What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, or online marketing, refers to the advertising of goods and services on the internet. The internet world acts as an avenue to convey messages that a business drafts for its audience. Digital marketing is giving your business/services a face on the World Wide Web.

It is essential to understand that online marketing is not second to traditional marketing. Nor is it a complimentary service that you can use to boost your marketing efforts on other mediums.

Instead, digital marketing is an uncompromising way to promote a business and make it known to an audience that is inundated with oodles of similar stimuli every minute of the day.

Perhaps the very foundation of digital marketing lies in finding newer ways to reach customers and markets that would be interested in what a business has to offer. Since traditional mediums like newspaper, prints and TVs have been tried over and over again, a new and creative internet marketing idea seems to be the fresh start that modern business so badly need.

Components of Digital Marketing

1. Content marketing
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Paid Search (PPC)
4. Email marketing
5. Social Media Marketing
6. Digital Display Marketing (Ad Ops)
7. Web Analytics and Reporting
8. Mobile Marketing

things you can do right now to become a Digital Marketer

1)    Choose a topic you are passionate about and start a blog about it.

2)    Learn a little about SEO and write SEO optimized articles in your blog.

3)    Install Google Analytics tracking code and see if you are getting some traffic to your blog.

4)    Open an Adwords account and do some keyword research to see what people are searching for in Google to find information on the topic you are blogging about.

5)    share the articles on your Facebook page.

6)    Promote your page with Facebook advertising.

7)    Write more articles and publish on your blog.

8)    Sign up for Google AdSense and deploy advertising codes in your blog.

9)    Embed social sharing buttons in your blog articles.

Sign up for an email marketing service such as Aweber

HOW TO BECOME A SELF MADE DIGITAL MARKETING EXPERT

As consumers spend more time using the internet and less time with other channels – advertisers are also forced to follow this trend. The ads have to be there where the eyeballs are. Unfortunately, digital marketing is not as simple and straight forward as traditional marketing. Digital marketing is best done in-house and cannot be outsourced to a digital marketing agency for various practical reasons. This is the reason that digital marketing experts are sought after all over the world right now and the demand for such candidates will only go up in the future.

digital-marketing-expert: you have a marketing background and want to become a digital marketing expert; you may be wondering which is the best way to go about it. There are several courses on digital marketing which are being offered as workshops, online courses and one-on-one coaching programs.

There are even MBA programs with specialization in digital marketing such as this one: NYU Stern MBA Digital Marketing. There are certification exams such as HubSpot Inbound Marketing certification program and Google Adwords certification. But does attending all these courses and getting all the certificates make you a digital marketing expert? The answer is a big NO. It may help you learn the fundamentals and even some advanced concepts in digital marketing but it does not make you career ready for a position like Digital Marketing Manager. Digital marketing expertise comes with digital marketing experience.

The best way to become a digital marketing expert is to start practicing digital marketing from today. The best thing about digital marketing is that you can start doing it at a very small scale. All you need is a computer, an internet connection and a small amount of money to play with. You can learn digital marketing by applying the concepts in your own mini-project. Here are the things you can do right now: