A digital marketing career can be fulfilling, challenging and incredibly varied. It continues to prove a popular career choice with people from many different backgrounds, but having a grasp of the core fundamentals required to excel in the industry is vital.
Below, Sheffield-based digital marketing agency Evoluted provide insight into what it takes to forge a successful career in the digital marketing industry:
Tips From the Evoluted Team
There are many things that you can do as a budding marketer to give yourself the best possible chance of getting your ideal first full-time role.
Arguably the most important of these is gaining as much experience as you’re able to before you apply. This will serve the dual purpose of showing your commitment to employers, whilst it will also help you to gain key insight into what is a fast-moving and changeable marketplace.
Another great way to prepare yourself is through any form of project on the side. This could be the creation of a website, running a blog or setting up a small e-commerce business.
Even if you don’t achieve ground-breaking success, the experience will at least teach you new skills and pitfalls you can avoid when it comes to applying your skills in any future role.
Skills Best Suited To A Potential Marketer
With digital marketing playing home to such a vast variety of roles, the skillset required to excel in a specific position will naturally vary. That being said, there are certain skills that will prove useful no matter which role you end up securing. These can be honed over time:
Adaptability
Whether you secure a role agency side or in-house, it’s very likely you’ll need to achieve results across multiple areas of marketing. For example, SEO and pay-per-click; or email marketing and social media.
A strong grounding in all of the areas you need to work within will prove priceless. Having even more insight into areas outside of your role can also help if someone fields an unexpected enquiry too. Make sure you read as much as possible to stay on top of all of the latest industry trends.
Communication
Whether you’re educating clients, working collaboratively, or trying to pitch an idea; strong communication skills are vital. Whilst there will be opportunities to work in isolation, for the most part you will be constantly engaging with different parties as part of your role.
If you lack confidence, undertaking a placement can be a great way to get yourself more comfortable with tasks such as presenting ideas and calling clients.
Leadership
Whilst this will become more important as your career progresses, strong leadership skills will stand you in good stead for success in marketing.
They will help you to drive forward the ideas you have and to engage with clients and your fellow team members. This will all help you to improve delivery within your role.
Calmness Under Pressure
There will undoubtedly be times during any marketing role where you’ll be under a good degree of pressure. Learning to maintain calmness whilst continuing to do a good job will be priceless.
An example situation could be managing lots of different client requests within an agency role whilst training to stay within budgets and also satisfy internal goals.
A great way to deal with any problematic issues is to take a couple of minutes away from a situation at the point it occurs. This will give you time to think and propose a considered solution.
Passion
Marketing is an industry that is always evolving. To stay in touch with what it takes to achieve, you’ll need to be well-read and that naturally requires a degree of passion for what you ultimately want to do.
It’s also a high-pressure industry to work within, so it will help infinitely if you enjoy the work that you’re doing.
Hopefully these tips will prove useful during your hunt for your first marketing role. You can read about the latest marketing trends and developments at Evoluted on their blog.
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