This article is all about starting a digital marketing career in India as a fresher or with little or no experience. We have discussed the fundamentals of digital marketing before moving on to the various career opportunities available in this sector.
The world has taken/seen various changes and modifications in recent times. Especially after the 2000s started, technological advancements and the virtual world have witnessed a huge amount of development due to the internet and connectivity.
The type of connection and connectivity that was once unimaginable is now possible with just a few clicks. The world now enjoys the convenience and comfort of operating and communicating from anywhere in the world.
Due to the advent of the internet, the digital and technological sectors started focusing on finding opportunities through the internet. Due to this, the world was introduced to social media platforms and other forms of applications and networking sites that made connectivity much easier than it was before. Back then, when there was no internet, people had to physically go out there and reach out to the world.
People made use of post letters and other forms of communication that required time and physical presence. Even in order to share news and updates, people have to reach out to the local shops and places where the news and updates were announced and printed in the newspapers.
But today, it all comes down to a few clicks. People can now easily reach out to anybody in the world by sitting anywhere on the globe. In addition to this, digital marketing has grown tremendously in the past few years. Back then, billboards and newspapers were the sources of advertisements and promotions.
Today, everybody is more exposed to advertisements on the internet and on social media networking sites. As everybody now uses social media sites like Instagram and Facebook more extensively, brands and companies now take the responsibility and opportunity to reach out to their targeted audiences via these social networking sites.
Digital marketing has been an interesting topic for the past few years, and it is assumed that this sector is still growing and shall continue to expand and develop in the next coming 10 years. Keeping this in mind, let us first understand a few fundamentals of digital marketing before moving on to understand How to Start a Digital Marketing Career in India as a fresher.
What is Digital Marketing?
In laymen’s terms, digital marketing can simply be stated and understood as the process of advertising products and services via the internet and new digital mediums. Any marketing strategies used on electronic devices that use a computer and smartphones are today referred to as “digital marketing.”
Brands and companies are now seeking their intended customer at the very right time on such mediums mentioned above. A company may use search engines, blogs, social media, video, email, and other avenues to reach customers while engaging in digital marketing. Furthermore, digital marketing today provides more qualitative and quantitative results as compared to traditional marketing.
As the internet grew profoundly all over the world, the overall time spent on electronic devices like computers, laptops, and smartphones increased abundantly. Consider your own example as a reader, you are reading this article on an electronic device and taking the advantage of the internet. Digital marketing is exactly doing the same.
Be it a startup business or a reputed brand or a company, anybody today can be highly benefited from this dynamic and new form of marketing. With respect to this, let us take a look at a few benefits of digital marketing.
Have a look at the importance of digital marketing in India after Covid – 19. Digital marketing after the outbreak of Covid, the Indian market played an important role. Due to the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns, many businesses were forced to shut down or reduce their operations. This led to a decrease in revenue and an increase in unemployment. In this scenario, digital marketing has played a crucial role in helping businesses adapt to the new normal and reach customers in a safe and efficient manner.
Top 5 Benefits of Digital Marketing in 2023
✔ Target the Audiences
Digital marketing has been famously known to help reach out to the right audiences and customers. Due to the fact that so many digital marketing platforms are available, today let you target a certain group, audience segmentation and finding the right people at the right time is now simpler than ever.
Today, we all have access to web technologies and several digital marketing tools that monitor someone’s online behaviours and demographic data (this is exactly what brands and companies do). This information may be used by digital marketers to present consumers with certain goods or services that they might find appealing.
✔ Affordability
Compared to the old traditional ways of marketing and advertising, digital marketing is far now affordable and economical for you as a startup or a reputed brand.
Traditional marketing is far more expensive than digital marketing as it contains several middlemen and requires labour and materials. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is totally on the virtual world – the internet.
Depending on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, your expenditure changes. The most significant benefit of digital marketing for businesses today is this. You may begin by creating a basic, inexpensive approach and then gradually boost your advertising spending as your return on investment rises.
✔ Connection & Connectivity
Advertising and promoting are all about connection and creativity. As stated above, the internet provides the convenience of connecting from anywhere and anytime in the world. In today’s highly competitive world, maintaining contact with your intended audience is absolutely essential for you as a brand or organization.
Due to so many various brands and companies competing on the internet and several social media networking sites, You may want to reassure them that you are actively trying to comprehend the current trends and shifts in your customers’ behaviours by maintaining in touch with them through digital marketing.
✔ Digital Flexibility
Digital marketing provides various crucial information and knowledge that you may need as a brand owner. The flexibility that digital marketing offers surpass what traditional marketing ever provides. With the data and knowledge you already have about your audiences, you may get insight into who they are as consumers and where you can reach them most easily as a brand owner. Due to this, you know the changes in the taste and preferences of your audiences.
You may flexibly produce content and offerings according to the digital platforms being utilized and link to them with your message. Furthermore, not every time you will create a digital marketing strategy that will help you flourish and expand. Digital marketing may also be used to test campaigns in real time and scrap those that aren’t working.
✔ Tracking & Measuring
It can be challenging to gauge the success of your marketing activities when using traditional or offline marketing. Traditional or offline marketing does have the capability to give you insights about the whereabouts of your advertisement or marketing strategies and performances.
If you simultaneously post an advertisement in a newspaper and on a billboard, it is impossible to determine how many people saw the advertisement in the newspaper and how many saw it on the billboard.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, gives you knowledge on various aspects like total clicks on your advertisements, total reach, number of engagements, and the number of people who interacted or made a purchase.
Now that we have understood what digital marketing is and what are its key benefits, let us now dive into the crucial part of this article – How to Start a Digital Marketing Career in India as a Fresher. Here we have given you steps to follow and get started with a digital marketing career in India as a Fresher.
1. First Of Everything, Do Your Homework
In whichever professional you are interested in or wish to be a part of, the most important thing before everything is to do your homework.
This simply includes overviewing the subject, understanding what the profession and career are all about, evaluating its growth and stability, knowing if there is a scope for personal growth, and knowing, and knowing if the career provides the expected salary.
Everything you would want to know regarding digital marketing is present on the internet. Experts like Sorav Jain and Neil Patel have already built a robust foundation of understanding what digital marketing is and how digital marketing is shaping the future of the entire world.
They intricately describe how the face of marketing, advertising, and brands has changed after the development of digital marketing and other digital marketing career opportunities.
Digital marketing, in today’s time, has tremendously grown everywhere around the world. The development of the internet caused the digital and technology industries to begin concentrating on leveraging the internet to identify possibilities.
As a result, social media platforms, various kinds of programs, and networking websites were made available to the world, greatly facilitating connectedness. Even while you do your homework, you’d realize this is the best time for you to become a part of the digital world.
2. In Order To Become A Part Of This Virtual World, Get Creative And Innovate
Nonetheless to say, in whatever field you wish to be in, creativity and innovative abilities are a prerequisite. But digital marketing might be something that asks for more. In order to become a digital marketer or start any career under the roof of digital marketing, one has to be profoundly creative, adaptive, and innovative.
Digital marketing is not just advertising and promoting on the internet or on social media networking sites, digital marketing is not just creating an online presence or merely staying connected with your customers and clients, digital marketing is a lot more than we expect it to be.
It is now widely known that digital marketing is a dynamic and versatile sector in the entire world. Unlike any other profession, digital marketing asks for new ways in which a digital marketing strategy can be created and implemented in a way that customers and clients get attracted and stay hooked on your brand forever.
So to become a part of such a sector, one has to continuously work upon his or her’s creative and adaptive abilities. One has to consistently look towards other brands and companies and analyze why they are creating and executing their digital marketing campaigns in such a way.
3. Work On Your Adaptive Skills
In today’s time, being adaptive is highly important. Consider the fact that digital marketing itself has grown so much in the past years. Nobody ever expected marketing to take place so conveniently and easily on the internet. People back then had to struggle to advertise or promote their goods and services, they had to go all over the way to afford billboards and ads in newspapers.
Additionally, most people were never aware of the products and services that existed back then. People were either notified of a new product by somebody they knew or they would physically come across the products by chance. But today, the scenario has totally changed.
Every brand and company nowadays promote and advertises their goods and services with just a few clicks. Not only that, businesses can now track their performances like total reach, exposure, engagements and interaction on their advertisements and updates. Digital marketing offers more than an average businessman or salesman can imagine.
Hence, in this digitally transforming world, one has to strongly be very adaptive. Even in the case of Google, the company regularly changes its rules and regulations. One should be able to leave the old techniques and start/adapt the new ones before their competitors do.
4. Practise What Others Already Do Or Have Done
As stated above already, digital marketing is a highly dynamic and versatile sector that keeps on changing and evolving. Yet, to date, none of us is aware of how marketing will take place in the future, or how digital marketing will grow and expand with future technologies and possibilities.
As for most of the people who are new to this digital sector and are willing to master the art of digital marketing, it is important for those people to practise what others already do or have done in the past.
Why is this so? As most of the masters of digital marketing have mastered the art of digital marketing and have done what really works and gives positive results and outcomes, one has to follow in their footsteps and understand how and why they have done that.
Even all the digital marketing masters today have no idea about how the sector will evolve in the future, neither are they aware of how digital marketing would look like today. All we know is this sector will flourish and expand as the world and digital technologies continue to grow.
Hence, it is important to keep doing and practising what others already do. As freshers, you must consistently keep an eye on other brands and businesses and question their digital marketing strategies. Moreover to this, you must attempt to compare several digital marketing techniques executed by several reputed brands in order to learn who did the best and who stands apart from the competitive crowd.
Traditional Marketing Vs. Digital Marketing
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing refers to the use of traditional media such as;
- Print (newspaper, magazine)
- Television
- Radio
- Billboards
- Direct Mail
- Telemarketing
- One-way communication
- Wider reach, but more costly
- Harder to measure
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing refers to the use of digital channels such as;
- Social Media
- Websites
- Mobile Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing
- Online Advertising
- Two-way communication
- More cost-effective, but limited reach
- Easily trackable and analyzable
Now let’s have a look at the several types of digital marketing;
5. Learn About Several Types Of Digital Marketing
In order to start a digital marketing career in India as a fresher and understand where in digital marketing you might be interested, you should start exploring and researching several types of digital marketing we have today.
Of course, digital marketing is known as advertising and promoting products and services on the internet as a whole, but it has various different types of forms under it. Let us explore a few –
✔ Paid Advertisement
This is a form of digital marketing you surely must have come across. Today, on the internet, we basically have two methods of conducting paid advertisements. Before the organic results, the sponsored search engine advertisements are displayed at the top of the SERP. Once you enter the “best digital marketing course in the world”, you will come across advertisements first, and once you scroll down, you will come across organic results.
The two types of Paid ads are –
▶️ Pay Per Click
This is the most popular method of paying for media on the internet, and practically all digital marketing methods may make use of it. Here, you purchase clicks on your advertisements. Once anybody clicks your advertisement, you are charged.
▶️ Cost Per Mile
Whenever you are using a short-tail keyword or phrase, this is known to be more beneficial. This is basically calculated per thousand views or impressions on the advertisement.
✔ Social Media Marketing
As the name suggests, the act of advertising and promoting products and services on social media networking sites is called social media marketing. Here, you may pay to produce advertisements or publish your content on social media to attract a certain audience.
It is not necessary to always pay for your advertisement, even natural or organic advertisement can be executed smartly.
✔ Content Marketing
This blog that you are reading is the perfect example of what content marketing is known as. Any form of knowledge, advertisement, or even updates is called content marketing. Blogs, social media, emails, and other platforms can all be used for it.
For mobile devices and other electronic devices, there are even particular forms, including apps and push alerts. You will win your audience’s trust if your brand delivers it to them through excellent and helpful content.
✔ Affiliate Marketing
Ever came across blogs or descriptions that have hyperlinks that direct you to purchase? In affiliate marketing, content creators are paid a commission for each sale of a good or service they generate. This is beneficial for bloggers and YouTubers.
✔ Email Marketing
Use of email marketing is one of the most popular and effective ways to advertise products or services. Simply put, email marketing is the practice of businesses sending their consumers and clients emails with newsletters, significant updates, and other essential announcements and events.
✔ Influencer Marketing
This type of marketing has been increasing and gaining a good amount of attention these days. The term “influencers” has grown significantly on the many social media networking platforms now accessible.
Anyone with a large number of Instagram followers qualifies as a social media influencer. These influencers work with well-known brands and businesses to help them sell their products and services on social media.
✔ Search Engine Optimization
This is the most opted and famous form of digital marketing. This includes ranking your website on Google with the help of inserting appropriate keywords to your website and optimizing your website well. With a well-done SEO, your content might rank among the top results on search engines thanks to SEO, or search engine optimization. As a result, someone who is actively looking for what you have to offer will find your website.
6. Keep Reading Digital Marketing Blogs
Digital marketing is a versatile and dynamic sector that has kept on changing, evolving, and updating. In order to keep your knowledge fresh and new, one has to constantly search blogs and articles related to digital marketing.
Once you are hooked up to digital marketing blogs, you can even start writing new blogs are the same. Writing blogs on digital marketing shall be profoundly beneficial for your knowledge. How? In order to write a blog, one has to learn about the subject thoroughly, this indeed helps in increasing knowledge and expertise and helps you learn new things fasters.
7. Get A Digital Marketing Course
Needless to say, in order to pursue a career anywhere in the world in any sector, one has to have knowledge that could get him or her to get to the interview. In order to understand the digital marketing core concepts more in detail, in order to understand how the above-mentioned digital marketing forms operate and work, one has to have a digital marketing course in hand.
Why is it necessary to have a course? Digital marketing, which might seem easy and not some rocket science, in reality, is not an easy-to-do job. There is an easy why several digital marketing experts available today have years of digital marketing knowledge and expertise. Nobody becomes a digital marketing expert just after interning in any digital marketing firm.
The benefits of having a digital marketing degree and certificate are –
- A Variety of Career Possibilities
- Results with Tracking and Measurability
- Uncover Your Professional Side
- Showcase Creativity
- Skills Transfer from One Company to the other
- Establishing and recognising your career
- Greater Pay
- Effective and incredibly economical
One of the top digital marketing courses in the world is called Digital Scholar. Sorav Jain, the best digital marketer in India, is the owner and founder. Students are guided by Digital Scholar to become proficient in digital marketing. Additionally, they have a sibling business named echoVME, a digital marketing firm with its headquarters in Chennai.
8. Start Working As A Freelancer
Yes, it is true. Digital marketing offers the benefit of working as a freelance sitting anywhere in the world. As stated above, digital marketing has the benefit of being time flexible. Digital marketing can be done at any time of the day or night and still gather useful and profound results.
There are several websites that can get you a freelance digital marketing job. Websites such as Fiverr, LinkedIn, or Upwork have potential clients that are looking for freelancers and digital marketing professionals.
Once you have finished your course and have received your digital marketing in hand, go out there to various websites, build your resume, and start seeking work opportunities. Freelancing may not be a forever choice of work but it will definitely help you gain digital opportunities and assist you to build your portfolio for the same.
9. Create Your Website
Even reputed brands and companies have to advertise and promote themselves in order to gain customers and clients and make sales and profits. Once you have gained enough knowledge about digital marketing, after you have completed your digital marketing course and have received a digital marketing certificate, once you are doing or have done various tasks and work as a digital marketing freelancer, now it’s your time to build your own website.
In most cases, clients and customers would simply to search engines like Google and search for their queries. For example, clients might search “best and cheap content writers” on Google in order to connect to one.
Once you have built your website by stuffing appropriate keywords and phrases, you will expose yourself and your portfolio to the world profoundly.
Conclusion
We hope after reading things you have understood how to start a digital marketing career in India as a fresher.
As we have said before, In recent years, the world has seen a number of changes and adaptations. The internet and connection have greatly accelerated technical breakthroughs and the growth of the virtual world, particularly since the turn of the millennium.
Many individuals have realized the necessity and significance of technology and digital breakthroughs after the Covid-19 pandemic. As nobody could have ever predicted, marketing is now handled online. As a result, there are presently a lot of professional options available, and digital marketing is no less.
We hope this article has been beneficial for you. What are your views on having a career in digital marketing?
Do let us know in the comments section below. All the best for a digital marketing career in India as a fresher.