How To Make a career in Digital Marketing: The best available tools and free resources online
Digital Marketing is proving to be a great area to build your career on. But unfortunately, there is a lot of misconception and half knowledge about building your Career in Digital Marketing. The domain includes multiple specialized fields, each of whom needs to be learned and mastered separately.
Luckily, there are a lot of free resources available online. All one needs is a overall understanding of the digital marketing domain and a willingness to learn. We present a consolidated list of all the branches of digital marketing and the tools you need to know to master them. In addition, we also add the free resources available online where you can read up further to develop your skills.
Understand Analytics. Start with Google Analytics for building your Career in Digital Marketing
Marketing or Product Management or Editorial or Sales – whichever role you pick to work in Digital world, this is the first starting point. Most people in the digital world, jump this step and land straight into their respective job. This leaves them with poor foundation, one that most fail to improve.
Analytics not only helps you measure website visitors. It helps you measure the efforts of your marketing. It helps you communicate with other digital person in a language that it measurable.
Bigger companies have started keeping a separate division of web analytics – a lucrative field of digital marketing if you love analysis and strategy. Google Analytics has some useful free online courses that not only helps you understand the basics but also adds a lot of value to your resume. We will recommend, go for those certifications as the first thing if you wish to be a Digital Marketer.
Understand Email Marketing
One of the most oldest and effective form of digital marketing is Email Marketing. The process includes sending specific Creative Emails to customers’ email ID to make them aware of your product or service offerings. However, it needs to be understood that the process of email marketing has evolved over years and in recent days sending emails to people who have not shared their consent to receive such mails is viewed strictly by most servers. This will result into your mails landing in their SPAM folder.
Tools like MailChimp are a good start to understand what works and how. Read up about the best practices in Email Marketing, about how to frame subject line, how to do mail merge etc. Also spend some time to learn how to segregate and maintain a contact list database. Maintaining a database the right way is the key to winning email marketing.
HubSpot Email marketing course, available for Free on HubSpot and Udemy, can be a good start to understand the basics.
Understand SEO
SEO, the most popular branch of digital marketing, is the process of optimizing a website or webpage or content in a way that it appears to a user when he searches for a relevant information on search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo. While most people will confuse SEO with inserting keywords in articles, the overall process is much bigger than that. SEO is broadly categorized into On Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.
SEO is a wide arena of work and requires a lot of work to master. Unless you are looking to make a career in SEO specifically, it will be ok if you know the basics and how to measure them.A few websites that we recommend you read regularly are The MOZ Blog, Neil Patel and Search Engine Land.
Also, learn to use a few tools. Most of them are free and easy to use. Knowing them will help you be on top of Digital Marketing Strategy building, even if you are not working as a SEO specialist. This extends from building content strategy to defining the overall Marketing strategy. No matter whichever branch of Digtal Marketing you are working on, this will add a lot of value to your resume and overall skill set.
A few tools that we strongly suggest you to check out are Ahrefs SEO toolbar, SEO Web Page Analyzer, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker and Keywordtool.io.
Understand Social Media Marketing
Building your company presence in terms of ‘pages’ on social media, communicating with your users through those pages and thereby building a community around them, is called Social media marketing. Popular social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc. A social media marketing can also include paid processes to advertise your pages or products to other users to improve your follower base.
The best place to start is probably Facebook Blueprint. There are a lot of free certification and courses if you wish to learn the basics of Facebook marketing – and that covers a lot of ground for social media marketing.
Learn to use Basic Tools
Digital companies are mostly lean teams. Despite the increasing investments in digital, the team sizes are comparatively small. This leaves with very little backup when a team member is on leave. That creates an excellent opportunity to prove your worth and get into the limelight. It also positions you for the next big role. Here are a few key tools you need to know to save your team on a rainy day.
Photoshop: You do not need designer level skills in Photoshop if you are willing to work as a Digital marketer. But knowing the basics of Photoshop will always help you guide the designers better by speaking in their language. This also can help you fix minor issues without having to circle it back to the design team every time – something your boss and colleagues may appreciate.
CANVA: If you ever find yourself in a spot where you are a single man army handling end to end marketing activities including design, CANVA may come to your rescue. It makes life very simple for digital marketers and helps reduce dependency.
Buffer: This is a very handy tool to schedule posts on social media. It also comes with insights and analytics of its own. There are also similar other tools. Knowing any one of them will be good enough to start.
HTML Basics: No one will expect you to delve into the codes. But knowing the bare minimum basics about HTML is always very helpful when you are trying to understand SEO or when you are asking your developer to install Google Tag Manager. Most marketers get a mental block when they see a couple of lines of codes. Do not be one of them.
Conversion.ai: This is a paid tool, unfortunately. But you can spend a couple of month’s subscription from your pocket to get in and learn about the working know how. It is a content building tool build on the latest AI technology. It comes very handy when you want to frame the right communication language. We forecast, there will be more tools like Conversion.ai soon in the market. Being hands on, gives you an edge.
GT Metrics, SEM Rush, AHREF: These are free measuring tools that gives you a insights about your site’s health, speed, SEO scores. You will be a good marketer only when you know the overall impact you are making or if there is anything that is blocking your efforts.
There are a lot of articles, study materials that can help you understand the above tools. But you will have to spend time reading them, understanding them and mastering them. A good Digital Marketer may not be master of all the tools but will be at least familiar with the basic know how or is hands on with all of them. Try to be like them.