These days you would be hard-pressed to find a business, regardless of its size, that isn’t investing in digital marketing to assist in their promotional efforts. Businesses must try their best to keep up with their fast-paced consumer markets and are challenged with staying in tune with the ever-evolving digital marketing technologies and strategies available to them.
As a result, digital marketing budgets are increasing by double digit increments year after year, projected to hit a total global spend of 306 billion by 2020, keeping the field of digital marketing both challenging and exciting.
What exactly is digital marketing, anyway?
Well, it’s not too far off from what you might think of as traditional marketing: businesses or organizations connecting with their audiences to promote their brands, services, and/or products, ideally bringing them closer to purchase as they span the customer journey. However, as consumers consistently spend more time online, marketers are shifting their promotional efforts to meet consumers where they are. Thus, digital marketing has come to the forefront, with marketing strategies spanning a variety of online channels such as social media, search engines, email, online publications, and other key business websites.
Today, the field of digital marketing is more interesting than ever and encompasses a wide range of knowledge and skill sets. It appeals to those that consider themselves creative types as well as those who are more analytically or technically minded. A digital marketing career includes a mix of desired skills to be successful in the field — such as data analysis, automation software expertise, and user experience design — as represented in the Altimeter State of Digital Marketing Report.
Digital Marketing Career Opportunities
While the skill sets required of digital marketing specialists are vast and diverse, it’s typically not expected that a single digital marketing role take on all of these skills. Instead, digital marketing careers are more commonly made up of a variety of roles and responsibilities that span areas such as:
Content Marketing
Content marketing entails the creation and distribution of consistent, valuable, and engaging content — emails, blog posts, videos, ads, social media posts — to clearly defined audiences. It’s the content marketing manager’s job to decide what kinds of content will resonate most with key audiences and keep them coming back for more. Content marketing managers work with their team members to decide how to use or repurpose pieces of content to suit the various digital channels leveraged by the business, ensuring that the content created has a long shelf life and reaches as many viewers as possible.
Search Engine Marketing
While a solid content marketing strategy is important for digital marketers to develop, it’s just as important for them to optimize their content and websites for search engines, as search engines are primarily what people use to find the information they need. Digital marketers have put various search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in place to improve the ranking of their content on search engines like Google. SEO can be a full time job; it’s the SEO Manager’s job to ensure content and websites are optimized as much as possible and are adapting to the requirements of continually changing search engine algorithms, such as Google’s PageRank.
Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing takes SEO one step further, applying a lot of the foundational aspects, but offering content through a digital ad on the search engine that viewers click on to access. Advertisers are charged per each click on the ad, hence the name of the practice. Putting money behind these ads yields a higher chance that the ad content will be seen. PPC managers are hired to determine which keywords to associate with the promoted ads, how large of a budget to allocate towards the advertising campaign, and which content to promote as part of the advertisement itself.
Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are available for digital marketers to use to promote their brands, generate followers, and drive traffic to their websites for future lead generation. It’s the role of the social media marketing manager to determine which social media platforms are best suited for the company’s audience, what content should be shared at what cadence and time of day, and which topics will interest followers based on monitoring conversations through specific keywords, phrases, or hashtags. Social media is an exciting part of digital marketing for people new to the field to dive into, and its use cases and features are always shifting and expanding.
Email Marketing
Email is another channel digital marketers can use to reach their prospects and customers. When done right, it allows email marketing managers to strategically send emails that rise above the noise of crowded inboxes and provide a relevant and personalized touch to their subscribers. Emails can come in many forms such as monthly newsletters, event promotions, educational product tips and tricks, and holiday discounts. Email marketing is often in place to point subscribers to a company’s website, with the hopes of driving further engagement or product purchases. Email is a tried and true digital marketing method that’s always improving and challenging digital marketers to do better, ensuring that email marketers stay challenged and subscribers stay informed and engaged.
Marketing Automation
As the options available to digital marketing professionals continue to evolve and campaigns become more sophisticated, so must the technologies that digital marketers use to maintain them. Enter marketing automation: the ability to utilize software to automate marketing operations that might otherwise be done manually. For example, marketing automation can allow digital marketers to set up processes on the back end of their various marketing tools to automatically send welcome emails to their new newsletter subscribers or schedule their daily social media posts. Marketing automation managers collaborate with many of the above mentioned roles and are most effective when they’re able to fully leverage both their creative and analytical attributes.
The Earnings of Digital Marketers in 2020
Digital Marketing, no matter which direction you go within the field, is in high demand and the earnings that can be made are in direct alignment. According to Mondo’s 2020 Tech, Digital Marketing, & Creative Salary Guide, you can expect to make upwards of $60,000 USD as a starting salary in most areas within digital marketing, progressing (upwards of $110,000 USD in some cases) as you develop in your career. This of course varies across regions and disciplines, with more technical roles tending to align with higher earnings.
Plan for a Digital Marketing Career
Digital marketing is an exciting field to get into and is only going to get more exciting over time as technology continues to advance. Should you find yourself interested in pursuing a career in digital marketing, don’t be afraid to explore the various ways you can dive into the career path. You’ll find that there are a number of great resources you can invest in to get you on your way. Whether you just recently finished school or you’re switching careers, digital marketing holds un-capped potential that’s yours to take advantage of in 2020.
