What is Required to Become a Successful Digital Marketer?

Digital marketing is one of the hottest topics in the industry nowadays. Today people are online. Global internet usage raised rapidly which opens a new door for business owners to increase revenue. They started implementing digital marketing for their businesses to grow online. This has created a huge demand for digital marketing and digital marketers.

Are you passionate about digital marketing? Do you want to become a successful digital marketer? Do you want to know the key factors for achieving this? If yes, this article is for you and it is very important to understand before getting into the world of digital marketing.

In this article, I’m briefly discussing how to focus effectively on digital marketing as a career and a few factors which will really help anyone to become a successful digital marketer.

What is digital marketing?

In simpler words, digital marketing is the utilization of digital technology to achieve marketing goals. Most people say that marketing is just a promotion of products or services. Do you really agree with that? No, marketing is not just selling something to make a profit. It’s trust and attachment that you are building with the customers. The right product speaks for itself and reaches the people.

Before getting into digital marketing, let’s understand marketing first. There are several ways to define marketing.

Marketing is the process of selling the products or services of a company to the customer.  It is also defined as the process of understanding your customers, building and maintaining relationships with them, or the process of getting people interested in your company’s product or service.

There are two types of marketing, Traditional and Digital.

Traditional Marketing– Newspapers, Television, Radio, Pamphlets, Magazines, etc

Digital Marketing– Social Media, Search Engines, Websites, Blogs, Emails, etc

The key differences between traditional and digital marketing:

Traditional marketing can reach a wide number of audiences but very few likely turn into potential customers as it fails to reach a particular category of people who are interested in that particular product or service at that particular time. But digital marketing can easily target the people very effectively who are looking for a particular product or service and they are more likely to turn into potential customers who are more reliable and cost-effective.

In traditional marketing, there is no control over the budget, and hard to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) but in digital marketing, everything is under control and can easily measure the ROI.

In traditional marketing, there is no control over the budget, and hard to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) but in digital marketing, everything is under control and can easily measure the ROI

(It doesn’t mean that the traditional ways of marketing are always not effective. It has its own benefits over digital ways. For example, if the product or service is more generic then traditional marketing is really good to reach wider audiences and turn them into potential customers)

Importance of communication skills:

Communication skill is very essential for any marketing success. Marketing won’t happen without proper communication. Even though you have a very good product or the best service but if you fail to communicate with the audience it is of no use. Many times, the average quality product hits good sales than the better ones just because of the way they communicate with the audience.

Factors that are required to become a successful digital marketer:

One of the best-selling authors and marketing experts; Beth Comstock, Vice-Chair of General Electric said “You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything”

The three major key factors are;

1. CATT funnel and framework.
2. Integrated Digital Marketing
3. Personal Branding

CATT funnel and framework

In simply it is represented as; Wealth = n ^ CATT
where, n = Niche
C = Content
A = Attention
T = Trust
T =Transaction

Niche - The product or service that you are providing or where you are good at. The selection of a niche is a very important aspect and one needs to be very careful about this to become a successful digital marketer. There must be some demand or hungriness that your service must be capable of fulfilling in much better ways.

Content - Content is something that you are going to create to drive traffic to your niche. The content should be something that grabs the audience’s attention that makes them take action like signing up for a newsletter, creating a new account, providing email and phone numbers for an Ebook, etc. The idea here is to offer something for free to get a few details of the prospect.

Attention– Driving attention towards the content. In simple it is traffic that drives the audience using different channels like social media, SEO, the mouth of the word, referrals, Ads, etc.

Trust - This is the most important phase in the funnel. Here you are developing trust with the audience through the product quality or service. And it is very important to look at the feedback, respond to their queries, re-targeting, etc.

Transaction - Here in this phase you are converting the audience into potential customers using different sales methods.

Integrated Digital Marketing

This is one of the major techniques for becoming a successful digital marketer. The name integrated itself says combined. A single piece of digital marketing method doesn’t work efficiently. Digital marketing success is a combination of different methods that helps in building the community. The different digital marketing methods involve email marketing, paid ads, social media marketing (SMM), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, etc.

Concentrating only one or two of the above fails to generate the leads and finally ends up with very less or no results in most cases. When these different methods are used altogether you can able to get more quality leads.

Let’s say you have collected a bunch of emails and directly start sending the emails to promote the product or service or to invite them to your blog without knowing whether they are interested in that kind of content or not. What happens next? The people are not going to open your mail and if they open, they are not likely to visit your blog or purchase from you as it seems irrelevant to them. There are already a ton of junk emails in everyone’s inbox/spam and you are going to be one of them.

Finally, the results are not satisfactory and all your efforts went in vain. Why did this really happen? Because you are concentrated only on email marketing and there no is no proper usage of integrated digital marketing. People will not visit your blog/site unless you are familiar with or known to them. Even though you have collected emails and tried to drive traffic but no use. The same scenario follows for the rest of the methods.

So how to overcome this? Integrated Digital Marketing is the solution.

For example, let’s say you have to work for a dietician. You drive some traffic to your blog/site using paid advertising, SMM, and SEM methods. When a visitor lands on the landing page there will be quality content like some health tips, and morning exercises that make the visitor feel something positive about your blog or about you as a dietician. Now you can encourage them to drop their emails or phone numbers by offering them free eBooks or PDFs or more health and nutritional tips.

Now visitors are likely to provide their emails and phone numbers and they are the ones who are going to be your potential customers in the future. This way you are building trust and attachment with the visitors rather than directly pitching them to the sales.

Personal Branding

Personal branding is very important to become a successful digital marketer because no one ever comes to you or finds the product or service that you are providing unless and until you showcase yourself the right skills and talent and that is what personal branding is. The golden procedure or practice to evolve as a Personal Brand is MassTrust Blueprint.

The below image best illustrates the understanding of the MassTrust Blueprint.

Learn - Before creating a personal brand, necessarily you have to be good at something and need to learn new skills by understanding the concepts, remembering the facts, and practicing the procedures.

Work – After gaining the necessary skillsets you need to implement them in the real world by working on real-time projects.

Blog– Later create your own blog/site and publish the articles related to your work, your skills, your unique perceptions, etc which helps the audience to know better about you, and your skills that result in gaining confidence.

Consult– Now you understood the concepts in a better way and acquires all the necessary knowledge and are capable of solving real-time problems. Now you are capable of getting consulted by companies, organizations, clients, etc instead of working for them.

Mentor– Later you can start mentoring the one who can become like you. When you start teaching others you are becoming more qualified and the level of understanding is higher.

Startup– Now you are equipped to understand the behavior of the market in real-time, set up your own company, launch the product or service, and can be your own boss.

Conclusion:

If you want to become a successful digital marketer, you should have a very good knowledge of all the digital marketing methods and you must be highly qualified in at least one or two. Digital marketing is one of the booming trends nowadays as most businesses look forward to a good online presence to grow their business which increases their revenue. To start with digital marketing one doesn’t require huge capital but just a good internet connection, a laptop, a mobile, and skills to understand digital technology and to utilize them.

But before jumping into the digital marketing field, figuring out the right niche is very important. Talent, Market, and Passion altogether combined give you the right niche. Missing any one of these will not yield the best result for you. For example, you have the talent for something and have the skills to accomplish it but there is no market for it, it’s of no use, and vice-versa. So finding the right niche plays a vital role in becoming a successful digital marketer. This is a growing business. So, don’t neglect the opportunity here.

Becoming a successful digital marketer requires a lot of effort and hard work. It is not possible over a period of the night. One must dedicate his time to acquiring the right skills and knowledge along with the proper implementation of the techniques.

Want to know more about digital marketing and its various types that you can choose from for different businesses? Click here. 

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