10 Steps to Start a Successful Digital Marketing Career

If you are planning to start a successful digital marketing career in India, you have taken a good decision. It is a great time, to begin with as all the businesses are moving towards digital; you will have an excellent opportunity to explore, learn, do, and practice digital marketing.

This article is aimed at helping you to know about how to start a career in digital marketing. There are ten steps that you need to follow them in order to get your first digital marketing job. Not only a job in a company but also this will allow you to set up your own digital marketing agency. Let’s get started:

1. Start from the basics of digital marketing

The first obvious step is to understand what is digital marketing? Digital Marketing or Online Marketing is a component of marketing that utilizes the internet and online-based technologies such as computers, laptops, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote one’s products and services.

It has a lot of components that cover almost all areas of online promotion. You also need to understand that it is a multidisciplinary skill that is involved in making digital marketing. Digital marketing has the following major channels with it:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing 
• Influencer Marketing
• Mobile Marketing 
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Search Engine Marketing 
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media Marketing 
• Video Marketing

You can learn and practice any particular skill to become a master of the particular digital marketing field. But, a good digital marketer should have all the above skills to work with. You may not be an expert in all these skills from day 1. But, as you move towards your digital marketing career, you will work with many different techniques and tools of digital marketing skills.

2. Start your own website

After understanding the basics of digital marketing, the next and most important thing to do is start a website and implement the things that you have learned from the basics of digital marketing. Always remember, Digital marketing is not a theory, but it is practical. It is not enough to know the theory behind all these digital marketing skills rather you need to know how to apply those different techniques and measure its results.

To gain the relevant skills, you need to start your own website. In other words, set up a blog and work on increasing your organic rankings along with sharing and advertising the website on social media and forums. In the same way, you will get sales of your product or service.

Having a website will not only help you to learn the different digital marketing concepts but also you can use it as a project to convince your new boss or clients to get a good job. It is important to showcase practical skills. Because, in digital marketing, it is more valuable than the random certificates from the institutes.

3. Become an SEO Practitioner

SEO is an important skill that every digital marketer want to posses. You will not have a successful digital marketing career if you don’t know about SEO. No one in the world will avoid anything that is offered for free. SEO involves increasing your website to the top of the search engine by implementing great SEO practices.

SEO is a similar thing if done correctly, your website and content will start to rank in the search engine and it will increase your website visibility. So with that, you can drive a lot of potential and targeted audience to your site. With SEO, you will learn how to create attractive websites that both the search engine and users like.

4. Understand Google Analytics

Besides learning to build a website, a digital marketing professional needs to know about analytics. One of the main characteristics of any digital marketing campaign is that everything is measurable. Only if it is measurable, you will be able to track your efforts and steps.

Google is providing free resources to learn Google Analytics and become a Google Certified Analytics Expert. Learn it to analyse all your marketing campaign efforts. To be able to make informed decisions based on real data, you need to know how to measure the effectiveness of efforts and learn how to analyze them properly. Your starting point is becoming an expert in Google Analytics.

After implementing all your SEO efforts, you need to track the visitors of your website with a tool which is a free tool provided by Google i.e Google Analytics. You need to know how many people have viewed your content. Google Analytics tracks visitors from both organic and paid traffic. So, it is important to know about Google Analytics

5. Become a Google Ads Certified Individual

Being a Digital Marketer, you need to use Google Ads (Google AdWords) for you and your clients. It is used to promote a company’s products or services across different Google properties and websites. Being a top search engine, Google tracks a lot of visitors to search and utilize content from it. The easier way to acquire the necessary skills is to get a Google Ads certification.

Google has tons of resources to help you become a Google AdWords Expert. Getting a certification is a great way to prove to your clients or employers that you have the necessary digital advertising skills. It is free to get a Google Ads Certification. But to become an expert, you need to spend some money on Google and test it across various platforms to get hold of its practical approach

6. Master Facebook Ads Advertising

Next is social media marketing. Almost every company and brand will have their own social media plans. It is equally important to have a different social media plan for different social media networks. But however, you will be in a position to use Facebook Advertising for you and your clients to get your desired results like increased post views, post engagement, lead generation, and conversion-optimized ads.

Facebook and Instagram are one of the most important social media platforms for many digital marketing campaigns. Getting organic exposure on Facebook is almost tougher as multiple users are creating and sharing a lot of content in a short span of the time period. So the only way to use Facebook as a selling tool is to learn how to use their advertising platform.

If you have already followed the above steps and have good knowledge of Google Ads, learning to use & implement Facebook Ads will not be much difficult. All the advertising methods are similar and have almost similar goals for their advertiser. Facebook being a social media giant, provides its advertiser with additional information about its users.

7. Learn how to use Digital Marketing Tools and Automation

Tools are always useful and help us to reduce our major work. Digital Marketing also has a lot of tools but if you use it effectively you can do your major tasks without spending enough time. With the evolution of many tools, it is equally important to work smarter to withstand the competition.

Besides learning how to use analytics & advertising, you also need to learn how to use other digital marketing tools. It is equally important to start using different important tools for Digital Marketing. A lot of skills and services are there in digital marketing.

So, once you have destined to become a Digital Marketing Expert. It is necessary to learn and effectively use digital marketing tools as it will ease your work. There are tons of various good tools available in the market, and although they are not free, the monthly fee is an investment for your career and another great item for your resume.

8. Start Freelancing in Digital Marketing

The next step in your digital marketing career path is to become a successful digital marketing professional; which is to get real hands-on experience on the existing projects. Starting your own website is a great way to practice different digital marketing techniques but doing digital marketing for a client, it is totally a different story. That is where you will use all your knowledge and face the real competition

Handling your client accounts will push you to set up procedures, improve your analytics & reporting skills, and learn how to handle budgets along with the client communication. You can use job portals like upwork.com, fivver.com to apply for digital marketing jobs. If you are a beginner, start with easy and quick tasks first and gradually move into bigger projects.

So create a profile on different freelancing platforms, update your profile, add all the works that you have done for your website and start to acquire the first few clients. Do those jobs even if you get less paid and prove your worth to the clients. Get reviews across the platform to prove that you are equally skilled and capable enough to strive as a digital marketing expert.

9. Join a Digital Marketing Agency

Another way to grow your skills & experience is to get a job in a digital marketing agency. This is usually recommended because you will get to learn how digital marketing agency works, how to work in the different skillset of digital marketing and you will be exposed to stay in touch with the latest digital marketing trend. You can use some of their practices if you later decide on to start your own agency or join another company as a digital marketing expert.

Look at the stats above, there are about 12,000 digital marketing vacancies that most companies are posted in LinkedIn. To begin with start, your career as a freelancer, show your digital marketing skills to the company. It will be easier for you to get a real-time job from a digital marketing agency as you have some prior work experience on your own website and clients’ projects.

10. Stay Updated and Keep Learning

In this competitive world, everything is evolving as time progresses. With that, digital marketing also changes from time to time. It has changed a lot in the past decades. It keeps changing as more users start to improve their marketing tactics.

To cope up with the audience’s behavior, Google is deploying hundreds and thousands of changes related to organic and paid searches per year, the Facebook algorithm is also constantly changing and in general, the digital marketing landscape is extremely dynamic. All these will help you to understand the trend of digital marketing.

Remember to keep learning with evolving trends as it will help you to stay focused on delivering better results to your agencies and clients.

Key Learnings

Congratulation on deciding to become a successful digital marketing (career) practitioner. Demand for digital marketing professionals is increasing day by day as many companies want to explore the digital space. Along with a handful of salary, digital marketing a job that you can do as a freelancer or by joining any desired digital marketing agency. Remember to build your skills first, as skills are in high demand which will fetch you with a higher salary.

Digital marketing is a multidisciplinary skill in which you will learn a course along with implementing it. There are many streams in digital marketing and you should be an expert in all of those to become a successful digital marketing manager.

The best way to learn digital marketing is to practice on your own website. Start a blog and post content regularly. Invest your time in mastering SEO, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads.

Always remember to implement things that you learn in digital marketing because being practical will teach you many valuable lessons than the theories.

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