How to become a digital marketer: where to start and what specialization to choose

A digital marketer is a specialist who is responsible for the appearance of a company on the Internet. His responsibilities include the execution of the financial plan, customer acquisition, and lead generation, market and competitor research, analytics, creation and maintenance of a company image.

Depending on the size and goals of the company, a digital marketer can perform different functions, for example, engage in search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), email marketing (newsletters), web analytics, targeted advertising, public relations or manage a team of such specialists.

But mostly a digital marketer manages a team of different specialists, understanding each of the areas of digital marketing.

There are a number of specialized fields in digital marketing. We will list the most popular of them.

An SMM specialist promotes brands on social media.

What are the responsibilities of this specialist?

• manage communities in social networks: write posts, select illustrations, and videos;
  
• run advertising campaigns;
  
• establish communication with the audience and eliminate negative feedback.
  

An email marketer promotes a brand and interacts with users via emails.

What are the responsibilities of this specialist?

• develop an email marketing strategy;
  
• prepare emails and motivate users to leave contacts and make a purchase;
  
• collect and segment the list of subscribers;
  
• use content distribution tools;
  
• analyze the results of marketing campaigns.
  

A web analyst gathers and analyzes the information on website visitors and social media of a company.

What are the responsibilities of this specialist?

• use basic analytics tools, such as Google Analytics;
  
• analyze large data massives;
• develop resource improvement strategies.
  

This specialist configures targeted advertising, that is, runs advertising campaigns in search engines, on social media and various websites using advertising networks such as Google Ads.

What are the responsibilities of this specialist?

• develop a targeted advertising strategy;
  
• plan a budget, configure and run advertising campaigns on social media;
  
• analyze the effectiveness of campaigns;
  
• work with mind maps;
  
• create banners.
  

This specialist builds brand interaction with the audience, forms and maintains a positive reputation of the company.

What are the responsibilities of this specialist?

• develop a PR strategy;
  
• make a plan for interacting with the media and bloggers;
  
• distribute the budget;
  
• deal with PR and marketing tools;
  
• build processes of reputation management on the Internet.
  

There is no particular description of the tasks of a digital marketer; it all depends on the company staff and the field of activity. In one company, a digital marketer manages a department of five specialists, and in another one, he does everything with his own hands in five areas.

However, there are several tasks that each digital marketer performs:

It is important to understand that you don't need to have a university degree of a marketer to work in digital marketing because the knowledge here is assessed not by diploma, but by actual skills. At the same time, knowledge of digital marketing becomes obsolete very quickly, and you need to continuously learn new things.

Choose a direction that you are really interested in doing. There are digital marketing tasks for everyone's taste. And in order to understand what you like best, you need to learn the basics of digital marketing, that is, to figure out how marketing generally works, what areas exist and what specific tasks are performed by different specialists.

Nevertheless, you need to have certain hard skills and soft skills to work in digital marketing.

Hard skills are professional knowledge and skills that are necessary to perform basic responsibilities. A digital marketer should be able to and know:

• marketing basics;
  
• plan a budget, configure campaigns in Google AdWords;
  
• create portraits of the target audience, develop USP and marketing strategies;
  
• master the skills of targeted advertising and search engine optimization;
  
• compose understandable and clear technical requirement specifications;
  
• create content strategies;
  
• allocate the marketing budget and monitor the effectiveness of its use.
  
  

Soft skills are also important for a digital marketer; these are non-specialized skills that are not related to job responsibilities directly:

• listen to people, hold a dialogue, defend your point of view;
  
• look for information and learn from the experience of colleagues;
  
• plan the workflow, set deadlines;
  
• form a team, set goals and control the process.
  

There are a lot of online courses on the Internet that teach the profession of a digital marketer. Use our tips to choose really high-quality courses.

As we have already said, there are many different courses on the Internet; choose the one that suits you best by the combination of different factors. It is highly likely that you generally will not want to study digital marketing online, but you will want to get a full-time education. If it's convenient for you to study online, the choice is huge.