What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the use of online platforms and media for promotional purposes. While traditional marketing campaigns use print ads, direct mail, billboards, and commercials to advertise their products and services, digital marketing leverages social media, email, and web-based ads. It’s an expansive field that encompasses many kinds of strategy and techniques. Someone who works in digital marketing may design marketing campaigns, produce material for them, track their success, or do all of the above.
Search marketing is one of the most important types of digital marketing. It includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search. Paid search refers to advertising via sponsored listings on Google and other search engines, while SEO involves taking a strategic approach to ensuring your website ranks at the top of organic search results. Any business or individual with a website should have a basic knowledge of search marketing, especially SEO—it’s a huge determiner of whether potential customers can find you.
These days, one of the first things you do when starting a business is set up social media accounts. With social media marketing, you can promote yourself online beyond simply asking friends to like and share your page. This type of marketing uses Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social platforms to bring new customers to your business. It’s generally expected that people working in digital marketing understand different methods of using social media to gain consumer attention, from purchasing Facebook Ads to making a video with the goal of going viral.
Another common strategy used by businesses is email marketing. One benefit of promoting your business through email is the ability to measure and track customer engagement with messages through open rates, clickthrough rates, and other metrics. You can even track individual customers via the email campaigns that brought them to your website. Email marketers use targeting and automation to ensure that emails reach customers
Besides driving traffic to websites from external sources like email and Facebook, digital marketing aims to draw and keep people on the website. Content marketing and web optimization are two ways this is achieved. With content marketing, companies use blog posts, articles, videos, and other informative or entertaining media to establish authority on a topic and attract the interest of potential customers. Web optimization involves analyzing user data and fine-tuning a website to improve targeted experiences and increase traffic.
Why Learn Digital Marketing?
There’s never been a better time to get into digital marketing. The importance of online advertising and promotion in today’s world has driven the need for experts who can put together well-informed strategies. Digital marketing professionals are in high demand across industries, and businesses are willing to pay for them. One study showed that over a quarter of businesses spend 90% or more of their marketing budget on digital strategies. There’s a lot of flexibility that comes with being a digital marketer: you can work on a team or alone, in a large company or a small one, as a jack-of-all-trades or in a specialized role.
People who aren’t aiming to work in digital marketing can benefit from learning more about it, too. If you’re an entrepreneur, having a grasp of digital marketing can help you get your new business off the ground. Freelance writers and designers who are familiar with content marketing, email campaigns, and SEO will be able to take on a wider range of clients. Even for professionals in unrelated fields, having a basic knowledge of web optimization or social media tactics can broaden their career prospects, especially at small companies where people have to wear many hats.
What Careers Use Digital Marketing?
Individuals skilled in digital marketing can work in all different types of businesses or as freelancers. While any professional who uses online marketing tactics can call themselves a digital marketer, there are also more specialized roles for people with specific sets of skills.
Digital analysts and digital strategists focus on crafting data-informed campaigns, while social media strategists consult on or direct campaigns specifically for platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Web optimization specialists work with web developers and designers to make sure a company’s website serves as an effective conversion funnel. Search managers work to improve search results with tactics like content marketing and SEO, with paid search managers focusing on Google Ads and other paid methods. Marketing managers oversee a digital marketing team and may help with some or all of these efforts.
What Digital Marketing Classes Are Available?
Want to learn how to create social media posts that appeal to your target audiences, work with keywords, or measure how your web traffic changes over time? Think about taking a digital marketing class. Unlike prerecorded videos or online articles, a class will provide hands-on training with expert instructors and real-world projects. NYIM offers several digital marketing courses through Noble Desktop, our design school. All are available to take in NYC or live online from anywhere in the world.
The Digital Marketing Strategies Bootcamp provides a decent introduction to the techniques used in digital marketing to identify and market to an audience. The first day of this course is devoted to building customer personas, establishing metrics and a budget, and website optimization. On the second day, you’ll learn more specific strategies for email and content marketing. This class provides a solid foundation for people interested in working in digital marketing and entrepreneurs who want to use digital marketing to grow their new or emerging businesses.
If you want to focus on boosting your company’s performance in search results, you can attend the SEO Bootcamp. The SEO Bootcamp covers techniques for improving your company’s ranking in Google results for different phrases and words. These include link-building methods, keyword research, writing SEO-friendly content, and how to arrange your website to improve your SEO.
Another good option is the Social Media Marketing Bootcamp. Here, you’ll learn how to navigate three of the most critical social media platforms for businesses: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. This class will get you familiar with Facebook Ads, LinkedIn prospecting, influencer marketing, Instagram Stories, and other marketing tools. There will also be a more general review of the social media landscape and popular strategies to use across platforms.
There is also a Google Ads Bootcamp. This program trains students to create successful paid campaigns by bidding on sponsored search results in Google. The instruction will start out with an explanation of keyword research and ad creation, then move on to higher-level topics like remarketing, automation, and optimization. Landing pages and conversion tracking are also part of the curriculum.
Many digital marketers start out by learning how to design and launch a campaign, but being able to measure its effectiveness is equally important. Noble Desktop’s Google Analytics Bootcamp helps you accomplish this. In this course, students practice using Google Analytics for monitoring and analyzing web traffic. Through a series of hands-on projects, you’ll identify your target KPIs, track marketing campaigns, and find out how to report your findings to stakeholders.
Certificate Programs for Digital Marketing
If you’re serious about starting a career in digital marketing, you may want to consider taking a single certificate course that covers multiple methods for building and running campaigns. This will give you more job opportunities than learning about search marketing or social media through an individual class. Another advantage to a certificate course is that you can add it to your credentials on your resume and LinkedIn profile, which looks good to potential employers.
At Noble Desktop, the best way to prepare for a digital marketing profession is by completing the Digital Marketing Certificate. This course covers a wide range of strategies and platforms that you will need to know for most marketing positions, including social media, SEO, Google Ads, Google Analytics, email marketing, and web optimization. By the end, you’ll be equipped to start working as a freelancer or apply to digital marketing positions.
Choosing a Specialization
In a big field like digital marketing, specializing is common. Some people benefit from studying to become a specialist in SEO, social media, or another area. These kinds of jobs are often associated with large companies that hire many people to their digital marketing teams. If working in this setting appeals to you, it may be worthwhile to consider choosing a specialization. With that in mind, having a broad basis of knowledge will help you be competitive for digital marketing positions, even specialized ones.
It is also common for digital marketers to bring cross-disciplinary skills to the table. Taking classes in graphic design and visual design will give you the power to create images for social media posts, websites, and email campaigns. If you’re interested in video content marketing or video-based social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, you may benefit from training in video editing. Learning about web design can be helpful for optimization strategy. If you want to learn how to better organize and interpret data from marketing campaigns, knowing the basics of data analytics can help you out.
