A Career in Digital Marketing
Want to start a digital marketing career but unsure where to start? Digital marketing isn’t just one thing you can be good at; it’s a broad spectrum of different areas of specialization. To know if this is your right career path, you must assess yourself to see if this job is a good fit for you, your personality, and your skills. In this article, we’ll show you the different types of digital marketing and some tips for finding your digital marketing niche.
Types of Digital Marketing
Search Engine Marketing
How do relevant results come up when you type something into Google? This digital marketing niche is responsible for that. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) focuses on researching and utilizing targeted keywords for search engines.
For a business or product to be seen on a search engine results page (such as Google Search), its content must have the best keywords. It must have keywords that prospective customers use to search for a product relevant to the business.
For example, a garden supplies shop would have to use keywords such as “garden supplier” or “where to buy garden tools” for their content to show up on the first page of the Google Search results page.
SEM covers Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click marketing (PPC). Both of these are forms of marketing that rely on using the correct keywords for increased reach.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing
If the first few results on a search page have the word “ad”, it is being boosted by PPC marketing. PPC uses paid ads to appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs).
Search ads can increase brand awareness by as much as 80% as these paid ads are at the top of the SERPs and are the first ones consumers see when they use the search engine. This form of marketing is called pay-per-click because advertisers are only charged every time one of the ads is clicked. It appears to be an effective form of marketing as 58% of millennials purchase something due to an online or social media ad.
Search Engine Optimization
The following few results after the paid ads are the organically most relevant sites. SEO is a digital marketing niche that makes a website more visible to search engines so that it shows up on the results pages without being a paid ad.
On the first search results page alone, 67.6% of the clicks are on organic, unpaid results. This is achieved by strategically using the keywords previously researched throughout the content.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is, of course, marketing that uses social media as its platform. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linked In, and other platforms.
The goal is to grow a brand’s social media presence to follow and reach its potential customers. Knowing what works on social media platforms is essential in this digital marketing niche. Is your content more visual? Craft an aesthetic feed on Instagram. Is it shorter, and you’re looking for more engagement? Twitter might be the way to go.
Content Marketing
If you’ve seen informational or entertaining content from a brand, they used content marketing to reach you. This form of marketing involves creating relevant content valuable to customers, such as (but not limited to) blogs and videos.
Content marketing focuses less on hard selling and more on establishing the brand. It helps boost customers’ engagement with the brand and builds up the consumer base by providing content that people would enjoy and find valuable. A study in 2019 found that business-to-business (B2B) digital marketing agencies that use content marketing were able to create brand awareness (86%), educate audiences (79%), and build credibility and trust (75%).
Email Marketing
Ever found out about a sale from an email newsletter? This digital marketing niche uses that kind of strategy. Email marketing entails sending content to people directly via a mailing list; its edge is personalization. And it cannot always be done through other marketing means. For example, emails with personalized subject lines have a 50% higher open rate than those without.
One drawback in email marketing is the danger of being sent to a spam folder, making it especially important to craft valuable and targeted content.
Tips For Finding Your Digital Marketing Niche
1. Find opportunities to try different types of digital marketing
This could mean joining an online digital marketing agency for startups or offering freelance work to different businesses. Consider exploring and having hands-on experience with the different types of digital marketing.
Knowledge of the differences is one thing, but working in different areas helps hone your skill sets and give you the experience needed for the rest of the niche-finding process.
2. Choose which areas you’re good at (or like doing the most)
Once you better grasp how to deliver different digital marketing services, you can figure out which suits you best. Did you enjoy crafting blog content? Was SEO your forte?
Narrow down your general work to one or two areas you are good at and start from there. Doing so will help you choose which digital marketing niche to focus on.
3. Develop your skills for that niche
Now, you can develop your skills to give yourself that edge that puts you ahead of your competitors. Online courses are good resources for this and even more work experience.
4. Find a specialized topic or area of expertise
The more you work on your specific area/s, the more you will know which topics or digital marketing niches you enjoy providing services for.
Once you find this, you can start developing your skills with this area of expertise in mind. Build on this so that your edge is delivering quality work for a specific niche that you have learned a lot about.
Digital marketing services cover a spectrum with multiple areas under it, and it can be difficult to navigate when trying to find something to specialize in.
It’s not impossible. Gain the experience you need, find what you’re good at, and develop your skillset to make your work stand out. Find your digital marketing niche today and make a promising career out of it.
Angeline Licerio
Angeline Licerio is the blogger behind Dollarmize.com. After working online as a writer and SEO strategist, she decided to start this blog to give advise to people who would like to earn money online. She is also the founder of SEO Tutorials for FREE, a Facebook community that helps aspiring freelancers and SEO specialists to kickstart their work from home journey.
