All you wanted to know about the career growth in Digital Marketing

By Sudhanshu Malik,

The rise of the internet and the subsequent growth in e-business has forced businesses to think beyond the traditional model and develop a new paradigm in order to compete effectively in such a dynamic environment. The new paradigm has permeated all aspects of how an organization conducts their operations and manages relationships from purchasing to sales.

As the COVID-19 crisis has brought about years of change in the way companies in all sectors do business. The companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer interactions and of their internal operations as well.

How Digital Marketing is Shaping the Businesses?

The importance of digital transformation for businesses is a largely accepted area of focus today. In order to get an optimal outcome, businesses are integrating digital transformation into every business process.

Capabilities of support digital marketing operations:

Customer Insights: Track and analyze customer behavior, deliver valuable insights quickly to the decision makers.
Understand Customers: Get to know your customers well by tracking, analyzing, and interpreting customer behavior and attitudes.
Customer Experience: Design customer journeys based on the insights, integrate phases and functions to deliver great experience.
Evaluate KPIs & Metrics: Continually track and manage marketing programs, adapt based on feedback.

Segments in Digital Marketing

Segmenting the audience into groups with similar traits is a great way to find opportunities, solve problems, and make sure each piece of content sent out goes to the right audience members.

The key segments of digital marketing are as follows:

Demographic Segmentation: It segments your potential market based on age, gender, sexual orientation, and income.
Geographic Segmentation: The target audience is segmented based on where they are located. For example, you could segment based on their country or zip code.
Psychographic Segmentation: It allows segmenting the market based on customer personality traits, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.
Value segmentation: When you segment based on previous assessment of the transactional data to understand products purchased by customers and how profitable they are to the business.

Key Component of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies used to reach consumers online. It allows companies to tailor messages to reach a specific audience, making it possible to market directly to people who are likely to be interested in their product.

Digital marketing can be broadly categorized into

Search Engine Optimization: The main goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google search results, ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website.
Pay-per-Click: Pay-per-click refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results to increase search traffic to a business online.
Social Media Marketing: It includes everything a business does via social media channels but marketers must approach social with an integrated and strategic approach.
Content Marketing: Content marketing uses storytelling and information sharing to increase brand awareness with the goal to have the readers take an action like requesting more information, signing up for an email list, or making a purchase.
Email Marketing: Email marketing includes creating compelling campaigns, they also understand optimal audience outreach and are skilled at analyzing customer interactions and data, and making strategic decisions.
Mobile Marketing: Mobile marketing reaches audiences via text messages, social media, websites, email and mobile applications.
Marketing Analytics: Analytics allow marketers to learn what is successful with consumers and adapt their marketing messages, which means they can demonstrate the value to the company.

Key Skills for Successful Digital Marketing

Digital Marketers need a diverse range of skills along with deep and comprehensive knowledge to outline a win-win digital marketing strategy. Digital marketing skills can be learned with patience, hard work, and determination. You can train yourself to acquire the unique skills needed to launch effective digital marketing campaigns for your brand.

The top skills required for successful digital marketing strategy are as follows:

In Depth Data Analysis: It refers to the use of functional techniques and modern software to collect and process extensive collections of data from various online interactions of your target market.
Great Writing Skills: Writing and editing are vital for connecting with your target audience using relevant messages and convincing them to take your desired action.
SEM Skills: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategies help in driving web traffic. A deeper understanding of it translates to better execution of your marketing strategies.
Active Social Listening Skills: Social listening helps your target audience talk about your brand, your products, and your services. It allows you to gain insight about how your target market perceives your competitors.
CRM Skills: Customer Relationship Management helps to monitor and maximize customer experience. By understanding their interactions, you can connect with them on a personal level toward enhancing your business.

Pro-tips to Grab A Job in Digital marketing

Whether you are a newbie to the marketing field or fresh college passout, every brand wants someone who already has a few years of experience. So how do you get that experience without actually having a job?

Here are some tips you can do right now to start a digital marketing career:

Adequate Knowledge of Digital Marketing: The very step is to have a broad understanding on what digital marketing is and its key components that are vital for outline a growth strategy.
Create your Online Presence: Digital marketing being a practical concept and you need to try out hands by starting your own website.
Thorough Understanding on SEO: SEO helps to learn how to create websites for both users and search engines so that you can apply the same concepts to improve your Google Ads and Facebook paid campaigns.
Keep a Tab on Latest Trends: As the industry trends keep on changing, it is crucial to stay updated on latest business trends.
Knowledge About Analytics: Having knowledge about analytics will help you to measure the success of your marketing campaigns.

Career growth in Digital Marketing
There are significant career growth and major roles in Digital Marketing with a handsome package.

Digital Marketing Manager/Digital Director: It is the highest position in the field of Digital Marketing. It requires 5-7 years of comprehensive experience and needs to be proficient in marketing development devising strategies that will drive more traffic, undertake digital marketing campaigns, make improvements in website and updating it regularly etc.

Expected Salary: 4 to 10 lacs p.a

Web Developer/Web Designer: The web developer/designer will be responsible for designing, coding and modifying websites making it appealing and user-friendly. Prior knowledge of JavaScript, JQuery, HTML, CSS and web programming is required to get into this role.

Expected Salary: 3 to 6 lacs p.a.

Social Media Executive(SME) & Social Media Manager (SEM): The social media executive/manager needs to to keep a check on the latest social media trends and plan strategies, coordinate with the content team and client servicing team regularly, create quality content or video etc.

Expected Salary: 3.5 to 7 lacs p.a.

SEO Executive/Expert: A SEO executive is responsible for getting traffic on the website and improving the Google rankings ensuring that the content on the website is search friendly, conduct keyword research, research about SEO tools, build sitemaps and submit them etc.

Expected Salary: 3 to 7 lacs p.a.

PPC/SEM Expert: The PPC/SEM expert handles PPC keywords, split ad groups, refine landing pages, generate reports, provide suggestions for ad copies and graphics, etc.

Expected Salary: 3 to 5 lacs p.a.

Content Marketer: A content marketer creates content of high quality, well optimised with SEO, coordinates with other teams and incorporates inputs in content, following content trends, etc. They need an impeccable knowledge on subject matter along with a lot of creativity.

Expected Salary: 2.5 to 8 lacs p.a.

Other Roles: Apart from these there are many other roles or designations in Digital Marketing that depend upon the company and their requirements.

Some of them are:

Analytics Manager
CRM Manager
Email Marketing Manager
E-Commerce Manager
Digital Agency Account Director

Top 10 Digital Marketing Tools

Apart from effective content marketing and publishing consistently that are the quickest and most affordable ways to achieve marketing ROI, you need a way to measure the traffic gains, promote the content, capture leads, and conduct continuous research of our buyer search trends.

Here is a list of the top digital marketing tools:

Google Analytics
BuzzSumo
Ahrefs
Hootsuite
Slack
HubSpot
Canva
Mailchimp
Yoast SEO
KWFinder

Future of Digital Marketing in India

Businesses are herding to connect with more customers online, the future of a digital marketing career is quite bright. Modern technologies are evolving the digital sphere such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital personal assistants and social media rise are shifting the way digital marketing is steering.

While automation is expanding its horizons in digital marketing aspects, the need to operate these tasks is arising as well. Considering this, many small to medium-sized companies are ready to pay a huge amount to employers with excellent experience and knowledge in this domain.

(The author is founder of Stealeads(dot)com. Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of the Financial Express Online.)