In a world where digital marketing is growing in importance, many students and even mid-career switchers are wondering if this could be a potential career path for them. If that’s you, you may wish to find out what this job entails and how a typical workday would be like before deciding whether to learn digital marketing in order to enter this industry. 

Learn More: 5 Reasons Why You Should Take Digital Marketing Courses

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is more than just the ability to use social media to reach your audience. It requires a deeper understanding of consumer habits and data analytics. Defined as the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers through the use of the internet and other digital channels, digital marketing is an overarching term that encompasses many other forms of marketing, such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Email Marketing, Content Marketing, Performance Marketing, and more. When you learn digital marketing, you’ll probably get a glimpse into other marketing specialisations as well. 

What Does A Digital Marketer Do?

1. Develop Marketing Campaigns

Digital marketing campaigns are organised and strategised efforts that help businesses achieve a specific goal, such as to raise brand awareness or to convert new leads into customers. To plan and execute a campaign, lots of decision-making, ideation, and observation needs to take place. And the steps taken to craft an effective campaign will differ depending on various factors, such as your Key Progress Indicators (KPIs), marketing channels, budget, content format, and the purpose of the campaign. 

Typical marketing campaign plans should include: 

• Campaign goals and tracking: What is the purpose of your campaign? What are you trying to achieve? How will you know when you achieve it? 
• Campaign insight and targeting: Who is your target audience? What should you do in order to effectively target them?
• Key campaign messages and offers: How will you generate responses? Which campaign or product will convert your audience and help you achieve your goals? What assets and content will you require?
• Campaign media plan and budget: Which media channels will you use to reach your audience? What media activities will you be doing, what is your campaign timeline, and how much money will you spend to reach your audience? 
• Campaign execution: What will you need to test and adjust before your campaign goes live? 

2. Produce Campaign Content

Once your campaign plan is ready, you’ll need to prepare the assets required. For example, a corporate video, a product photo, a series of short reels, or a blog article. In order to effectively engage and/or convert your audience, you’ll need to have a good set of creative assets. 

You may have a team of content writers, designers, or video editors to help with this task. You may need to prepare a content brief to instruct the team on what they need to do. If the company you’re working with does not have a creative team, you may have to source for agencies or vendors to help with the work, or even produce the content yourself. 

3. Campaign Review and Management

After you have your plan ready, it’s time to launch your campaign; it could be a social media ad, a display ad, or a series of organic posts. Launching the campaign does not mean that your work is over. You’ll have to continue to monitor the metrics and even adjust your campaign details or settings as you go. 

Then, at the end of the campaign, you’ll need to pull out all the data related to your campaign, analyse it, prepare reports, and work with your team to find out how you can improve. Some questions you should ask yourself and the team include: 

• What could have been done differently?
• How could you have saved money?
• Did you do well in any aspect of the campaign?
• If something went wrong, why did it go wrong and what should be done to prevent it?

4. Keeping Abreast of Trends and Topics

As a digital marketer, you’ll need to stay on top of marketing trends and the trending topics of every day. This allows you to stay relevant, and even come up with effective digital marketing strategies that will help a business stay ahead of the competition. Identifying trends and continually using them to enhance your campaigns lets you communicate marketing messages in a diverse manner. 

Although digital marketers typically plan and execute campaigns to promote and advertise the company and its products and services, what you do on a daily basis will depend on many other factors. For example, the company you work for, their industry, overall goals, where you are in your career, and the area of digital marketing you specialise in. 

Interested in dipping your toes into this career? Learn digital marketing at a digital marketing academy today. Smartcademy is a leading tech educator in Singapore offering a variety of accredited courses to equip you with in-demand skills. Find out more about the available courses here.