How to Become a Digital Marketing Expert

To become a Digital Marketing Expert is the dream of many. If you have the same dream, well, then making your dream come true is not very difficult.

Since the internet has penetrated deep into our lives, people spend more time browsing the internet than ever before. The time people spend on other mediums like TV, radio, newspapers, books, and magazines has drastically come down.

People use the internet for a lot of reasons like entertainment, communication, seeking information, and expressing their feelings in form of journals, blogs, articles, Q&A forums, social media, etc. It means people spend a lot of time on the internet. So it is a great opportunity to reach out to those people on the internet through digital marketing.

Sounds simple? But no, it is not as simple as it sounds. Capturing the attention of your audience at the right time, and at the right place is important in digital marketing. It requires a well-planned digital marketing strategy to grab your audience’s attention and motivate them to take action on your website.

To build a successful digital marketing strategy and launch a successful digital marketing campaign you need a Digital Marketing Expert. A digital marketing expert is one who puts together the entire digital marketing strategy. Also, he executes it as per the plan to achieve the desired goals for the business.

How to Become a Digital Marketing Expert?

Most noteworthy is the question “How to Become a Digital Marketing Expert”.

Well, that takes a lot of studies, and an understanding of digital marketing tools and how digital marketing works.

To become a Digital Marketing Expert you technically don’t need a degree or diploma. But you need to have a certain set of skills. For instance, using the internet, writing engaging and meaningful content, knowledge about SEO, managing PPC advertisements, data analytics, handling Social Media marketing, etc.

Digital marketing is not as easy as following the marketing rule book and as straightforward as traditional marketing used to be.

Its rules are literally not by the book but are tailor-made, built from the data analysis and gut feeling. This understanding comes from analyzing the digital trends, experience in digital marketing, industry & domain knowledge, and requirement of the business.

What You Need to Learn to Become a Digital Marketing Expert

But before that, you should have an idea of what you need to learn and how the things you will learn will help you in your career. So Below are the areas you should be focusing on:

Data Analysis

Digital marketing is all about data, whether it is your consumer interaction, traffic on your website, competitor’s traffic, sales numbers, bounce rate, keyword research, conversions, social media interactions, keyword research, or content planning. Learning to analyze the data to make your marketing decisions so that you can achieve your marketing goals. There are a lot of tools available to you that produce a lot of data like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc. But to make your data really useful and get real and useful insights from it is important and that’s what you would have to learn.

Content Creation

Content is the king and the heart of digital marketing. Generating content that will attract and engage the right audience for your business is important. Create content that is useful for your audience and helps them make informed decisions. It’s always better to create evergreen content so that your audience gets benefit out of it for a long time and that way your business will keep getting the right traffic through that content.

SEO & SEM

The algorithm of the search engines keeps changing and learning to make your keywords and content rank in the search results is utterly important. Hence, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the skill that every digital marketer needs to have to support all levels of digital marketing. Having a good understanding and practical knowledge of the dynamics of SEO is crucial. Both SEO & SEM helps you not only to make your content reach the target audience but also help you attract the right audience that is important for your business.

Customer Relationship Management

This is the age of customer delight and to learn about the customer experience the digital marketer needs to learn about customer relationship management. When you learn about customer relationship management you can develop strategies to monitor and improve the customer experience. Connecting and engaging with your customers on a more emotional and personal level is always an added advantage for the brand as it increases the chances of customer loyalty.

Communication Skills

Good communication skills are also very important for a digital marketer. With good communication skills, a digital marketer can spread impactful messages, establish trust, and build relationships with customers. A good Digital Marketer should have the ability to look at things from a different perspective so that he/she can communicate ideas and messages in a way that the audience will understand.

Social Media Marketing & Management

Social media is the most important arena of customer engagement and public conversation. Digital marketers can use social media to their advantage to convey relevant messages to the relevant audience. There is more to learn than just posting content on social media. The digital marketer needs to learn to generate quality and relevant content and build customer engagement. With these skills, the digital marketer will be able to create good social media marketing strategies. Each social media has its own algorithm and purpose. Also, they have several tools that the digital marketer can use to his advantage to engage with the audience and convert them into customers.

Visual content today drives more brand exposure and engagement than written content. Videos unarguably have a higher engagement and conversion rate, engagement, and higher SEO rankings. Creativity is the key to creating engaging video content. Hence, it is important for Digital Marketers to have basic knowledge about software such as Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, etc), Canva, etc., that would help them in creating appealing visual content to engage his/her audience.

You really don’t need to be specialized in all these skills but to become a good digital marketing expert you need to learn all of these and master a few.

Simple Steps to Become a Digital Marketing Expert

Though a lot of information is available online about digital marketing, just finding where to start can be challenging. And even when you get started, how do you ensure you are not wasting your time, efforts, and money. Don’t worry, below is the Step by Step Learning Process to Become a Digital Marketing Expert. And this will help you proceed in an efficient way.

Step 1: Invest in a Good Personal Computer

Though it is not necessary, I recommend the learners to invest in buying a good personal computer. Many people are comfortable working on their smartphones. But when it comes to writing long content, mobile devices might not be a good idea. Similarly, editing images and resizing them would also be better and faster on a computer than on a mobile device.

Step 2: Read Digital Marketing Blogs & Tutorials

The starting point in the journey to becoming a digital marketer is to first learn and understand digital marketing concepts. Digital marketing is complex and you need to learn a lot about the different digital marketing concepts. Start reading digital marketing blogs and tutorials in detail.

There are a lot of free & paid Udemy courses on digital marketing which will help you learn the concepts faster. That’s the good starting point, to begin with.

Step 3: Start Implementing Your Knowledge & Learning

Content and SEO are the main pillars of digital marketing, everything else comes after that. So, research the topic you want to work in. Make a list of articles or topics you want to write about.

Start writing your articles and try writing SEO optimized articles and save them for publishing online. List down the keywords with the highest search volume and write articles about them on your blog. This will quickly bring organic traffic to your website.

Step 4: Set up a Blog/Website

Think of a nice name for your blog depending on the topic you want to write about. Make sure your blog’s name is unique. Register your domain with the name you have decided for your blog and subscribe to a hosting plan to host your website/blog. (Try to buy a .com domain if possible).

Install a free or paid WordPress theme that you like on your website. Make sure the theme you install on your website is responsive. Because a lot of visitors (63%) would be visiting your website from their mobile phones. Hence, your website needs to be responsive to serve those mobile visitors.

Buy a hosting plan to host your website which is reliable, fast, and secure. You can use siteground or Namecheap which are very fast, reliable, and affordable.

Step 5: Generate XML Sitemap of Your Website

Generating the XML sitemap of your website or blog will be handy when you submit your website to Google for crawling. Google bots read your website and its content from the sitemap you submit to Google Search Console. The best is to use a plugin that automatically generates and updates the sitemap whenever new content is added on the website and adds it to the sitemap.

Step 6: Verify Your Website with Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster

Now sign up with Google Search Console and submit your website for Google Crawling. Signing up with Webmaster tools will help you submit your sitemap on google. Google bots crawl your website through the sitemap and index your pages in google searches accordingly.

Step 7: Set up Google Analytics

Obviously, you want to see what is happening on your website, and how your articles are performing, how many visitors you get on your website, etc. For that, you need to set up Google Analytics on your website. For that, you need to signup for Google Analytics and install the Google Analytics tracking code on your website to see the amount of traffic you drive on your website.

Learn a little about Google Analytics to make sense of your Google Analytics data. This will help you understand your visitor’s behavior, the performance of your articles, the demography of your visitors, etc.

Step 8: Set up Social Media

You also need to set up your social media channels like Facebook page, LinkedIn page, Twitter, YouTube if you also want to create some video content, Instagram, etc. Start with the setup of a Facebook page dedicated to your blog where you can share the links to your articles. Invite your friends to follow your page and read your articles. Also, ask them to share the posts on their walls and Facebook groups they are associated with.

Step 9: Enable Social Sharing & Integrate Facebook Page Plugin

Enable social sharing on your blog. If you are using WordPress then you can use the free WordPress plugin to share your articles on different social media platforms. This will also help you create back-links for your articles and drive traffic to your website.

And the readers on your website would also want to share the content which they like on social media, so this plugin would help them as well to share your content. Add Facebook Page Plugin to your blog and ask your readers on the blog to like and follow your Facebook page.

If you want you can also integrate the widgets for Instagram and Twitter to show the latest posts on your Twitter and Instagram and motivate your visitors to follow you on those channels.

Step 10: Enable Email Subscription

Enable email signup form in your blog and ask the visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. Email your subscribers whenever you publish something in your blog. Sign up for an email marketing service such as MailChimp or SendGrid.

They give you free emailing on a list of up to 2000 contacts. MailChimp also offers a WordPress plugin to directly add the newsletter subscribers from your blog in the email list. So, whenever you publish something on your website, you might want to inform your audience about it. Emailing is a great way to do that.

Step 11: Publish Your Content

Since you have done the basic setup of your website, now it is time to publish your content on the website. Publish your content on the website and don’t forget to follow the SEO guidelines while doing it.

If you properly write your content and optimize it for the search engines you will see the organic traffic growing pretty fast on your website.

This is what everyone out there in the digital world is killing for — to be seen on the web. And if you can get that position on the search engine organically, nothing is like that.

Step 12: Promote Your Content

First of all when you have published the content on your website make sure you have shared it on all the social media channels you have the presence on. Social plugins you have installed on your website would help you do that in just a few clicks.

Step 13: Start Paid Ads

You can drive more traffic to your website by advertisement. All the major social media channels and search engines like Google and Bing offer opportunities for paid ads. Paid Advertisements can quickly bring more targeted traffic to your website.

Google Ads

Signup for Google Ads account and do some keyword research to see what people are searching for related to your blog subject. Promote your website via Google Ads.

Google Ads gives Rs. 2000/- Free Credit on signing up which you can use with your Rs. 500 Ad Budget to promote your website. Keep the lowest CPC bids so that you get more clicks and website visitors for your Ad budget.

With Google Ads, you can do both display and search ads. Also, you can show your ad banners on the entire Google network including YouTube.

Bing Ads

If your target audience is mostly on the yahoo and bing networks then you should do advertisements on Bing. For the reason that your audience uses the bing network for searches, they will see and engage with your Bing Ads rather than the Google Ads.

Facebook Ads

You can also choose to promote your website with Facebook ads. Target people who might be interested in your blog subject.

TwitterAds & LinkedIn Ads

If you want to reach out to more people on Twitter and LinkedIn you can choose to advertise on Twitter & LinkedIn. Though, Twitter and LinkedIn both are expensive as compared to Facebook Ads and Google Ads. But, if your target audience is on Twitter & LinkedIn you should for it.

Step 14: Create BackLinks

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking, popularity, and importance.

Google‘s description of its PageRank system, for instance, notes that “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.

So, try to get high-quality backlinks for your website by writing guest posts, directory submissions, link exchanges, etc.

All of this you can do in about a month’s time and doing this would give you hands-on experience in SEO, Google Ads, Website Optimization, Domain Registration, installing WordPress themes, installing and using WordPress plugins, making use of the Google Analytics data, Email Marketing, Facebook Ads, Social Media Marketing, and most importantly writing SEO optimised articles and researching keywords to write articles.

And all this added together covers more than half of the Digital Marketer’s job. But the discussion would not be complete unless we discuss the important components of digital marketing.

These components comprise the certifications of Google, Twitter, Bing, and HubSpot, etc. These certifications help you enhance your knowledge. Let’s see that as well.

Important Components of Digital Marketing

Below are the most basic and important components which a Digital Marketing Expert should know in and out:

Content Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Paid Search, also called Pay Per Click (PPC)
Content Automation
Influencer Marketing
Data-Driven Marketing
E-Commerce Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Display Marketing
Video Marketing
Mobile Marketing
Gaming Advertisements
Web Analytics and Reporting
Google Search Console

You will see that when you dedicate 3-4 hours daily for learning about Digital Marketing and about an hour to implement your learning on your website/blog then you are almost half-way there.

Mastering all the Digital Marketing Concepts, understanding and know-how of using the Digital Tools, and knowing the use of the Digital Marketing resources is one part of the Digital Marketing.

The second part is to make the strategy for any business you want to get involved with, for achieving its business objective, viz., branding, brand positioning, increasing revenue, upselling, cross-selling, lead generation, sign-ups, etc.

Digital Marketing Courses or Certifications to Enhance Your Digital Marketing Knowledge?

Digital Marketing is still an evolving industry and with new researches, new development, new technologies, new digital tools, new social media networks, new coding languages, it is certainly not possible to define a specific curriculum for it.

Anyone with a desire can become a Digital Marketer without any training. Unbelievable, isn’t it?

But, it’s true! There is a lot of free stuff available on the internet on different topics of digital marketing. You can read, understand, and evaluate your learning by implementing the same in your project.

But, people who want to become Digital Marketing Expert in less time can undergo professional training. Taking training from experts helps you to learn things better and faster.

Even you can enhance your Digital Marketing Skills through Google Certifications and HubSpot free certifications in different areas of Digital Marketing. Some of these courses are as follows:

Google Certifications

Below are some of Google’s Certifications which you can do on your own. It will help you enhance your knowledge in digital marketing and understand Google’s Advertising systems.

HubSpot’s Certifications

Below are some of HubSpot’s Certifications that you can do on your own. These certifications would help enhance your knowledge of digital marketing and its components in detail.

Bing Certifications

Unlike Google, Bing offers one certification which covers everything about the Bing advertisement. Note that Yahoo also uses the Bing platform for advertisements.

Accredited Professional Bing Ads Certification

Twitter Certifications

Certification from Twitter helps you understand the Twitter marketing system. It will also help you learn to use a Twitter Business account to advertise on Twitter.

Twitter Marketing Graduate

NOTE: All of the above-mentioned courses and certifications are absolutely FREE. But it takes a lot of time to prepare for these certifications.

Besides the above, there are courses available on Udemy, Lynda, and many other websites that you can refer to.

What Next?

Now the important question is: Would I Become a Digital Marketing Expert by doing these courses and Certifications?

So, the answer to that question is like this: Learning Digital Marketing is like learning to ride a bike. Besides the instructor’s guidance, you need to practice on your own, and test your driving skills on all the terrains.

Similarly, in Digital Marketing you need to apply your skills in different Industry Verticals to become a Digital Marketing Expert.

Practice, innovative thinking, and patience are the keys to Success in Digital Marketing.

The best thing about digital marketing is that you can begin learning and implementing your understanding practically simultaneously. It’s kind of DIY (Do-It-Yourself). You can start small by setting up a website/blog of your own.

All you need is a computer connected with the internet and spirit to learn.

Summing Up

Digital Marketing is all about strategy and execution. And consequently, the execution takes much more time than learning the concepts, tools and using resources.

Your experience increases with the amount of work you do and the time you productively spent in Digital Marketing.

Companies are looking for people who are experts in building up 360° integrated marketing plans and executing them successfully.

Having relevant work experience and certifications from Google, HubSpot, etc., would be an added advantage in getting employment opportunities.

I would love to hear from you if you like the content. If you have some suggestions to improve the content please let us know, because that will enrich the content. If you like the content and find it share-worthy, please share it with friends who can get benefited.

Furthermore, if you also want to know How to Become a Social Media Marketing Expert Read here.