Digital Marketing as a Long-Term Career Option

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In a world full of products and services waiting to be bought and sold, digital marketing plays a crucial role. A digital marketing strategy and its proper implementation can make or break a company. As we move into the 4th industrial revolution, marketing plays a very important role - the importance of good digital marketers has increased manifold!

There are over 73 million users of social media in the Philippines alone - the number grew by 8.6% from April 2019 - January 2020. The social media penetration stands at over 67%. Mobile connections stood at 157% of the population. It is safe to conclude that people are shopping online quite a bit - it is reported that 92% of the internet users look up products online.

Businesses are increasingly relying on online platforms to augment their sales. In such a scenario, the role of a digital marketer becomes indispensable.

What does digital marketing entail?

Digital marketing is a very broad term, and a digital marketer is someone who facilitates an online sale of a product or service. However, that's a very simplistic explanation. Digital marketing involves a large number of subdisciplines, which include but aren't limited to Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Video & Audio production and promotion, Search Engine Marketing, eCommerce, Web Design & Development, Interactive Design (Artificial Intelligence), and more.

As a digital marketer just starting out, you are expected to be versatile in at least a couple of the aforesaid things. However, if you are aiming at a supervisory role, you have to be fluent in most of the aspects of digital marketing.

Is digital marketing right for you?

A lot of digital marketing involves fulfilling the needs and wants of prospective customers. It involves pushing products either through advertisements or through organic ranking on search engines. Either way, a digital marketer either caters to an intent to buy or creates that very intent. Digital marketing is quite interesting as one has to keep figuring out ways to attain maximum engagement while spending as little of the clients' money possible.

The most desirable skills required for a digital marketing job would be SEO, SEM, and SMM (social media management). These cater to both serving the intent to buy (SEO) as well as creating intent (SEM and SMM). If you have these skills at a competitive level, you can land a high-paying job with a digital marketing agency or a product/service-based firm.

Digital Marketing - Long term prospects & advantages

A few advantages of digital marketing include:

  1. Creative Outlet: Digital marketers need to vary their strategies according to consumer behaviour. This differs from field to field, and even product to product. If you have the creative potential, digital marketing jobs can be very satisfying as they give you a creative outlet.

  2. Earnings: Digital marketers make good money in the Philippines. The average salary is ~PHP 160,000, while a digital marketer makes about PHP 350,000 on average. The potential for growth is also vast in digital marketing as a career.

  3. Job Security: The very importance of this vast field makes it almost systematically important. Therefore, there is going to be no dearth of digital marketing jobs. Also, if you have the requisite skills, it is quite easy to shift your field within digital marketing. Therefore, digital marketing offers not only job security but also opportunities to do something you like.

  4. Versatility of the Field: Digital marketing as a field has something for people of various qualifications. If you love to code, web development would be the way to go. If you are good with words and maintaining websites, SEO and SEM are your fields. Even AI specialists manage to find high-paying jobs in this field due to the vastness of digital marketing. Data scientists also find very high-level jobs due to the amount of data generated and the need to draw inferences from these data sets.

  5. Networking through diversity: Building inter-personal connections is quite important to climb up the hierarchy or even set up your own digital marketing agency someday. As a digital marketer, you get exposed to a variety of people at various levels of employment. If you do a good job, these connections can be very helpful in the future.

  6. Skill up along the way: The only way to keep growing is to keep learning. Since digital marketing is such a vast field, you can keep learning skills and adding competencies to your resume. The added advantage is that whatever skill you learn, you get to see its implementation before your own eyes, giving you the much-needed practical exposure as well.

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