There are thousands of marketers, PR professionals, advertising executives, and business owners out there who have the skill, talent, and expertise to succeed in the world of digital marketing, but putting the pieces together and demonstrating how your skills translate into a digital marketing role isn’t always obvious.
One of the best ways to become a reputable, established, and credible digital marketer is to gain real-world experience, often looking for vacancies based on essential soft skills and workplace experience since you can learn many of the technical aspects as you go.
This guide, designed for professionals keen to shift to a digital marketing specialism or work out how to secure a digital marketing job, sets out the foundational abilities you’ll need to be a great digital marketer and some advice on how to demonstrate your worth and value to prospective employers or recruiters.
Understanding the Skills and Characteristics To Make it as a Digital Marketer
Most recruiters aren’t necessarily looking for digital marketing candidates who already know everything about the role. It’s incredibly common for agencies and businesses to provide induction training since the types of campaigns, audience demographics, and competition within each sector can vary widely from the next.
Soft skills are often harder to teach or to quantify, so if you’ve been working in a more traditional marketing position or an entirely different business sector, you may be better able to highlight your abilities.
Professional Skills in High-Demand for Digital Marketing Jobs
The below are all capabilities that professionals develop in every industry and position, but that can be applied to meet the criteria for a digital marketing post.
- Research: Most digital marketing projects begin with deep-dive research, analyzing everything from consumer trends and behaviors to social media platform usage and competitor activity and looking at current benchmark metrics and visitor numbers.
- Communications: Digital marketers often work as part of a bigger team or within a wider department and require excellent communication skills, whether negotiating with advertising platforms, creating strategies and plans, or explaining what campaign results mean.
- Creativity and Design: Not every digital marketer needs to be a graphic designer, but the ability to apply creative thought, match brand graphics and visuals to marketing slogans, or see how to improve a campaign to make it more visually appealing can be valuable.
- Data Analytics: Data management is a crucial aspect of digital marketing, where great employees can’t just understand data or put it into a uniform structure but can extract valuable information to quantify and clarify what that data means to the organization.
- Team Collaborations: If you’ve worked independently and as part of a team, you will be able to approach a digital marketing team-based role well, with the ability to manage your own tasks autonomously while contributing to discussions and handling cross-team workflows.
- Strategy Implementation: Campaigns center around strategic planning, and applicants who have created data-driven plans, identified goals and targets, and monitored implementation to achieve positive outcomes make great applicants for digital marketing jobs.
By revisiting your resume, reviewing the requirements in a digital marketing job advert, and identifying where your existing abilities apply, you can better align your application with the recruiter’s criteria and improve your chances of securing your ideal position.
Learning the Hard Skills and Technical Proficiencies to Become a Digital Marketer
The next area to consider is your skill set and where you can enhance your resume and formal qualifications or certifications to back up the capabilities you already possess as a professional working outside of the digital marketing field.
There are numerous options, from official training courses and degrees to online paid and free certifications and beginners’ courses, which you can use to kick-start your learning process.
Depending on your budget, you could enroll in a qualification or study program. Still, it’s very common for business professionals to already have the necessary education – many digital marketing recruiters, for instance, ask applicants to have a bachelor’s degree in any subject or a diploma-level qualification to be considered.
This varies, but the takeaway is that professional business expertise may be just as desirable as a digital marketing qualification, and you don’t necessarily need the latter to apply for a job, especially if the employer or agency includes learning opportunities.
Following industry expert blogs and podcasts and reading digital marketing books and newsletters can also be helpful, as can experimenting with digital marketing tools and platforms – which means you’ll easily be able to discuss their applications and uses during an interview.
How to Get Digital Marketing Experience While Working in Another Profession
We’ve noted that you won’t always require evidence of experience within the exact role you’re applying for – although that can differ, particularly for managerial or higher-level digital marketing jobs where candidates will be expected to have the existing know-how and skills to get to work immediately.
However, you can also start to build a portfolio and gain real-world experience before transitioning to a career in digital marketing. Options might include:
- Contributing a few hours a month to help with digital marketing for a local charity or community-based project.
- Taking on a part-time or short-term internship or attending a training program with a few hours of real-world client contact or practical experience included.
- Working independently on your digital marketing projects, testing tools and platforms, and promoting yourself, a family business, or your professional networking pages.
You may also have an obvious area of specialism, depending on the types of jobs you’ve previously held and the nature of the work you have focused on.
Transferable Skills Relevant to Digital Marketing Jobs
Digital marketing recruiters advertise for a broad range of applicants to fill jobs of every specialism, and a large proportion of applicants who have worked in other industries naturally meet the requirements, with just a little on-the-job instruction to teach them how to tweak their approach to match the business or marketing agency.
As a snapshot, here are some of the generalized skills we see most commonly advertised for on the Digital Marketing Jobs Board:
- UI or UX design: Programmers, graphic designers, and developers often fit well into digital marketing teams since they already know how to design engaging interfaces, imagery, and campaign graphics.
- Copywriting: Digital marketing agencies frequently hire copywriters to assist with email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing, with the assurance that new recruits appreciate how to write persuasively and in a brand-specific style.
- Social media expertise: Whether you’ve managed socials for a business or have extensive knowledge as a personal interest, social media know-how can be in high demand, ensuring you can work on this aspect of a digital marketing campaign straight away.
Employers and recruiters also often prioritize candidates with a background in data, reporting, or analytics since these skills are key for digital marketing teams and agencies that rely on functions such as trend mapping, behavior analysis, and industry monitoring to make decisions or craft new campaigns.
Applying for a Digital Marketing Job Without Sector-Specific Expertise
A common mistake candidates make when applying for vacancies is to browse the job description or list of duties and responsibilities and assume they aren’t a good fit—or discard the opportunity because they don’t tick every single box.
We advise going back to the basics and reviewing what the business or agency is looking for. Of course, if they need a senior digital marketer with ample on-the-ground experience running campaigns, there may be a better post for you.
However, if you have years of demonstrable professional experience in marketing, communications, project management, data analytics, customer relationships, or any other relevant field, there’s a great chance you’re close to being the perfect candidate.
Rather than writing yourself off, you can highlight those characteristics, interests, and abilities that match the job description, emphasizing your willingness to learn as you go, work towards professional qualifications, or take on a more junior job while you get your knowledge up to speed.
You’ll find hundreds of high-quality vacancies, entry-level posts, and digital marketing jobs with training included through our Digital Marketing Job Board, or you can browse the types of vacancies currently available to see where your skills would slot in.
