Digital Marketing

7 Steps to Become a Digital Marketer

By Moses Siringi June 27, 2019 Form Image 1507 Views

Become a Digital Marketer

Digital marketing is an integral part of any organization. It helps in guiding the activities and growth of the organization. As a result, most organizations interweave the digital marketing strategy in their operations. As a marketing marketer, you need to learn some tips on how to become a digital marketer to compete favorably in the industry.

In this era, it is good to plan for your digital marketing efforts in good time. The most important thing is to learn the key elements of digital marketing and how to implement the strategy. This forms our basis for discussing the 7 steps to become a digital marketer.

If you have been having the desire to become a digital marketer, you will get the secret of preparing by going through this piece of content. You have to go an extra mile from what you get in traditional marketing.

This article will help you to build a powerful digital marketing strategy. However, it is important to start by leaning the meaning and importance of digital marketing before we move further.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Digital Marketing Strategy

The digital marketing strategy defines how a firm will achieve its objective by using digital platforms, channels, and thinking. It prioritizes audiences, stipulates clear strategies, recognizes the behaviors and needs of customers, and details all the platform requirements and channel utilization.

In simple, the digital marketing strategy will clearly set out your plans and use the digital platform to remain relevant all the time. The intersections of digital marketing exist with both CRM and branding. It also boosts customer care, customer experience, and user experience.

You can embed the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence into your digital product experience. Apart from the traditional marketing assets, the content strategy also encompasses the levers for growth.

Digital innovation is creating new experiences, products, and services. All these things are worth your marketing efforts. This background information will help you to understand how to become a digital marketer.

Benefits of Implementing a Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Brand:

Once you become a digital marketer, you stand to gain from the long list of benefits that comes with implementing this strategy. It gives you the ability to access a massive market at very affordable prices. It is better than TV and print advertisement because it is a truly personalized marketing strategy.

The primary benefit of digital marketing is that you can reach a targeted audience in a measurable way and at a cost-effective price. The other pros are that digital marketing drives online sales and increases brand loyalty.

Here is a summary of the top benefits of digital marketing;

Global Reach:

Global Reach

Digital marketing will help you establish new markets for your goods and services. The good thing with this marketing strategy is that it does not have regional boundaries. You can reach out to anyone irrespective of their location.

It is an excellent approach if you have products that can sell all over the world. You will reach to this global audience at a very small fraction of investment. You can learn better how to get this global reach once you become a digital marketer.

Low Cost:

Low Cost

Most business leaders will tell you that marketing is an expensive endeavor. However, an effectively targeted and well-planned marketing campaign will help you get to the target audience at a lower cost when you compare to the traditional methods of marketing.

The cost will depend on the type of digital marketing strategy that you choose. In most cases, all you will need is a stable internet connection and a digital marketing strategist. It is among the most affordable but highly effective digital marketing strategies.

Measurable and Tractable Results:

It is meaningless to have a digital marketing strategy that you cannot measure the results. You need to know the success rate of your current strategies and take any corrective actions where there is a need. The good thing with digital marketing is that its results are tractable and measurable.

You can use web analytics among the other online metrics tools to determine whether your campaigns are effective or not. These tools will give you detailed information about how customers are using your website. Also, it will help you to determine how your advertising is fairing on.

With web analytics, you will be able to know the amount of money that you are making from every digital platform. Once you know what is working for your brand, it will help you to set up the right digital marketing strategies.

If you are planning to become a digital marketer, you should be willing to learn how to use some of these tools. It will help you to succeed in your endeavors of implementing an effective digital marketing strategy.

Personalization:

If your website is linked to the database of your customer, whenever a person visits your website, you can use targeted offers to greet them. As they continue buying from you, you will be able to refine your customer profile and effectively market to them.

Openness:

Once you engage in social media and begin to manage it carefully, you can create your reputation and build customer loyalty for being easy to engage with. Digital marketing is something that supports a high level of openness in the strategy.

Social Currency:

With digital marketing, you will be able to create engaging campaigns using various forms of rich media content. These campaigns can gain a high level of social currency on the internet. It becomes viral as it passes from one user to another.

High Conversion Rates:

If you own an active website, your customers will only be a few clicks away from the completion of a purchase. Unlike the other media that need users to rise and make a call or go shopping, digital marketing tends to be immediate and seamless.

With this in mind, we can now look at the steps to become a digital marketer. These steps will make sure that you succeed in this profession.

1. Determine the Potential of the Strategy:

Potential of the Strategy

The status quo has changed significantly and you cannot avoid going digital. However, your strategy should be attractive, competitive, and current. To become a digital marketer, you have to determine the channels that your customers are using for engagement.

The other thing you need to learn is what your competitors are doing to become transformative in the digital world. Also, you need to learn how discoverable your brand is and the number of inbound leads that have been converted to sales.

If you are not aware of this, you could already be lagging behind. You should determine the potential of your strategy before you embark on this journey.

2. Define Your Role in Digital Marketing to Become a Digital Marketer:

The first thing that you need to understand is the contribution of digital marketing to your brand. It should not appear as a laundry list for your marketing objectives. It should present a series of intentional choices and a deliberate vision that indicated the role of digital marketing to the organization.

This step is crucial for anyone who wants to become a digital marketer. You have to realize the relationship that your digital marketing efforts have with the other elements on the ecosystem. In most cases, these elements include media, product innovation, customer care or support, CRM, UX, CX, content, marketing, data, and brand.

Once you note down the available opportunities and what is at stake, you will be able to clarify your focus quickly. Basing on this evaluation, you will be able to develop our KPIs (key performance indicators) that will communicate to your executive team the impact of digital to your brand.

3. Get to Understand the Target Audience:

Target Audience

At this point, you should create robust digital profiles for your target audience. You should know how they behave, what they want, and how to interact with them together with anyone else who they interact with.

You have to map the customer journeys in detail and identify the value exchanges along with them. In most cases, the profiles begin with traditional segmentation but you should go a few steps higher to identify content, interactions, and behaviors, experience, and functionality requirements.

With several customers especially the B2B ones, you will not necessarily build the digital profiles around the precise description of who your customers are. It has to revolve around the objectives that your target audience are trying to resolve.

This needs to be done early enough if you want to remain cognizant of the needs of your customers. In addition, this will help you to match your objectives so that you can meet them. You cannot become a digital marketer unless you have a clear understanding of your target audience.

4. Always Take the Multi-Channel Approach:

It is a wise move to create modern channel strategies such as email, social, web, and search. Take advantage of these key channels and activate them. Specific touchpoints and platforms may call for the use of unique ‘channel characters.

You need to identify how you can best use them for your business or brand and what you may internally need to pull it off.  There are a few points that you need to note as you implement this step.

The first thing is to view social as a major sales driver and not just a customer care channel or media. Think about how you can use social to meet the goals of your business. Have clarity about the search by incorporating organic SEO to build your brand credibility, fend competitors, or drive web traffic.

You also need to think fresh about your website. You need to position your site to convert, obtain, and attract leads. Nurture the potential, existing, and former customers to effectively use marketing automation platforms and email.

5. Identify the Resources you need to become a Digital Marketer:

become a Digital Marketer

You have to use all the information that we have discussed above to determine what you will need to execute the digital marketing strategy. Include your budget, headcount, and the marketing technology system in your plan.

Technology acts as the marketing interface and the pipes that connect the various pieces together. The other crucial element to becoming a digital marketer is governance. You need to build playbooks and guidelines for people, tools, and processes.

The challenge with most companies is that they don’t give governance the attention that it deserves. You need it so that everyone can know his roles and their expected contribution to the success of the program. Besides, if you are a complex and global entity, you should establish market types to assist local leaders to tell their current position and discover what they require to grow in a different direction.

Read more: How to choose a Digital Marketing agency in India

6. Know How to Create an Execution Roadmap:

To become a digital marketer, you should prioritize and organize initiatives into a roadmap that will help you move from the strategy stage to the implementation phase. It can even be phased and paced over 6, 12, or 2 months.

You should neither be too cautious nor too slow. Besides, you should also not wait for the annual planning cycle. You should be agile and ready with the alternative scenarios that are available.

It may take time for an organization to implement its digital transformation. However, the nimblest driver should be marketing and should be ready to work on the opportunities that are available.

7. Support Your Digital Transformation:

The last step you need to take is identifying how digital marketing efforts can go beyond implementing the routine job of efficiency. It should play the role of a powerful lever in the new dispensation. It could be through the utilization of creativity to tell stories, the innovation of digital services or allowing the voice of the customer to impact media spend.

You can also use creativity to discover new audiences and uncover engagement opportunities. The digital platform can help you discover new engagement opportunities with both contractors and customers. It can also help you to enhance your current relationships.

Conclusion:

Aspiring to become a digital marketer is a good thing because most organization prioritize online marketing. Besides, most customers are shopping online and you will remain behind if you don’t go digital.

Once you become a digital marketer, you will be able to embrace the digital strategy. An effective digital marketer should implement all the seven steps to success. It will help you create and execute the best digital marketing strategy for your organization.

You should clearly understand how digital marketing can influence your organization. Also, put in place measures to assess and benchmark the effectiveness of your digital efforts. You should be able to drive the digital transformation through the above steps.

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