How to grow as a Digital Marketer?

The Digital Marketing Podcast with Mandar Marathe

How can you become an expert at digital marketing - either at your job or for starting a business. When it comes to learning anything or any field, what I believe is that you need to be a jack of all trades and master of one. For example, when it come to Digital Marketing, there are different areas / facets such as SEO, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Affiliate marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, content creation etc. Digital marketing in itself is a very vast domain. You need to have tangential knowledge across all areas of digital marketing but specialize or have deep knowledge / expertise in one area. You need to be a T-shaped digital marketer. For e.g. when it comes to digital marketing, earlier I used to focus a lot on Web Analytics or Data Analytics, and I thought I'd develop my expertise in that area. But slowly, i started getting more attracted towards SEO - and that's where I spend most of my time today - in terms of reading blogs related to SEO, learning from experts, watching videos, conducting SEO experiments, managing SEO campaigns of clients, conducting research and so on. That's the area of digital marketing that I specialize in. So, how do you grow as a digital marketer and become an expert. 1. Start with a foundation course - I would recommend that you sign up on academy.hubspot.com and take up the Inbound Marketing Certification course. You should take up that course and gain knowledge across all areas. 2. Decide on your area of focus - See what you like. May be spend some time doing everything in bits and pieces and see where your interest lies. You should subscribe to blogs in your area of focus - I subscribe to backlinko.com / Neil Patel's blog / SEOByTheSea by Bill Slawski / SearchEngineLand / SearchEngineJournal. Reading is just 30% of of the job done. 70% is execution. If you find a blog that you have read interesting, then you need to document the learning and go ahead with implementing what you've read. For e.g. there was a blog by Neil Patel related to CTR optimization. We went ahead and used this piece of knowledge across 3-4 clients to see whether they gave results. Be bold enough to implement and experiment new ideas. See the results first hand and then decide whether the pedantic knowledge that you have gained actually works. Be hands-on. 3. Work at different companies - You need to not just look at digital marketing, but also understand all other aspects of business - finance, operations, managing people. Work at three different companies - a small sized start up, a mid-sized company (100 people) and a large company (500+ people). Each company has different challenges. Work at different organizations and understand how digital marketing can solve business challenges.