- What do digital marketers do?
- Digital marketer career path
- Digital marketer salaries
- Qualifications and training
- Digital marketer skills
- Pros and cons of being a digital marketer
- Digital marketers work-life balance
- Typical employers
- Related jobs
- More information
Are you good at understanding what people want from their user experience? Do you enjoy design and want content to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible? If you’re analytically minded but creative, a career as a digital marketer could be for you.
Are you interested in working as a digital marketer? Explore the current marketing and PR jobs available to you right now.
What do digital marketers do?
As a digital marketer, you look after the digital media of a company, making sure that customers in the target demographic find their way to the company’s website or app. Here are the responsibilities that you may have as a digital marketer:
- Have meetings with your team to establish the future of the digital marketing of the company
- Use analytical software to check the performance of websites, social media pages and apps. You may analyse how engaged people are with your posts
- Make content for websites, social media platforms and emails
- Work with graphic designers and videographers to make visual content
- Look over web pages to make sure they are optimised for search engines so customers can easily find your content
- Research social media trends and produce relevant content. You may work with influencers to create sponsored content
Digital marketers career path
There is a wide range of digital marketing jobs available to you and with the relevant experience, you can reach high levels in a company or even start your own business. Here is the typical career progression for digital marketers:
Entry-level
You begin your career in a junior or entry-level digital marketing position. Your responsibilities include researching analytics and user engagement, creating content for blogs, social media and websites and building or assisting in the building of pages for websites. This role is designed so you can learn the skills that you need to succeed in your future career from current experts in your department.
Career progression
After gaining experience, you progress to a mid-level digital marketer job. Your responsibilities increase with this promotion. You have more control over the content that you make. Having a better understanding of search engine optimisation (SEO) is important for this job.
Digital marketing manager is a senior role in the digital marketing team. In this job, you manage the digital marketing strategy and are included in the planning and organising of online marketing campaigns for the company.
Future career
Your career in digital marketing could take you to higher levels in the company. This includes a senior digital marketing officer role. In this job, you plan large scale digital marketing campaigns for a company, including email, website and social media. You may still create content for the company or direct colleagues in your team on the content that you want for the campaign.
If you enjoy working as a digital marketer but don’t want to progress to executive jobs that don’t include as much digital marketing, you can become a freelance or contract digital marketer. To do this, you set up your own company and work as your own boss helping many different companies. If you’re successful, you can earn a large amount of money from freelance work. However, the market is fairly saturated with digital marketing businesses and you need a large amount of experience to be successful.
Digital marketers salaries
- In an entry-level digital marketer role, you earn between £18,000 and £23,000 per year.
- Once you reach a mid-level digital marketer job you earn between £25,000 and £32,000 per year.
- Digital marketing managers earn an average of £40,000 per year and senior digital marketing managers earn between £50,000 and £60,000 per year.
- More senior roles like head of digital marketing can earn up to £70,000 per year.
Qualifications and training
Education
Most digital marketers have a degree that specifically relates to digital marketing in business studies, marketing or management. Alternatively, some digital marketers have related degrees which give them transferable skills but are not directly relevant to the job like media, English language or literature.
Another option is getting a college diploma in digital marketing. Unlike a degree, a college diploma in digital marketing will give you the specific skills that you need to work successfully as a digital marketer.
When deciding between these options, note that hiring managers for more senior jobs sometimes prefer a degree. If you have lots of experience which you can demonstrate and a good track record, then having a diploma instead of a degree shouldn’t hold you back.
Work experience
Having some relevant work experience before you begin your career could help you succeed in digital marketing. You can gain work experience through an internship or an industrial placement.
Having work experience teaches you how to work well in an office environment and shows you the tasks that you typically do as a digital marketer. Work experience also teaches you the skills that you need for digital marketing work. Combining a degree or diploma and work experience could set you up well for working well as a digital marketer.
If you’re interested in getting work experience in digital marketing, explore current digital marketer internships available to you right now.
Professional qualifications
There are professional certifications and qualifications available in digital marketing. Having a professional qualification isn’t a requirement of working in the industry. They’re typically designed for people already working in digital marketing who want to improve their skills to get promoted. If you’re a graduate interested in working in digital marketing, having a degree or diploma and work experience is more relevant to your skill level than a professional qualification.
If you’re interested in learning about the professional qualifications available, consider the Professional Marketing Qualifications from the Chartered Institute of Marketing or Professional Qualifications from the Institute of Data and Marketing.
Digital marketer skills
Hard skills
- Search engine optimization (SEO). Being able to make your content stand out and perform well amongst the other content that’s available online requires understanding how to optimise your websites and social media posts for search engines.
- Paid advertising. Part of your job could be making online ad campaigns. Understanding how to successfully set up and advertise a product or service to consumers significantly improves your performance and increases your chance of promotion if you can encourage more consumers to view or buy the product or service.
Find out more about search engine optimisation.
Soft skills
- Data analysis. Digital marketers need good analytical and data analysis skills. This is to understand how well your marketing campaigns have performed including social media views and website analytics. Conducting data analysis and understanding the software that your company uses to analyse performance is important for your job.
- Creativity. Depending on the size of the company you work for, you may have a wide range of tasks including content creation of social media posts and website content like web pages and blog posts. Being creative helps you produce interesting and innovative content.
- Empathy. To be a successful digital marketer, you need to understand who the product or service is intended for. Understanding who the target demographic is, the media they want to consume and how to successfully sell them the service or product means having a good level of empathy.
- Eager to learn. Being eager to learn helps you stay up to date with relevant software that could help your work like analytical software for website performance. This willingness to learn helps you stay on top of the latest social media trends so you can produce content and steer the short term marketing strategy towards it.
Pros and cons of being a digital marketer
Pros
- There are many digital marketing jobs available because most companies have an online presence and need a trained employee to manage it.
- You have the opportunity to work with many different companies and organisations.
- Once you have enough experience, you can start your own business and be your own boss.
- You have a structured working day with many different tasks.
- You can teach yourself lots of the required skills to be a digital marketer.
- It is a new and expanding sector and you could be a pioneering expert.
Cons
- Keeping up to date with trends and analytics can be difficult on top of your other tasks making your work stressful sometimes.
- It may be difficult to separate your working life and your home life because your working life often includes keeping up with social media. This may make the time you spend on social media platforms feel like work.
- Digital marketing is a highly competitive field so consistently making your content relevant when there is a huge amount of other content available online can be tricky.
Digital marketer work-life balance
As a digital marketer, you work standard office hours of 9am to 5pm. You may work overtime around large campaigns or big deadlines. The specific hours that you work depend on the company and whether they offer flexible working times.
Digital marketer employers
Since many companies have an online presence and want to utilise the online market through advertising and marketing campaigns, there is a high demand for good digital marketers. Many employers offer graduate roles to digital marketers. Here are some top employers who hire digital marketers:
Jobs related to digital marketer
More information
If you’re interested in starting your career as a digital marketer, explore the current opportunities available now.
Learn more about the marketing sector with this Bright Network Marketing Career Path Guide.