So you want to work in digital marketing? You’ve chosen a great time to get started!
With audiences spending more time in front of their screens now than ever before, companies of every shape and size are looking to ramp up their digital content production and take advantage of this cultural and consumer shift to all things digital.
Put simply, organizations in every sector are seeking talented marketers to get their products and messaging in front of their target customers.
But with so many digital marketing jobs out there to choose from, how do you know which is the right one for you?
From content production to analytics, the digital marketing team requires a broad spectrum of talents in order to hit its two big targets: acquiring and retaining customers.
If you’re still not sure where you’d like to be in this eclectic team, check out our list of the best digital marketing jobs.
Whether you’re a dab hand at strategy and long term planning, or you’re happiest brainstorming great ideas and producing first class content, you’re guaranteed to find a fulfilling role with growth and longevity in the digital marketing team.
What exactly is digital marketing?
“Digital marketing” refers to the curation, production and implementation of all public-facing digital content for a company, brand, or individual. A digital marketing team will seek to build trust and increase awareness through the publication of promotional materials and relevant content with the aim of converting new customers, and keeping existing ones loyal and engaged.
Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and numerous other social media platforms are typically used to share posts and promotional material using text, graphics and videos, as well as to establish groups to share ideas about the product or its content with other fans or customers.
Emails, newsletters, and web-based advertising are also popular tools to reach audiences, while some companies take advantage of text and multimedia messages for more direct promotion.
Longform content plays a role too. With a growing recognition of the value of SEO, more businesses are gaining traction publishing articles on sites like Medium, Tumblr, and WordPress as well as on company landing pages, product pages, and blogs.
So now that we know what digital marketing is, what roles are available in this dynamic, multi-faceted and lucrative field?
What are the top digital marketing jobs right now?
1. Content strategist
There’s been a huge shift in marketing in recent years away from the ‘hard sell’ often associated with traditional advertising towards providing valuable content as a lead generation tool. This shift has meant demand for content strategists has soared.
A content strategist’s role within the marketing team is to develop a strategy that aligns with both the company (or client’s) business goals and the customer’s needs. They do this by planning high-quality, relevant content that provides some kind of intrinsic value to the reader. This kind of content—typically a mixture of long and short-form text content, images, videos and infographics—promotes the brand as an authority in the field, builds trust with potential customers, and provides opportunities for the content team to increase website traffic using techniques like back-link building and SEO.
A content strategist will not only plan content to be published, they will often work closely with the SEO team to write detailed briefs for freelance or in-house writers, run competitor analyses, and conduct content audits. Depending on the size of the team, the content strategist will most likely be expected to jump in and write, edit and publish content themselves when other content producers are not available.
2. Email marketer
With the prevalence of emails—319.6 billion sent per day as of 2021!—this popular format is an area that brands really need to leverage if they are going to reach their target audiences. To do this, the email marketer has a specific brief to work to; cultivating language and design that speaks to users on their home turf, and ensuring their company’s emails stand out amongst all the other emails flooding their target users’ inboxes.
As well as nurturing leads, boosting traffic, improving conversion rates and increasing brand awareness via email and newsletters, email marketers are expected to build campaigns which align with the overall goals of the rest of the marketing team, track open rates, conduct A/B tests, and analyze what language and graphics work best for their brand’s messaging in this format.
3. SEO specialist
The role of the SEO specialist is crucial to any company with an active, online presence. SEO—or Search Engine Optimization—primarily helps to send the right people to the content they are seeking through the careful placing of specific keywords in high quality, relevant content on a website or blog, thereby increasing the visibility of that content on search engines like Google or Bing. You can learn more about SEO (and how it’s different from SEM) here.
The SEO specialist is responsible for researching and identifying those keywords before ensuring the content is tailored to naturally include them. When this is successful, the content on a blog or website moves further up the search results and reaches more of the people who want or need the product that company is selling.
Ultimately, SEO should lead to target users finding content which is beneficial to them. When this happens, the user’s faith in the brand increases, and the company sees a rise in both conversions and returning customers. Working as an SEO specialist can pay handsomely, too—learn more about SEO specialist salaries in this post.
4. Digital marketing manager
The digital marketing manager is responsible for the successful running of digital channels and campaigns that create new customer leads, promote the brand, and contribute to overall company growth.
The size of the company will determine how hands-on the digital marketing manager is when it comes to the execution of tasks, but in almost every case they will collaborate closely with the community and social media managers, as well as the head of marketing to ensure that messaging is aligned and tasks are distributed among the right people.
As well as working closely with the rest of the marketing team, the digital marketing manager is expected to collaborate frequently with team members in the content production teams, like copywriters, graphic designers, and videographers, and work on strategy and planning with members of the business and sales teams to ensure that targets are aligned and met. As such, digital marketing managers require a variety of skills and knowledge of different tools.
You can learn more about how to become a digital marketing manager with this step-by-step roadmap, and discover your earning potential in our digital marketing manager salary guide. You can also explore a similar role: the digital marketing specialist.
5. Social media manager
The social media manager is primarily responsible for curating a brand’s online voice and presence via its social media channels.
Using tools like Hootsuite or Buffer, the social media manager must create, plan and schedule shareable content on sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. When a social media campaign is over, they will gather data from users to analyze and report their learnings back to the rest of the marketing team.
Seeking out and building partnerships with other relevant brands or influencers is another aspect of the social media manager job description, and a good knowledge of Google Adwords and sponsored content is essential to ensure campaigns are executed successfully. Those interested in becoming a social media manager will therefore need to demonstrate a variety of skills.
If you’re interested in starting a career in the field, check out this step-by-step guide on how to become a social media specialist (another exciting social media role!) You’ll also find a complete guide to social media jobs and career paths here.
6. Data analyst or digital marketing analyst
Data analysts hold a vital—and often fascinating—role, gathering, organizing, and interpreting data sets in order to answer a question or solve a specific problem.
What this translates to in the digital marketing team is closely examining the strengths and weaknesses of direct competitors and using that data in ways that leverage their own brands’ positions.
As a data analyst (or a digital marketing analyst, as your job title may be if you’re working specifically in the marketing team), you can expect to spend a good deal of your time developing systems and setting up infrastructure for collecting data, before compiling your findings into reports that help improve the overall team’s efforts. To excel in this role, you should be a master of creating narratives and spotting patterns and trends, as these will be used to form data-driven insights that will directly inform the marketing team’s future campaigns.
7. Content creators
The content creators are the backbone of the digital marketing team. A mixed bag of creative copywriters, videographers, and graphic designers, these talented individuals are responsible for producing carefully crafted content for social media, blogs, email and landing pages that draws the target audience in and keeps established customers coming back again and again.
Copywriter
A copywriter creates clear, compelling text that is designed to inform, provide insights, and guide the reader towards a conclusion that promotes the company, product or brand message. Copywriters are often tasked with different jobs on the team, e.g. producing short-form social media copy for the social media manager, writing long-form articles with the SEO strategist, or writing landing page or product copy with the UX designer.
Videographer
In a digital world that places increasing importance on video, having a videographer on your digital marketing team is no longer considered a luxury but a necessity. A short, engaging video on a website or social media channel is often the fastest, easiest and lowest-commitment way for users to get crucial information about products and services.
Graphic or digital designer
In a marketing context, a graphic designer works to communicate and promote a brand, product, or service in a visually appealing way, seeking to ensure that all image components match the company’s established visual style. With a clear understanding of the marketing team’s strategy and goals, a graphic designer aims to create connections and experiences for the user with visuals.
8. UX designer
We talk a lot about UX design here at CareerFoundry, and for good reason! UX designers are involved in every aspect of the user’s experience with a product, including those very first interactions a user has with a brand via a website, blog, or social media channel.
The role of the UX designer in the digital marketing team is to contribute their own user research to that of the marketing team’s to gain a rounded vision of the target customer; their needs, wants, and goals.
The UX designer then uses that knowledge to inform designs of pages, elements, and content that persuades the user to take positive steps towards engaging with content, buying a product and recommending it to friends or colleagues. Put simply, the UX designer is tasked in making optimal design decisions based on cumulative research from the UX and marketing teams.
UX design is a priority for marketers because, as we have seen time and time again, a great user experience increases conversion: the ultimate goal of almost every business or brand. You can learn more about the role of the UX designer in this guide.
9. AI specialist
It may sound like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie, but the role of the AI specialist is increasingly sought after in marketing teams. Artificial Intelligence specialists can significantly contribute to marketing efforts by building tools which can scan data and user profiles in order to find out the best ways to communicate with customers. With this information, messaging can be tailored to solve user pain points and then delivered at specific times to ensure maximum impact and efficiency.
AI is an area that is likely to grow quickly over the next decade or so, so if creating systems to analyze data is something that interests you, it’s worth learning how to do it now—it’s likely you’ll be in high demand as soon as you hit the job market.
What’s next? Starting your digital marketing career
You might think you need a digital marketing degree to get started in the field, but actually, that’s not true! There are many routes into marketing, and not all of them involve studying years for a qualification. If you like the sound of some of these digital marketing jobs, here are some concrete ways you can get started right now:
- Take a course. Find a course in digital marketing to get an all-round education on a career in the field, or specialize in the one area that appeals to you most. Either way, you’ll learn valuable skills, meet professionals in the field, and have an impressive accolade to add to your CV when you start applying for positions.
- Ask for advice. Reach out to someone who is already doing your dream job and ask them about it! If you’re friendly and genuinely interested, you will most likely make a positive connection and get some useful information about the best ways to get started, find work and stay relevant in the field.
- Try out some tools. Get to grips with digital marketing tools like Hootsuite, Hubspot and Google Analytics to get an idea of what you might be working with when you start a career in digital marketing. Plan some imaginary campaigns, schedule some posts or perform some A/B tests to see how it might feel when you’re doing the job for real.
So there you have it: A selection of some of the most exciting, rewarding, and sought-after jobs in digital marketing. Not sure an in-house role is for you? You can also explore the freelance digital marketing route.
To learn more about a career in the field, check out our free, 5-day course, or read these guides: