Digital marketing is not hard to learn, but it requires patience and focused effort. If you’re unfamiliar with paid advertising, web analytics, search engines, etc., you will feel a bit overwhelmed at the beginning. Start slowly, focus on one thing, and you will succeed.
If you want to be a great digital marketer, the fundamentals are indeed manageable. But one attribute that is often indicative of great marketing ability is the ability to adapt to changing conditions with speed and skill. The recent rise of AI and tools like Chat GPT might be a good example. If you are able to do this, you will find that your success as a marketer is almost guaranteed.
In this fast-paced post, you’ll learn the intricacies of digital marketing. You’ll also learn the best roadmap to understanding digital marketing and how to get a digital marketing job after attaining some proficiency.
Do You Need a Degree In Digital Marketing?
This is one of the first questions that most aspiring digital marketers ask before their foray into digital marketing. However, if you’re not transitioning from another job into digital marketing, you may try getting a degree in digital marketing or any other marketing-related field.
Instead of a degree in digital marketing, you can always take a Bootcamp to get your feet wet in the trade. Most boot camps last for a couple of weeks, and they teach a couple of digital marketing skills, including social media marketing, email marketing, and programmatic advertising.
What Does It Take to be a Digital Marketer?
It’s virtually impossible to give an objective answer to the question: ‘is digital marketing hard?’ Depending on your previous employment and your average work rate, digital marketing may be a tasking change or a piece of cake.
To get an idea of how difficult digital marketing can be, we’ll list the crucial skills of a digital marketer and how you can be an excellent digital marketer while lacking some essential skills.
Firstly, here are some of the skills of an excellent digital marketer that you may or may not need, depending on your ambitions.
1. Digital Marketing Essentials
This is a necessary skill for all aspiring digital marketers, regardless of their interests or areas of specialization.
The essentials of digital marketing explain the primary goal of digital marketing and why most companies launch digital marketing campaigns.
You need to know this, even if you won’t be creating your digital marketing agency. If you don’t know the primary purpose of a marketing campaign, you can’t work as an effective digital marketer.
Google Digital Garage is an excellent place to start learning about the essentials of digital marketing. You can also get some free Hubspot courses on Udemy, depending on how well your search is.
If you’re aspiring to be a digital marketer, you surely need to get your feet wet with the essentials.
2. SEO
If you’ve ever had or managed a website, you should have heard about SEO. It stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it refers to the practice of trying to rank your website high up on Google.
SEO is an invaluable skill in any digital marketer’s arsenal, but you can fare well as a digital marketer with a below average knowledge of SEO. Depending on the caliber of companies you’ll be working with, you may be okay with expertise in PPC advertising, for example.
Learning SEO takes time, patience, and lots of practice. Before you can comfortably take on an SEO project, you must have tested with some sample websites to confirm your expertise. There are hundreds of SEO courses on Udemy, and you can also take an SEO Bootcamp if that works for you.
With the demand for proficient SEO experts increasing over the last few years, taking an SEO course may be the most rewarding investment you’ll ever make in your digital marketing tourney.
3. PPC
PPC refers to buying ad spaces on apps and websites. It’s a sister to SEO, and it also helps to generate leads for websites.
In SEO, you don’t pay the search engine to show your website in the search result. However, PPC is another story. Have you ever heard of Facebook or Google ads?
These platforms provide a means to sell ads to a target audience to market a company’s product or service.
In a regular PPC course, you’ll learn how to target the best audience for a company’s product to get the most customers for the least possible amount of money.
A proficiency in paid advertising or PPC can get you a rewarding career in digital marketing, and learning it alongside SEO makes you a rare gem in the digital world.
The rise of programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising is the buying and selling of online advertising via an automated system.
Automation makes transactions more effective. It streamlines the process and consolidates your digital advertising efforts in one technology platform.
This also opens a whole new world of job opportunities.
4. Email and Social Media Marketing
While these are distinct fields in digital marketing, they’re well-related enough to be grouped in this case.
Email marketing is the practice of collecting user emails and sending them mails crafted carefully to build a dedicated customer base.
Social media marketing is nurturing a social media site to reach the highest number of people to create new customers for a business.
The synergy between these two skills makes an insanely effective digital marketer.
What Should You Do After Learning Digital Marketing?
Since most digital marketing tutorials recommend that students create their digital marketing agencies, most people tend to gravitate towards launching an agency after completing their training or Bootcamp.
However, this may not be the best option for you. Since you’re making your first entry into the digital marketing world, you need to work with other agencies to manage an agency practically.
You can check our available remote SEO jobs at ArdorSEO if you gravitate towards the SEO field. Otherwise, you can check out this Australian digital marketing agency that does programmatic advertising.
Working with these agencies will get your feet wet in digital marketing, showing you how to work in synergy with other digital marketing agencies to nail the company’s goals.
Will AI Replace Digital Marketers?
AI is transforming the digital marketing landscape with its capability to automate a large portion of the work done by digital marketers. According to an article from AMarketology.com, marketers needn’t worry about being replaced by Artificial Intelligence.
AI is still in its early stages and digital marketers will continue to be important for a long time as AI advances. Furthermore, there are many creative tasks that AI cannot perform such as developing strategies, engaging with customers and creating content that resonates with the target audience.
At the end of the day, digital marketing is rapidly changing and evolving. As a digital marketer, you must always stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in order to stay ahead of your competition. Keep learning new things and explore different opportunities to expand your expertise in the field of digital marketing.
Conclusion: Is Digital Marketing Hard?
As hinted in this article, it depends on how you define hard. Digital marketing is such a broad field that it’s virtually impossible to estimate its difficulty.
If you don’t like too much work, then pick and focus on a specific niche in digital marketing.
As digital marketing is a changing field, it’d be best to always focus on the latest digital marketing trends and updates to keep your skills relevant.
