A Digital Marketing Career Path – Is it worth the effort?
If you are a student who is just graduating, or yet to graduate, digital marketing is a great career path for you, no doubt about it.
I have been a digital marketer for more than 10 years now and I have worked in amazing organizations like Razorpay, Practo & Instamojo at very high salaries. (Watch my video on how to get a high paying digital marketing job).
If you are fresher who has just graduated, you can get a digital marketing job by showing skills and experience with your side projects.
However, if you are already working in some other domain, is it still worth learning digital marketing and changing your career?
This article has the answer you are looking for (make sure you read till the end).
I did not start as a Digital Marketer
I keep telling people that I have 10+ years of digital marketing experience. I have been doing digital marketing since 2008.
However, I did not start learning digital marketing so that I could get a digital marketing job. I only wanted to start and grow a blog and that’s why I was forced to learn digital marketing.
When I started my motorcycle blog BikeAdvice, it did not grow by its own. To grow it I needed digital marketing expertise. I started learning content, email, social media, SEO and ads. By 2011, the blog was getting more than a million page views per month. You can learn more about my journey in my TEDx talk.
By 2013, I figured out that a lot of people need digital marketing and that’s when digital marketing jobs started coming up.
At that time, since it was a new job opening in most organizations, experienced people in digital marketing were not available. NIIT was one of the first institutes to come up with digital marketing courses and most of the people did not know where to learn digital marketing.
So you see, I did not learn digital marketing to get a digital marketing job. I learned digital marketing to grow my business.
Grow Your Business with Digital Marketing
If you learn digital marketing, it doesn’t need to be to get a digital marketing job. In most of the other fields such as Law, Medicine, Engineering… you learn them so that you can get a job in that field. Yes, some people start businesses in the same field in the long run, but the return on investment is not immediate.
However, if you know digital marketing, you can use it to grow your business. And you can learn digital marketing for 2-3 months and immediately start using the knowledge to grow your business.
I’m pretty sure that your idea is not be in a job forever. Everyone dreams of starting their own company some day or the other. Being an entrepreneur gives you freedom, power and the ability to create a life that you want.
Digital marketing will be the key to grow your business. The time, money and energy that you invest in learning digital marketing will never go to waste because this learning will help you in business growth in the future.
Even if you do not plan to start your own business, you need to brand and market yourself as an expert – in any field that you are in. A doctor who knows digital marketing can market his personal brand and clinic better than other doctors.
A lawyer can setup a law firm and grow it using digital marketing. An app developer can spread word about his app development skills using digital marketing.
Learning digital marketing is key to growing your personal brand. And you can grow your personal brand no matter which field you are specializing in.
Grow Your Personal Brand with Digital Marketing
If you know digital marketing, you can grow your personal brand with digital marketing. You can start a blog, write and publish articles, have a social media presence and even sell something online through your personal brand.
It doesn’t matter which career path you are in. You could be an AI engineer, app developer, lawyer, dietician, dentist or anything at all.
If you know digital marketing, you can get customers and clients through the web. Learning digital marketing is not always to have a digital marketing career path.
Digital marketing is not a career based skill. It’s a life skill. It’s like communication, public speaking body language and sales.
The better you can market yourself, or your products through the digital medium, the faster your will grow in your career – no matter what you do.
Digital Marketing is a Life Skill
So what does it take to learn digital marketing? It might look like a very complex subject, but digital marketing can be broken down into the following 7 simple components.
- Understanding audience and market needs
- Creating content for your audience
- Ranking your content on the search engines
- Getting your content to spread via social media
- Driving traffic through paid advertising
- Gaining a following and engaging your audience
- Generating sales of your product through persuasion
If you learn all the above skills, it’s a super power.
The whole world is now connected via the internet and we have the power to communicate through digital channels.
Most of the people know only how to communicate (1 to 1) communication. At the max, they will be communicating with a group of people (on WhatsApp or Facebook).
If you learn digital marketing, you can communicate to thousands or even millions of people through the digital medium. Digital marketing is a force multiplier for your communication.
These very words that I am writing as a blog post is being read by 1000s of people. That’s because I have learned how to apply the above 7 components properly through learning and experience.
If you have the power to communicate to a large audience, you can start a movement, start a business, grow a brand, influence people and even persuade them to take action. This is unfair advantage.
That’s why Digital Marketing is not a career skill, but a life skill. So if you are thinking whether it will be worth your time learning digital marketing, my answer is Yes. Even if you do not end up getting a digital marketing job, your learning will help you in many ways.
Invest in Learning Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a deep subject. I still feel that I have a lot of areas to cover after learning and doing digital marketing for the past 10 years.
Sometimes, it might even unsettle you to see all the moving parts of a digital marketing campaign. But it is a subject worth learning.
Most of the people will not care about digital marketing and they will never have this super power. You are at least investing some time in learning about learning digital marketing (reading this post).
If you are looking to learn digital marketing from me, you can check out my Digital Marketing Mastery Bundle.
Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju