertisements in various places (even non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos). Since advertisers pay for these clicks this is how Google makes money from search.

5- The Importance of E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is one of the most common tools to use for remarketing purposes. But why is it still important and how does it benefit your business? It’s fast, cheap, accessible and easily replicated. Also, a fantastic way to build relationships with the following;

1. Prospects
2. Leads
3. Current customers
4. Past customers

Moreover, e-mail marketing is one of the most popular ways of digital marketing automation to ease marketers’ workload.

It is possible with the use of email to create targeted and personalized messages which in turn improve response rates to your direct marketing.

Be aware, however, not to overuse this method as it can easily have a negative impact on your customer base. E-mail marketing is also used for digital marketing automation to reach out to your audience without spending extra time.

The Best E-mail Marketing Tools

• Best Overall: Mailchimp
• Best for Automation: ActiveCampaign
• Easiest to Use: MailerLite
• Best All-in-One Marketing Suite: Hubspot
• Best Affordable Option: SendinBlue
• Best for E-commerce: Drip

Don’t forget to check different e-mail marketing strategies that you need to follow up!!

6 – Data Analysis for Digital Marketing Strategies

The implementation of a marketing strategy across all forms of digital channels where consumers engage with a brand is classed as a digital marketing campaign. The main purpose of this is usually to improve the customer conversion rate to help the business grow.

Say you were to implement the best digital marketing strategies within your business plan – how would you know they are working?

Checking metrics and reports will provide various data, with the addition of analytical skills you can make informed decisions to steer your company in a more productive direction rather than just relying on assumptions.

“Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions and supporting decision-making. – Wikipedia

Conclusion

If you think that it is too much work to become a digital marketing specialist, we have a special guide for you to find the best way to hire a digital marketer for your business. Long story short, let’s sum up our article for you to understand how to become a digital marketing specialist with the right guidance!

• Gain more knowledge in the digital world and explore various marketing channels
• Improve your social media marketing skills with courses, tools, and agencies
• Get an insight into data analysis and how it’s used in digital marketing strategies
• A reminder that email marketing is still beneficial to your business and how
• Learn more about managing paid campaigns and online advertising

Q&A

What education do digital marketing specialists have?

You don’t have to graduate from any degree program to become a digital marketing specialist. If you check many famous digital marketers’ backgrounds, it will surprise you big time. Nowadays, micro certifications are making a huge difference in the digital marketing industry. We also encourage you to take digital marketing diploma courses in Canada to be way ahead of any competition.

What do digital marketing specialists do?

Digital marketing specialists are responsible to increase online awareness and find a way to convert more leads to help the company’s growth. Social media marketing, e-mail marketing, SEO, and building strategic marketing projects are their main tasks.

How to become a digital marketing expert?

Becoming a digital marketer is a challenge in itself. However, reaching out to the level where you can show your expertise is a completely different story. Joining the Advanced Digital Marketing Diploma Program is a perfect option to learn all automation techniques, advanced SEO and marketing strategies along with e-commerce.