Questions you should ask before pursuing a career in digital marketing

Digital marketing in an exciting part of the marketing landscape that is constantly evolving to meet the behaviours and trends amongst internet users and the search engines they rely on. Certain disciplines of digital marketing like search engine marketing (SEM) and subsequently search engine optimisation (SEO), are highly fluid areas of study that require practitioners to apply their broader knowledge or marketing rather than following a dogmatic approach.

A career in digital marketing can be particularly enticing to people who dismiss it as Facebook or social media marketing, thinking of it as a cushy job. The reality is however that digital marketing can be an incredibly hard industry to get a start and be successful in unless you’re the right kind of person.

Let’s take a look at some questions you should be asking yourself before pursuing a career in digital marketing.

Do you have good writing and English skills?

A large part of digital marketing revolves around generating high quality content for the purposes of being shared commercially in order to drive traffic to a client’s website. This type of soft-copy advertising and sponsored content is the bread and butter of a lot of contemporary digital marketing strategy and will be a requirement of most digital marketing roles.

Many entry level digital marketing roles will be offered to copywriters. A good copywriter can write high quality and engaging content at a commercial scale, meaning that they can produce several articles every day for a variety of different clients.

Are you a good communicator?

While communications degrees have been dismissed or misunderstood in popular culture, they are actually the best education you can get to become a digital marketer. This is because marketing is all about communicating a message to an audience in an effective way.

Contemporary communicators have a great understanding of social media and how it’s changed the landscape of digital marketing over the last decade. These people will often be quite popular on social media, having an intrinsic knowledge of what kind of posts do well.

Are you a patient person?

Because the internet is such a large and constantly expanding behemoth, it can be hard for digital marketing campaigns to take off. Unless you create the next viral hit, a campaign is going to have to spend a long time fighting for relevancy amongst other similar offerings.

This means that a lot of digital marketing work will require you to wait for results over a longer period than with traditional advertising campaigns. Implementing and committing to proven strategies as well as being patient is the best way to garner long-term results.

Organic vs paid search marketing – which is better?

For digital marketers, the dichotomy between paid and organic search traffic is a source of fierce debate. Supporters of paid digital marketing methods tout its advantages over organic practises like SEO and vice versa.

Both organic and paid means of digital marketing have proven successful in the past and the best approaches use both of them in concert. However, people still want to know which of them is superior in achieving their digital marketing goals.

Let’s take a look at organic vs paid traffic and see which is better overall.

Paid for traffic

Paid digital marketing methods like pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements require the marketer to pay a certain amount of money so that an ad is served directly to the target audience. Using advanced demographic insights, these campaigns can be highly targeted so that they reach the best possible audience 100% of the time.

Despite the highly targeted nature of paid advertisements, they are disclaimed as such by search engines and websites that host them. This means that the audience can directly see that the ad has been paid for and targeted to them.

This can be a disadvantage as some audiences will be turned off obvious advertisements and instead look for the most authoritative organic search result.

Organic traffic

Organic growth digital marketing strategies like search engine optimisation (SEO), while not strictly considered paid-for, still have a cost in terms of man hours spent on it. Therefore organic means of generating traffic should not be confused as being free, as tactics like SEO cost money to do effectively.

However, the advantage of organic growth tactics like SEO is that they work to boost the visibility of a website in search engines naturally. This means that effective SEO will make it so that a website appears in the top, organic, results for a certain set of keywords.

This is more authoritative that paid-for ads as people will automatically trust an organic listing over a paid one. The reasons for this are fairly obvious, people trust search engines to rank sites organically based on their true popularity and authoritativeness, rather than whoever can spend the most money on marketing.

Which is better?

Ultimately, neither organic nor paid search marketing is definitively superior to the other. The suitability of either will really depend on the type of business you have.

For example, people shopping for clothes are less concerned with authoritativeness than someone looking for a lawyer, so paid-for ads would be equally as effective as organic listings. On the other hand, people looking for a lawyer will want to see what the most genuine search result is because of the nature of the service they are looking for.