What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing has a number of components, but it broadly refers to any attempt at advertising a product, service or institution in a digital space. In the past, this has mostly been about translating traditional advertising projects to an online space (and, in many ways, this is still true, as pre-roll ads, for example, are just commercials in a different medium), it has expanded to include everything from running branded social media accounts to complex data analysis of customer and consumer habits based on evidence gained from online tracking systems. Learning digital marketing will cover all of these skills and more, helping students become robust marketers in their own right.
What careers are available within digital marketing?
Digital marketing is an expansive field that offers professionals a large number of different career opportunities depending on their training and specialization. In addition to digital marketers, who are marketing professionals who handle all of the major aspects of an online marketing campaign, there are social media specialists (who unsurprisingly manage social media campaigns, including running accounts for clients), search engine specialists, paid search managers, digital analysts, content managers and a host of other professional roles under the banner of digital marketing.
SEO specialists, paid search managers, web optimization specialists and content managers all work in various capacities to ensure that a company or client’s web presence is generating traffic and is converting engagement into sales. They will be responsible for making sure that a company’s website has good SEO and that their websites are built to drive traffic to points of sale. They will also need to keep up on changing trends in the SEO landscape as well as new methods of optimizing websites for use by customers and by the algorithms that determine how a website ranks on various search engines.
Digital analysts are a more data focused position, aimed at tracking customer and visitor data to help digital marketers better understand what is working and what isn’t working on a given advertising campaign. They will need to understand how to use programs like Google Analytics and Semrush and how to work with the data tracking tools offered by various social media platforms. They may also work alongside data scientists or data analysts to implement new systems to track and record consumer data in more granular or efficient ways. They will also work with financial accountants to track ROI and performance on the campaigns they are overseeing.
Social media strategists (also called social media marketers, social media managers or social media specialists) work primarily on establishing and maintaining a brand or company’s presence on social media platforms. This will require them to learn how these platforms work and devise strategies that are tailored to their employer or client’s specific needs. They may also be in charge of running social media accounts and interacting with customers on those platforms in order to generate organic engagement and build brand awareness.
Are digital marketing classes difficult?
Digital Marketing classes can be intimidating for new students because they cover such a wide range of different skills and they require students to become adept at everything from content creation to data analytics. However, these classes are actually very accessible for beginners since they tend to cover the fundamental principles that digital marketing skills build up. There are a lot of beginner-friendly classes that aim to make digital marketing skills easy to pick up and these classes tend to focus on practical lessons and exercises that will make sure that students are comfortable with the foundational skills needed to become successful digital marketing professionals. While the classes can be difficult (and they are often immersive, career-focused courses that require a lot of time and dedication), anyone who commits the time and effort to learning the skills can become a digital marketing expert.
Are digital marketing classes worth it?
Looking at the time and cost associated with a digital marketing class might be intimidating and students may want to know if it is worth it to enroll in a program. Digital marketing courses are a great way to find a new, in-demand career or to learn essential marketing skills needed to grow your own personal brands, businesses or projects. Whether you are aiming to build a new professional career or just get your own projects off the ground, enrolling in a digital marketing class is going to pay long-term dividends.
Career-focused bootcamps and certificate programs are designed to help students become professional marketers, which is an ever growing career field given the importance that business and institutions place on online marketing. For students looking to become professional marketers, these programs are an excellent way to learn all of the skills you need to become either a Digital Marketer or Social Media Strategist. Digital Marketers earn an average salary of about $65,000 annually. Social Media Strategists earn about $75,000 a year and more specialized markets can earn upwards of $100,000 annually.
Digital marketing classes are still well worth the time and effort to enroll in if you are working on any personal project that you think would benefit from online marketing. This can include things like start-up businesses but it can also be useful for social activist projects, personal creative work or getting events off the ground, since having a strong online presence is important to getting your work and ideas noticed. Learning how to leverage these online marketing tools to our advantage is an important part of building brand identity or getting your work noticed and enrolling in a few specialized digital marketing classes can significantly boost your chances of success.
How long are digital marketing classes?
The length of a digital marketing class will largely depend on how immersive the course is and what kinds of lessons it is aiming to teach. Since digital marketing is such a wide and varied subject with so many different components that one can learn, these classes can last for several weeks of full-time instruction or several months of part-time instruction. While there are shorter classes available, these tend to only teach specific subsets of digital marketing (like how to market on specific social media platforms or how to use tools like Semrush), so students looking to pick up all of the digital marketing skills needed to find professional work will need to enroll in multiple courses, extending the time of their studies.
The time it takes to complete a digital marketing program is also heavily contingent on the question of whether or not you are pursuing a career change or attempting to learn marketing skills to help build your own brand. If you are looking to become a professional marketer or social media strategist, you’ll end up spending a lot more time in the classroom than if you are just aiming to learn how to better leverage specific tools to help advertise your product, service or brand.
How much do digital marketing classes cost?
Similarly, the question of how much a digital marketing class costs is going to hinge on whether you are looking at an immersive, career-focused certificate program or shorter subject classes aimed at helping students learn individual aspects of digital marketing. Longer, more involved classes will naturally be more expensive, often costing several thousand dollars to enroll in, but these classes aim to provide students with the tools needed to find new, in-demand, high paying jobs as professional digital marketers. These programs also tend to provide students with individual career support services which are incredibly helpful for anyone looking to find work in the field upon graduating. This means that while the initial price tag looks intimidating, it is well worth it in the long term for anyone looking to improve their lifetime earning potential.
Shorter, more focused classes are naturally going to be less expensive, since students aren’t using as much of an instructor’s time, but they are better suited for individuals looking to learn specific individual skills, rather than students looking to become professional online marketers. For example, if you are looking to market your own lifestyle brand on TikTok, you can spend far less money on training than someone who is looking to start a new career at an online marketing firm. There are also on-demand resources, which are going to be even less expensive, since there is no live instructor and the material is prefabricated. These courses however, will only be suitable for students looking to learn fairly specific skills quickly, since there is no support structure in place to help ensure that students learn the skills and complete the program.
Aspects of digital marketing
Content creation
Whether online or in traditional advertising, one of the earliest steps in the process is creating the content that will be used to advertise your project. This can include commercials, banner advertisements, social media campaigns, sponsored blog posts and a host of other branded content. Learning how to create this content is an important step, because nothing else matters if audiences aren’t being drawn to the advertisements you are creating. Creating compelling content that customers want to consume, is an important aspect of ensuring the success of a campaign.
Data collection
One of the major revolutions in the modern digital marketing landscape has been how easy it is to track user behavior and gather data on everything from what search terms are drawing eyes to your website to how long visitors spend on average on any given page. This immense amount of data makes building online advertising campaigns more focused than ever, but it can also be overwhelming, especially if you don’t know what to do with this data and how to translate that data into sales. However, as tools become more sophisticated and offer more robust features, it is becoming easier than ever to not only collect this data but also to make use of it.
Google Analytics
One of the primary tools to assist in the data collection, organization and interpretation process is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a collection of different data collecting and visualization applications that will allow users to see what search terms are directing users to their site, how their website fares in Google’s search algorithm and create detailed charts and graphs to compare different aspects of a website’s traffic or compare the website’s traffic over time. These analytic tools give users a better understanding of how visitors are interacting with their webpages and how they can better guide users to their pages using Google’s various advertising features.
Web design
Essentially, if you offer a product or service to the public, you need a website in order to attract attention and get eyes on your brand. Having a strong, memorable and evocative web presence is an important aspect of the digital marketing process, especially if you are selling a service or primarily utilize a virtual storefront. This includes making sure that the website communicates information properly (the website for a tractor supply store will want to look very different from the website for a pet salon) and that the site it easy to use and navigate (if your customers can’t easily find things like contact information or prices, they are liable to just go back to Google and look for the same product or service elsewhere).
Social media management
A staggering amount of daily web traffic is dedicated to users visiting various social media platforms (4 of the 5 most visited non-search engine websites are social media platforms) and if you aren’t leveraging this, you will lose out on a lot of eyes and potential customers. Learning how to effectively utilize social media as a tool for advertising will require you to understand the platforms, their media ecosystems and the tools that the platforms offer to assist sellers and advertisers. For example, if you want to market on Facebook, you’ll want to understand how to create and leverage group pages, how to build a page for your own business and how to make use of the marketplace features. In addition, you’ll need to understand how users that frequent Facebook expect to interface with the site and how those expectations differ from users of other platforms.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
In the modern marketing ecosystem, the vast majority of customers’ first impulse to find a product or service they are looking for is to turn to Google or a similar search engine. This means that building your web presence to rank highly on these search engines is an important part of digital marketing. This process is called search engine optimization and it is an ever changing process that digital marketers need to keep up on. As companies (particularly Alphabet) change their algorithms frequently, it is important to be sure that you are constantly producing new content and keeping your web presence up-to-date and in line with the expectations of major search engines. Learning SEO skills (particularly how to update content for SEO purposes) is vital to keeping up with competitors in the digital marketplace.
