Why Digital Marketing ?-Reasons Digital Marketing can be your best career choice.

You are on the verge of discovering something great. By the end of reading this entire page you will know why!

I know that you are trying to evaluate, if being a digital marketer makes sense or not. And in next 5 minutes, I am not going to tell you if it makes sense to you to choose it as your career path, but I am going to highlight some of the pressing reasons why it is becoming a preferred choice for many individuals on the verge of choosing a career for themselves or trying to make a career shift in some cases.

Actually, most of the places where I interact with people like you, rather than asking why a career in digital marketing, the question is how a career in digital marketing?

We know that everything human activity is slowly being automated. And to manage and interact with this automation the first connect that any customer has with any such automated business/service process is online.

Digital Marketing is essentially improving interaction of businesses with customers online.
Digital Marketing as we call it, has two aspects to it:

1. Digital –To be done in digital/electronic medium
2. Marketing – Crux is marketing

Hence in digital marketing the most important thing is ‘Marketing’. And marketing is all about understanding the consumer.

All these aspects bring about certain factors in the online domain which make the domain of digital marketing lucrative and growth worthyas a career for you.

Guys and Girls, let’s face it. The reason you are even reading this thought on why a career in digital marketing is because digital marketing is a booming and growing domain.

Why pursue a career in digital marketing is answered from the fact that as per industry reports, digital domain is attracting maximum investments from investors.

Digital Marketing’s growth is primarily dependent on how many internet users are there in the country. And as far as internet users in the country are concerned, they are on a growth trajectory.

And guess what they are growing @ 30.5% YoY which is humongous.

Any industry booms when a lot of spending is being done for that domain. Digital Advertising is growing at a rapid pace in India.

According to eMarketer, it is believed that digital spending is supposed to touch $ 2.8 billion in 2021

In 2016, global mobile ad spending was $ 36.6 billion and $9.1 billion & $16 billion for video ads & social media ads respectively, according to IAB’s Internet Advertising Revenue Report

Businesses which operate in the internet space are attracting a lot of investments. These investments are then flowing in digital marketing. According to CB Insights, 636 ‘Internet of Things’ received approximately 4 Billion with 59 exits, whereas 12.5 Billion was invested in IoT Startups.

Following is the growth of Indian E-Commerce Companies in India.

This clearly tells that digital marketing industry’s growth is inevitable.

From the figures shared with you above it is self-evident that digital marketing is the future.

The future is digital marketing is one of the strongest answer to your question ‘why a career in digital marketing’

Another thing which makes it evident is how people i.e. businesses are poised towards the industry.

A good indicator towards this is where businesses are hiring or recruiting manpower. Wherever businesses are hopeful towards, they will hire there.

When it comes to marketing functions, as per a research done by Mckinsey Research, digital marketing is the marketing function where business are most geared up to hire manpower. This is shown in the following figure.

Digital marketing is one marketing function where salaries are on a rise.

Salaries in digital marketing at entry level are most lucrative. Following figure will tell you clearly why pursue a career in digital marketing. In all the countries, the entry level salaries are very good.

In India, they touch somewhere around 360K INR, given that you have domain knowledge and practical experience in digital marketing.

You can also check how salaries are rising the moment you move to mid-level and become experienced.

To start a career in Digital Marketing requires you to understand the knowledge of Mobile and Computer operating.

They don’t need you to know any programming language, any software or any other special skill. You need elementary English language reading and writing skills.

Apart from it, any other skills like knowing programming, good logical reasoning are add-ons which help to do quicker and better in digital marketing.

But to start a career in digital marketing it is not important that you have the skill. However, with time and experience you might need to gain those skills.

As discussed in the point above, a digital marketing career required limited educational qualification.

Any entry level job in digital marketing requires you to have a higher secondary education i.e. clear 12^th standard. With a plenty of courses and career options, it is an obvious thing to get done. To join any course, the minimum qualification required is 12^th. There are many carrier-based courses, some of them are here.

In case you have taken up a professional course in digital marketing, even this criteria is relaxed.

But I must stress, this doesn’t undermine the importance of graduation.

Later on, in this article you will find how being able to utilize your graduation knowledge in digital marketing makes digital marketing a good career option.

In a research done by Mckinsey, following were the priority wise soft skills requirement for any potential digital marketing hire by companies. You can see that education comes as the last preference.

Digital Marketing has one unique advantage over many other courses in India i.e. how quickly can you start earning.

It hardly takes 6 months – one year of training to start earning well in digital marketing, provided you can apply your learning practically in digital marketing.

Also digital marketing comes as the best return on investment generator. RoI on choosing digital marketing as a career option is the best among many other professional and academic courses.

In the figure below, it is clear that digital marketing can help you get closer to earning vis a vis your investment of money and time.

This is very subjective actually. Whenever I discuss this point, people tell me that during recession marketing budgets are slashed at the first.

However, there are certain areas of digital marketing that actually are required during recession of any sort. Areas like Search Engine Optimization, Analytics & Testing, Organic Marketing, Conversion Optimization deals with investment of stringent budget well.

Hence their demand increases during recession. So, digital marketing as a profession or career suffers less impact during the difficult times of recession.

As discussed in point no. 5, you get to utilize your experience from your academic or professional degree.

For example, if you have taken up arts stream in graduation, you can utilize the skills and knowledge to develop campaigns which are creative.

If you have taken up engineering, then you can utilize the skills and knowledge in user experience, analytics and testing domain of digital marketing.

If you have taken up commerce, you can utilize the skills in RoI calculation and budgeting of campaigns. Plus, statistical skills will come handy in testing as well.

If you have taken up humanities, you can utilize the same for developing communications and customer understanding.

One great thing about Digital Marketing is that it has multiple domains which require different kinds of things and skillset.

We know that when you start your career, you really don’t have an idea on what exactly you need for a successful and fulfilling career.

Nobody knows how to choose a successful career or why most career fails at the start. Hence it is OK to go wrong. However, with digital marketing as a start, it is difficult to go wrong. You can align easily!

This gives an amazing opportunity to specialize in a particular domain in digital marketing. This can help you to align your passion and hobbies and specialize in that domain and hence excel in digital marketing as a career.

For eg:

1. If it is your hobby is to write, you can go for content marketing.
2. If your passion is drawing, then you can go for graphics development.
3. If your passion is acting, then you can go for video marketing.
4. Hence it is easier to plan and align as per you hobbies and passion.

As discussed earlier, there is no need of any particular educational qualification that one should have before opting for Digital Marketing. Hence if one needs, they can start as early as 12 years of age.

The reason for that is the basic requirement of being proficient in elementary English language. This makes it easier for people to start their career early. What it also does is that when others are choosing or evaluating Why choose digital marketing as a career, the early starter already has enough experience to move to be doing well in Mid-Level digital marketing position.

As shared earlier, it is difficult to know at the start what is your calling. You might want to be a SEO or PPC professional, soon to realize that content writing is something that you enjoy.

This is where I personally love digital marketing. It required one have a cross functional knowledge and in depth knowledge of on domain of digital. This helps you to understand your real calling for any specific domain of digital marketing.

Now-a-days, digital marketing industry and a career in digital marketing requires you to be a T-Shaped Marketer i.e. Cross Functional knowledge of every domain and deep expertise of one domain.

This is clearly shown in the figure below:

Digital marketing is a manpower extensive service industry. Being Services, it is supposed to be delivered by people. Irrespective of how much automation takes place in digital marketing, it always requires people to study that automation, understand them and then consequently apply that automation to digital marketing campaigns.

Following is the landscape of expertise that businesses are seeking in prospective digital marketing hires:

To restress the point, many researches in terms of finding which are the areas that businesses are going to hire in the coming years, digital marketing has constantly featured there.

Most of the manpower requirement planning take digital marketing and sales as the first propriety. Let alone marketing as a function, digital is the foremost requirement in marketing.

Rather now businesses need candidates who understand both digital and traditional marketing well.

So digital marketing as a career is in demand.

Last but not the least, all you need to be proficient in digital marketing is a computer with basic features and a running internet connection. The collaboration required can be done over the internet. Hence it becomes an amazing field for people who are looking to freelance.

This also favorable for men and women, who need to be at household to manage houses and yet continue their career. I personally know many people manage their digital marketing career from home.

This is where digital marketing as a career is especially apt to become independent and choose a flexible life for yourself on the longer run.