How to Become a Digital Marketer With No Experience [Guide]

Digital marketing is one of the few career paths that promises exciting opportunities with the continuous development of today's technology. It is undoubtedly one of the most creative career paths that provide exciting career experience. 

With so many people reading, shopping, working and playing online, there is no surprise that digital marketing became a priority for most of the companies and attracted big budgets.

Sometimes emerging career paths like digital marketing can look dark, scary and exciting at the same time. Those career paths can contain and require so much that most of us get scared and confused about where to start. We can start asking questions to ourselves - "Can I learn this?" "This is super complicated," "What should I do to start?". These are all valid questions, and the answers to those questions lead towards a good learning experience.

Considering the scale and complexity of this career path, it is completely normal that it confuses so many people. For that reason, I have put together this brief guide to help you to create your learning plan and land a digital marketing job with zero or little experience.

What is Digital Marketing and how is it evolving?

Digital marketing refers to the utilization of digital tools, assets and channels to accomplish the company’s marketing goals including demand generation, brand marketing, and communications.

Channels Include: 

• Email
• Social Media
• Organic Search Results
• Paid Social
• Programmatic advertising
• Paid Search
• Affiliate networks
• External Video Hosting Websites
• Marketplaces
• Listing Websites 
• and many more

Assets Include:

• Your website
• External video content
• Social media pages
• Images (infographics, branded images, etc)
• Business listing pages (Google My Business, YellowPages, Yelp, etc.)
• Written content
• And more

For different companies, digital marketing has a different strategic meaning. For example, for e-commerce, it’s a source of generating recurring revenue, for SaaS startups, it can be a source of steady growth while seeking funding and investments, and for media companies, it can be a great source of attracting eyeballs towards online platforms they sell ads on.

Although the strategic purpose can be different, the goal is the same everywhere; using digital marketing tools and tactics and spending the right budget to reach projected results and ensure the business grows. 

Digital marketing is changing rapidly. All areas of digital marketing are interdependent and have their unique tools, tactics, and channels. The slightest change in technology, policies, and regulations can create a chain of necessary adaptations across all areas. This tendency towards constant change means that learning never stops, and it can be as intense as getting weekly industry updates to stay on top of it.

1. Education: Enroll in Digital Marketing Course

Although this particular career path is very much possible to learn through online lessons, going through a proper certificate or diploma course is a good idea. It has many advantages, including interacting with like-minded marketing enthusiasts, getting a well-designed curriculum, and of course, enhancing your marketing knowledge with essential fundamental principles of marketing.

There are two critical criteria to look out for; 1) check if the course has good reviews and pay attention to the reviews on the structure and lecturer(s), 2) check if the employers are aggressively hiring the graduates. If the answers to both are positive, then it’s the course to sign up for.

2. Tap into New Digital Marketing Fields

Learn SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing the website and its content for search engines. The process includes optimizations of many different components that require a robust set of skills and knowledge. 

SEO helps to understand how search engines work and what they require from websites. Search engines are continually improving their algorithms to provide a better experience and more relevant results for their users. The requirements and best practices that they set is part of that strategy: providing meaningful and relevant information to the searchers in an easy and user-friendly way.

Here is what you need to learn to be good at SEO:

• On-page SEO - optimizing everything on the website, including the code, the content, and the media. You can learn on-page SEO through MOZ’s SEO Learning Center, LinkedIn SEO tutorials, or by taking a course on Udemy.
• Off-page SEO - optimization of external assets such as videos, infographics and articles. It also includes generating backlinks to your website, which search engines treat as endorsements.
• Content Generation and Content Management - creating the right content with the right keywords that is useful and valuable for your audience. 

Learn Digital Analytics

One of the essential directions of digital marketing is digital analytics. There are a few big analytics tools that most of the company’s use. If you learn those and main principles behind data collection, visualization and communication, you will be able to use any analytics platform your employer or the client uses. Here are some of the big ones:

• Google Analytics - learn and get certified by Google at Google Analytics Academy.
• Adobe Analytics - learn and get certified at Adobe Digital Learning Services.

In addition to big analytics platforms like Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics, that track almost everything on the website or an app, you can learn specialized analytics tools that help to optimize conversions, do heatmap analysis, or analyze content performance and engagement. Here are some specialized analytics tools you can learn:

• CrazyEgg - a heat map and analytics tool that helps to identify and optimize website pages and structure for a better conversion rate.
• Hotjar - a conversion optimization platform that includes heat maps, screen recording, feedback surveys and more. 
• KissMetrics - a customer engagement automation tool.
• Parse.ly - content optimization platform for online publishers and SEO specialists.

Having strong analytical skills and being proficient in some of these tools helps to measure your digital marketing efforts across all areas effectively. This is key to being a successful digital marketer as knowing the right way to measure the performance of your campaigns and the outcomes of your optimizations helps to become an expert in the field gradually.

Learn Content Marketing

Content marketing is an essential part of digital marketing. I found the best definition of content marketing on Content Marketing Institute website:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Having a well-designed website and a big advertising budget is not enough to create a long term traffic generation strategy. When you put enough effort into content marketing, you own and host your media channel that provides valuable content to your targeted audience for free. It also helps to create a long term relationship with your community, increase brand awareness, increase website traffic - and, ultimately, sell your or your employer’s products and services.

The best way to learn content marketing is to:

• Read as much as possible online (for example, on Content Marketing Institute)
• Monitor how other brands are running their content marketing
• Read Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi

If you do all three, you will know how to:

• Identify a niche topic for your brand or blog.
• Create a content calendar
• Optimize your content for search (SEO)
• Optimize content for conversions
• Use social media to promote your content.

Learn Online Advertising

Online advertising is one of the most complicated and deepest areas of digital marketing. It involves multiple platforms, requires deep learning and a good understanding of advertising best practices.

The fastest way to learn online advertising is jumping into it, starting from the biggest platforms. Those advertising platforms dominate the industry and already established themselves as thought leaders. They provide a massive amount of information to help with learning, ongoing work and even certifications.

Start learning from:

Google Ads at Google Skillshop - Here, you can learn all about search, display, mobile and YouTube Video Advertising. The program provides step-by-step lessons from basic advertising terms to deep dive into audiences and targeting. Upon successful completion, you get a certificate that helps with job hunting. Another benefit of doing a deep dive into the Google certifications is also making yourself proficient in other search advertising platforms as Google being the biggest ad network has many followers with similar ad platforms.

Facebook Blueprint - The learning program is designed to teach everything about social media advertising, including advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Social media is full of opportunities and formats that can help businesses grow through organic as well as paid efforts. Upon the completion of the program, you will have sufficient knowledge in audience research and targeting, advertising formats and requirements, building campaigns, and more. 

If you find it easier to break your learning plan into formats of advertising and learn each separately, you can look into the following formats:

Search Ads

Google dominates this ad type that is based on keywords and user intent, as it is the search engine with the biggest market share. The best way to learn all about it is to sign up for Google Skillshop and start the search ads course. 

Being a good search engine marketer very much depends on how well the marketer understands how search engines work. Try to learn more about the search engine algorithms, SERPs, SEO and SERP formats.

Social Media Ads

Although the best way to learn all about social media ads is to go and explore the guides on the biggest social media ad platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.), it is still good practice to take online courses out of those platforms. Try to get a course on Udemy or LinkedIn Learning to sharpen your media knowledge. 

YouTube Ads

Video is the future of content, and ignoring it is a big strategic mistake for your career. Although in your early career you may not be able to put your hands on big video ads as it requires a bit more knowledge and experience in managing big budgets, it is still a good idea to start learning it as soon as possible. 

Any client or employer appreciates the knowledge of video ads. Keep your eyes on the ads that big brands are running. Learn about the formats, campaign types and measurement methods of YouTube ads by signing up for a Google YouTube ads certificate course. 

Shopping Ads

It is quite important to learn all about shopping ads as soon as possible. By learning shopping ads on Google, you open new doors of opportunity that include e-commerce employers and e-commerce clients. 

To learn more about shopping ads, you need to learn how to set up and use Google Merchant Account, how to create campaigns to advertise the products on Google search, and how to optimize the ads for better reach and conversions. 

The best way to learn shopping ads is Shopping Ads Course on Google SkillShop. 

Learn Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing the website and web assets for better conversion. The ultimate digital marketing goal of every web-based company is to have a maximum conversion with a minimum budget. Knowing how to run ads, optimize the website for search, and generate traffic is just the beginning.

When you did figure out how to increase the number of targeted visitors to your website, you find yourself at the next level. That is the task of finding ways to convert visitors into subscribers and customers. Even if you have close to the industry average conversion rate, you should work on improving that rate as it is tied directly with the revenue and performance. 

CRO includes the optimization of many different components on the website. The main method of CRO is A/B testing. A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing assets and measuring the difference in performance.

The biggest A/B testing tools are Optimizely and Google Optimize. 

3. Develop Essential Skills to be Competitive

To be able to win the competition that is quite strong out there you will need to develop essential skills that give a digital marketer a competitive advantage. If you don’t have enough experience for some attractive openings you will need to have a few tools under your belt that compensates for the lack of experience. 

Technical Skills

Most of the technical skills are usually not introduced as a requirement but optional (good to have) skills that most of the employers are looking for. These skills are usually adding those necessary checks in the hiring managers’ checklists and thus shortlisting the candidate.

The main technical skills you need to be competitive are HTML, JavaScript, CSS and advanced Microsoft Excel. 

Learn HTML at W3Schools HTML Tutorial

Learn JavaScript and CSS through SoloLearn Online Learning Platform

Learn Advanced Excel with Udemy’s Excel from Beginner to Advanced course

Soft Skills

Being comfortable with continuous learning

Continuous learning is the key to being a successful digital marketer. It is always changing and ever-evolving career path that requires everyone to keep themselves updated. 

Strong work ethics and honesty

When having access to resources, a budget and powerful tools to reach millions of people to advertise a product or service it is easy to find ways to trick vulnerable people or audiences into actions they are not fully informed about. Digital marketers should have high standards of work ethics for maintaining fair digital space as well as keeping your clients and employers from harmful consequences of unethical behaviour. 

Curiosity

This is one of the skills that is almost necessary to have when you are trying to build a career in this field. If you like non-stop learning that’s good but if you are curious about new tactics and tools that change all time, you will be ahead of all the changes happening in the digital marketing space. 

Analytical skills

Having analytical skills is as important for the marketer as knowing grammar for a writer. To understand how vital it is, we should look into the campaign cycle marketers go through. Marketers need some data to identify their target audience and build necessary assets to include in the campaign. While running the campaign we track its performance through analytics tools to make sure nothing is broken. After the campaign is completed (if it’s not an always-on campaign), we take the data, analyze it and make decisions for improvements and next steps. Besides working with data there are a lot of nuances and cause and effect relationships we need to pay attention to be on the right track with branding, messaging and positioning. 

This simple cycle alone shows that having or developing analytical skills will come in handy and will make you a better team player. 

Creativity

Although the data helps with decision making a lot, digital marketers should still come up with creative ideas to be different and competitive. Don’t be afraid to experiment and think out of the box. You shouldn’t be afraid of testing something that nobody does in the industry. 

Conclusion

Remember, you can pick any of the digital marketing areas and build a successful career. You don’t have to learn everything, however, the journey becomes more exciting when you tap into new fields. It enhances your knowledge in the fields you already know and makes it easy to learn the new ones.