How to Become a Digital Marketing Specialist?

Steps to Become a Digital Marketing Specialist

Becoming a digital marketing specialist requires a lot of effort and hard work but it’s the best digital marketing job you can get in the online marketing industry.Nevertheless, if you are willing to put in the required effort, there is nothing stopping you from pursuing a digital marketing career.

These are the 10 steps to follow to become a digital marketing specialist.

• Learn Digital Marketing Essentials
• Work as an SEO Expert
• Master PPC Advertising
• Build Social Media Marketing Skills
• Implement Content Marketing Campaigns
• Learn how email marketing works
• Build team management skills
• Learn how to use data analysis / Reporting tools
• Get a Digital Marketing Certification
• Stay Updated on the Latest Digital Marketing Trends

Step 1: Learn Digital Marketing Essentials

• The first step to becoming a digital marketing specialist is to learn what is digital marketing and how it works.
• Digital marketing is not a single discipline but it’s a term that encapsulates a number of techniques and methods you can use to promote a website or products online.

The most important digital marketing channels are:

• Website Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing (includes SEO and PPC advertising)
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Video Marketing

As a digital marketing manager, you need to know what is the role of each channel, what it does and how to use it.

Subscribe For Free Demo

Error: Contact form not found.

Step 2: Work as an SEO Expert

• Once you get a general idea of what we mean by digital marketing, the next step is to master SEO and become an SEO expert.
• SEO has a critical role to play for the success of a digital marketing campaign, that’s why it’s important to learn how to optimize a website for search engines.Building your SEO skills will also make it easier to work with other online marketing techniques.
• Although it is more likely that you will have dedicated SEO experts in your team, as a digital marketing expert you’ll have to supervise them and the most efficient way to do this is to have working experience with SEO.

Step 3: Master PPC Advertising

• A considerable amount of your time and budget will be allocated on managing PPC campaigns either on Google Ads or Facebook.
• As a digital marketing specialist, you need to know about the different types of campaigns you can run and how to correctly measure and analyze the results.
• Depending on the size of your team and industry, it is common for a digital marketing campaign to only have PPC campaigns running so mastering PPC is more than critical.

Step 4: Build Social Media Marketing Skills

• Besides using paid ads on Facebook, you also need to learn how marketing works on other networks.
• Depending on the type of website to promote, you may have to explore other social media networks like Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn, and thus it is important to have the necessary skills.

Step 5: Implement Content Marketing Campaigns

• Content can be in the form of text, video or audio and can be in different formats like articles, YouTube videos, landing pages, podcasts, etc.
• As a digital marketing expert, you need to prepare a plan on what type of content to produce and when and how to measure the performance of each content type.
• This is what content marketing is all about.In a well-structured digital marketing team, your job will not be to provide the content (you will have dedicated writers for this task), but it’s your responsibility to ensure that the right type of content is produced for the different campaigns.

To power all your digital marketing campaigns, you need content that has the following characteristics:

• Satisfies the user intent
• Interesting for users to read
• Optimized for each platform (SEO, FB, etc.)
• Generates rankings, leads, and conversions

Step 6: Learn how email marketing works

• Email is still one of the most popular selling tools. Despite the rise of social media networks, marketers use email marketing to finalize a sale, get more leads and engage with their customers.
• Email marketing is usually the last step of the sales funnel. All other digital marketing campaigns (SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing), generate leads for email marketing and email marketing will do the sales (or any form of conversion), through a series of targeted emails.
• In most teams, the role of email marketing specialist is missing so the responsibility of running email marketing campaigns falls directly under the supervision of the digital marketing manager.

Step 7: Build team management skills

• To become a digital marketing professional, you need to have good team management skills.
• The reason is that part of your job responsibilities will be to lead and manage a team of other specialists that make up a digital marketing team.
• In big digital marketing agencies, the digital marketing manager is essentially the manager of the team (or team leader if you prefer) and besides the technical knowledge, he/she needs to have the necessary skills to manage a team of people.
• This means knowing how to work with project management tools, setting goals and targets, training your team, and all other tasks that a person in a managerial position is supposed to do.
• For small teams or digital marketing experts who work as freelancers, you may not have to manage people but you still need to know how to create project plans, set milestones, and monitor the progress of a project.

Step 8: Learn how to use data analysis / Reporting tools

• Besides monitoring and optimizing digital marketing campaigns, part of the daily tasks of a digital marketing professional is to analyze data and prepare reports.
• Whether it is reported to the marketing department or to the client directly, a digital marketing manager needs to know how to use several digital marketing tools.

The must-know tools are:

• Google Analytics
• Google Data Studio
• Google Search Console
• Facebook Ads Reporting
• SEMRUSH or similar (Ahrefs, Moz, HubSpot, etc)

Step 9: Get a Digital Marketing Certification

• One of the fastest and most efficient ways to become a digital marketing specialist is to follow a comprehensive digital marketing course.
• A digital marketing course will teach you everything you need to know about digital marketing without having to read separate guides or look for additional resources.
• Getting a digital marketing certification from a reliable company, it’s a great way to show that you know Digital marketing.
• Becoming certified does not prove that you are a good digital marketing professional but it does show that you have the necessary knowledge for the job.
• Of course, to secure a position in a big agency or company, you need to have several years of working experience and ways to demonstrate your expertise (success stories and case studies).
Digital Marketing Sample Resumes! Download & Edit, Get Noticed by Top Employers! Download

Step 10: Stay Updated on the Latest Digital Marketing Trends

• Google is making thousands of updates per year to its search results and algorithms, Facebook is adding/changing new features all the time, Google Ads move towards AI, etc., etc.
• The changes happening in the digital marketing industry are continuous (I would say daily) and are a lot.
• Learning never stops for digital marketing experts and this is something that makes this profession very interesting and challenging. You never get bored as there are always new things to learn.
• If this is something you cannot accept, then becoming a digital marketing specialist is not the best choice for you.
• If on the other hand, you like working in a dynamic environment, you need to make sure that you stay informed of all the latest trends and the resources below will help you do that.