How to Become a Digital Marketing Specialist in India in 2024
The most essential requirements for becoming a part of the Digital Marketing World.
We now live in a world where we cannot move a single step ahead without using online resources. Either it is your day to day tasks or your official work-related stuff, You need a lot of online support that can help you survive and thrive in this digitally challenging world.
In other words, one has to be quite digitally savvy in this era. To get things done properly everyday we need those people who might not appear in front of us but work pretty much all the time for all the things online. First, let’s understand who is a Digital Marketing Specialist.
A digital marketing specialist is someone who works alongside a company’s marketing team to identify a target market, create a brand image, and create and maintain a marketing campaign for the internet and digital technologies. They are responsible for what a company looks like online. They create an image of what the company can provide and what it is capable of.
Now let’s dive into the world of digital marketing and learn how one can become a Digital Marketing Specialist in India. This guide will teach you the exact steps that you need to follow to become a digital marketer and start a successful career in digital marketing.
What does a Digital Marketing Specialist Do?
A digital marketer is a dedicated professional that possesses a diverse set of skills and experience to promote your business online…Be it business or products, there is no shortage of digital marketing practices to bring effective results.
Digital marketing specialists need to know the in-out of all the SEO tools and digital practices. Here are some of the jobs/responsibilities of a digital marketing professional:
- Designing and monitoring SEO campaigns performance.
- Analysis and optimization of PPC campaigns
- Supervision of content marketing opportunities
- Social media network analysis and utilization
- Digital promotion activities coordination
- Managing another team of digital marketers
- Set goals and analyze the marketing performance
The basic difference between a digital marketing specialist and an SEO expert is that the former holds expertise in more than one area. The person gets designated as the digital marketer when the knowledge scope grows beyond a single discipline.
1. Learn Digital Marketing Essential Details
The first step to becoming a Digital Marketing Specialist in India is to learn what it is & how it works. Digital marketing is not a single discipline but it’s a term that encapsulates several techniques and methods that you can use to promote a website or products online.
The most important digital marketing aspects 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 specialist, you need to know what is the role of each channel, what it does, and how to use it.
2. Work as an SEO Expert
After understanding what you will be dealing with as a Digital Marketer, the next step in this process is learning SEO. Now you might think why do I need to learn this? Don’t worry, everyone has the same question. But what you need to understand is that it is an essential part of your journey as a Digital Marketer.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” Simply, it means the process of improving your site’s visibility when people search for products or services related to your business on Google, Bing, and other search engines. The better the site’s visibility, the more likely you are going to get attention and attract people’s prospective and existing customers to your business.
SEO has a critical role to play in 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. It will make you more efficient in your life and your career as well.
3. Master PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising
As a digital marketer, you will spend a lot of time dealing with the budget that is set for PPC (Pay Per Click). You’ll have to work a lot on managing PPC campaigns for Google Ads or Facebook Ads and the same on other social media apps.
In the digital world, PPC stands for “Pay-Per-Click”, a model for internet marketing in which advertisers pay a small fee, each time one of their ads is clicked. Basically, it is a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.
Search Engine Advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ads placed in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. Every time an ad is clicked, it sends the visitor to a specific website where they have to pay the search engine a small fee.
As a digital marketing specialist, you need to know about the different types of campaigns you can run on these platforms to correctly measure and analyze the results.
Depending on the size of your team and the demand of the industry, it is common for a digital marketing specialist to run these PPC campaigns. So mastering PPC is important for you if you want to achieve success in this field.
4. Build Social Media Marketing Skills
In this constantly growing world, we need to upgrade ourselves regularly. The same concept applies in the world of Digital Marketing. Nowadays, everything is operated through various Social Media Platforms to increase the visibility of the brand.
If anyone wants to be a successful digital marketer then they have to be very creative and exceptional in the case of social media content development. Regular research and the idea of what others are putting up on social media and what else we can do is extremely essential in this area.
5. Organize Content Marketing Campaign
To elevate all your digital marketing campaigns, you need to develop content that has the ability t
- Satisfy the user’s intent.
- Content should be interesting for users to read.
- Optimize for each platform (SEO, FB, Instagram, Twitter etc.).
- Generate rankings, leads, and conversions.
There are no such limitations in Content Creation. It 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 should be produced and when and how to measure the performance of each content on various platforms. Because this is what content marketing is all about.
As a digital marketer, it is not your sole responsibility to do each & every task on your own. In your well-structured team, you will have many professionals for different types of tasks. But you will have the responsibility to handle everyone in a manner that the final result should be epic.
6. Learn Email Marketing
E-mails still dominate the selling tools and business. Currently, Social Media is a very dominating factor but still, marketers use email marketing to finalize a sale, get more leads and engage with their customers.
From small to large scale industries, Email marketing is still a very popular & reliable source as it allows them to communicate directly to the customers and is safer as compared to other social media platforms.
Email marketing is usually the last step of a marketing sales funnel. All other digital marketing campaigns (SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing) generate leads for email marketing and through these emails, they do the sales through a series of targeted emails.
Most companies do not hire an Email Marketing Specialist and that responsibility is usually handled by a Digital Marketing Specialist. So if you get an opportunity to work, and your team does not provide you with an Email marketing specialist, then it will be your responsibility to handle that. So it is better to learn how Email Marketing works.
7. Develop Team Management Skills
When you get appointed for a specific position in a company, it is expected from you to coordinate with the existing team. No matter which organisation or position you get to work with, it is essential for you to have good management skills.
As a Digital Marketing Specialist, you will have 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 and besides the technical knowledge, he/she has to manage a team as well.
This means that 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 has to do, you have to do that too.
8. Learn How To Use Data Analysis Tools
Besides monitoring and optimizing digital marketing campaigns, it will be your daily task as a digital marketing professional, to analyze data and prepare reports.
Whether you have to report to the marketing department or the client directly, a digital marketing manager needs to know how to use several digital marketing tools. Such as,
- Google Analytics
- Google Data Studio
- Google Search Console
- Facebook Ads Reporting
- SEMRUSH or similar (Ahrefs, Moz, HubSpot, etc
In the current situation, almost every digital marketing specialist has to deal with these tools regularly. So one should learn how to work with these tools.
9. Stay Updated On Latest Trends & Development
Google, Instagram, Facebook and other social media and web platforms are making thousands of updates per year to their search results and algorithms, by adding or changing new features all the time and becoming more and more AI friendly.
These changes happen so quickly and continuously, in the digital marketing industry that you cannot afford not to learn as learning never stops for digital marketing experts and this is something that makes this profession very interesting and challenging at the same time. You never get bored as there is always something new to learn.
If you cannot handle this or you find it difficult, then becoming a digital marketing specialist is not the best choice for you.
10. Get Authentic Certificate From An Institute
In India, we currently have many institutions that offer you various types of degrees( i.e Diploma, Bachelors, Masters etc) in the field of Digital Marketing. But it is our responsibility to check few things before taking admission into these institutes and they are,
- Check if the institute is affiliated with
- Compare the fees structure.
- Analyse the syllabus offered and topics included in that.
- Ask for the authenticity of the degree.
- Compare the placement process and other benefits.
In the end, I just wanted to let you know that, yes it is essential to get a degree related & necessary in your field but a lot depends on the fact that how much you can learn and how much innovation you can bring into your work.
Because if you don’t have that something different in you, then it’s going to be really tough for you to survive among those who already have that difference with them.
