Become a Digital Marketing Professional (in 2024)

How to Become a Digital Marketing Professional

Have you ever thought about starting a part-time career in digital marketing? If you’re an active user of social media and you spend a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter, chances are, you’d know the basics.

Digital marketing is a wide field, which means there are various areas for people can choose their career. Before I go further, let me clarify what digital marketing is exactly for those who are not internet-savvy.

Digital marketing is a way of attracting, engaging, and converting the prospects into customers using content, paid adverts, and outreach strategies.

The topic, however, is what you can do to become a digital marketing professional, which means, it doesn’t necessarily teach how to do digital marketing. If you want to learn how to get started with digital marketing, you should check the following articles:

The purpose of this article is to help guide you in starting a career in the digital marketing field.

How to Become a Digital Marketing Professional 2024

digital marketing for companies

Here are four steps you should take to become a digital marketing professional in 2024:

Choose Your Area of Interest

Digital marketing is a wide field; you can’t single-handedly cover all aspects of it. Therefore, it creates opportunities for others to participate and contribute to a multi-billion dollar’s worth of global industry and make a living.

It all begins by choosing your area of interest. There are several fields in digital marketing:

  • Online Advertising
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Web and Blog Content Writing
  • Video Production and Editing
  • Podcasts and Voiceovers
  • Web and Graphic Designing
  • Email Marketing
  • Conversion Rate Optimisation. (Mostly people don’t talk about it)

The above-mentioned fields are various areas of digital marketing that you can join in and become a part of this emerging industry.

The purpose of sharing a list of areas is that people don’t know what they can do in digital marketing. Most of them think that digital marketing means online advertising or all a digital marketer does is that he runs Facebook ads or Google ads.

I want to open your vision of digital marketing. You can choose from a number of options and still become a digital marketing professional. The basic idea is that marketing is changing, and therefore, digital marketing is the forefront of the newest style of marketing, which makes it attractive.

So to get started with your digital marketing professional campaign, you must first decide what you want to do in digital marketing.

Master Your Skill set

The second step is mastering your skill set, which means honing in on your art or craft. Once you’ve identified your craft or skill, pay close attention to becoming a skilled professional. You might have heard people saying that learning never stops, and it’s 100% true. So don’t be ashamed of asking questions, doing Google searches, joining courses, and attending seminars to learn your craft.

Here are different ways to master your skill:

  • Join Udemy and sign up for a course related to your digital marketing area.
  • Read books about your area of interest and learn from the best.
  • Consume relevant video content on YouTube and enhance your knowledge.
  • Subscribe to industry-related blogs and read content that belongs to your area of interest.
  • Listen to the podcasts on Stitcher, iTunes, or Google Podcast.
  • Buy an audio book from Audible and listen to it.
  • Or Even keep on reading my blog.

These are different ways to master your skill set. Don’t shy away from learning something new because we don’t know everything. The best way to learn more is to keep learning. There is a famous saying that “leaders are readers” which is about right. So if you want to be a leader in your niche or industry, you have to be a learner.

Build a Community

Digital marketing is incomplete with listening to the customers, interacting with the audience, and analyzing the feedback. Therefore, a community plays a vital role in running a digital marketing campaign. It’s not necessary that everyone would agree with this point. A lot of advertisers run Facebook ads and they don’t care what people think or say about their ad units. If ads work, they are okay with it, and if they don’t work, they make changes and keep doing it until it works out.

The lack of empathy is a disastrous move in digital marketing. Utilize every chance to interact and communicate with the audience whether it is a retweet on Twitter, comment on a Facebook group, or a comment on YouTube. If you don’t value people’s feedback and messages, you won’t understand what they’re going through or what they are facing. Building a community takes you closer to your audience and helps you understand people better.

A successful digital marketing professional would want more comments, more interactions, and more emails from the audience. Otherwise, there is no point in creating content and try to help out people.

Use Facebook Live

With over 2.6 billion users, Facebook is one of the huge online communities where a good presence can do wonders for your business. One of the important feature which can help digital marketers specially is the use of Facebook Live. Checkout my detailed post on Facebook Live for detailed briefings.

Market Your Personal Brand

This might be the most simplest article on helping in becoming a digital marketing professional. All I’m conveying to you is what a lot of digital marketers don’t even consider. They would rather learn how to run Google ads and that’s it.

I run Google ads, Facebook ads, write articles, make videos, consume content, reply to the comments, and interact with people on social media. All these things not just contribute to my digital marketing campaign, but they also market my personal brand.

If you’re learning your digital marketing craft, but not building your personal brand, you won’t be successful the way someone with a personal brand would be. I have built my personal brand (Aliraza.co) and you can see that people associate my personal brand with me all the time. When they introduce me, they talk about aliraza.co as well.

So, somehow, I market my blog and my blog markets me. The reason I included this point is that it’s necessary to market your skill or craft. The identification of skill and becoming good at it are not the only traits you should acquire, but you should also learn about building your brand.

Read : Why I like my personal Blog so much

The benefit of building a personal brand is that it would help you utilize the digital marketing skill that you learned or honed in along the way. Plus, you’d get more reach and attention when you’re associated with your personal brand because people are likely to remember your name, face, and URL. People often forget someone they hired through Fiverr or Twitter, but they would remember if they bookmarked your website in the browser.

Read : How to Build Your Personal Brand


Faq

Is Digital Marketing a good career?

With more and more brands increase their online spending and Digital Media has crossed Traditional Media in countries. With ever increasing demand of digital marketing it seems to be one of the most favourite choice of career.

How long does it take to become a digital marketer?

Marketing field is ever learning. You always keep on learning and experimenting new things. However there are many online courses offering digital marketing certification with ranging from 3 to 6 months of study with experience.

What is the qualification for digital marketing?

Although many universities globally & locally have started teaching digital marketing as part of degree but majority doesn’t offer a complete specialisation. There is no specific degree requirement as such as well.

What are good ways to learn to become the best digital marketer?

Learning and Testing are the main key things in learning digital marketing. However you can do Google Ads Certification and other courses to become a marketer. I also recommend to follow digital marketing blogs as well for regular learning.

Do you need a degree to be a digital marketer?

No, I repeat, no. You don’t need a specific degree to be a digital marketer but if you don’t have prior knowledge in this field, then a degree helps you in improving your command over the subject of digital marketing.

Can we learn digital marketing online?

Yes there are many institutes who offer digital marketing courses. Even I do have my own PPC & SEO online courses.

How do I start a career in digital marketing?

Follow Industry leaders, create your online presence, learn & test marketing. Making connections is a plus. Personally Im focusing on personal branding to get recognition in digital marketing.


Final Thought

I suggest building a personal brand whether you’re trying to become a social media marketing expert or a content writer in the field of digital marketing.

I’ve written articles on personal branding, which you can check out for more details on the importance of personal branding.

Digital marketing is a growing field and you aspire to be a digital marketing professional, just pick the right area and be a learner; you’ll succeed.

All the best.

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About the Author: Ali Raza

An Internet Entrepreneur who converts visitors into customers; A Google & Microsoft Advertising Professional with years of experience in Internet Marketing, Social Media and Blogging.

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