How do you acquire the skills to work as digital marketing and online communication professionals?
What is the path to becoming a digital marketing and online communication professional appreciated by companies? What skills should you have and how can you acquire them? There are more and more graduates in different disciplinary fields who want to pursue a career in this field and therefore it is essential to give a precise answer to these questions.
Companies want online marketing and communication professionals
For their part, companies are increasingly increasing the search for digital communication and online marketing professionals, specialised in various specific fields: Social Media Marketing Manager, Online Content Manager, Digital Marketing Manager, SEO Consultant, E-commerce Manager, Online Brand Strategist, Web Marketing Strategist, etc.
A whole set of highly sought-after professions on the market and constantly evolving, in line with multimedia and technological updates. Both in large companies and small and medium-sized enterprises, the awareness that the relationship with the market is based on communication through new media is increasingly widespread. In this sense, professionals who work in this sector know how to make the most of all the marketing opportunities that the internet and the web can offer to business.
However, these professionals are still quite rare. A recent study highlights that 53% of companies have difficulty finding collaborators with digital marketing skills, while SEO jobs increased by 43% between 2017 and 2018, and Content Marketing jobs increased by 33% over the same period.
But how do you become an expert in the field of digital marketing and online communication? To clarify, it is necessary to define what are the skills required of a digital marketer.
Skills and starting degrees
To become an expert in online marketing and communication it is necessary to have a fair amount of skills. The starting point is a solid general culture, which is essential in all areas relating to communication.
Precisely because companies increasingly need professional communicators, humanities graduates are starting to find more and more space in the organization charts and even before in the search for candidates. Graduates in Literature, Philosophy, History, Communication Sciences, Political Sciences, etc. they are demonstrating more and more clearly that they have the best ability to manage the new business communication tools.
Basic skills such as the ability to write in a pragmatic and captivating way, a mix of creativity and imagination to create original content, the ability to interpret the individual and social behaviors of the consumer, great mental elasticity, and the ability to apply reasoning processes typical of lateral thinking make the new humanists figures highly sought after by recruiters.
The problem with humanists is that they are often reluctant to manage new digital technologies as well as to acquire good marketing skills, both traditional and digital. A major limitation, which seriously penalizes the employment prospects of those who remain anchored to a vision of humanistic culture that is too old-fashioned.
Those who come from economic faculties, on the other hand, are much better at managing numbers and analyzing data, so they are highly appreciated by companies in cases where there is a lot of work of interpreting big data or analyzing behavior flows., statistics, or numerical results that define the business trend. The limitation of these graduates is that they tend to be often too strict in their approach, to the detriment of creativity and communication skills.
The common problem with humanists and economists is that their approach to technology often remains evasive and unfocused. In other words, these graduates tend to be unfamiliar with all the features of the various online platforms. In this field of information technology, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and in general, almost all graduates from scientific disciplines have an edge.
It should be noted, however, that graduates in science and technology faculties are unlikely to start a career in the field of online marketing, given that the job market offers other opportunities that are almost always more direct and more in keeping with the skills acquired at university. Those few who decide to work in the field of marketing and communication have to work hard to gain flexibility and an open mind that is usually not part of their scientific and technical approach to problems.
The skills of digital marketing and online communication professional
So what is the identikit of the perfect digital marketer? It must be borne in mind that marketing is not an exact science, so it is not easy to define precise standards that outline the profile of those who work in this sector.
The characteristics that almost all established professionals of the digital marketing manager possess are the following:
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• broad general knowledge
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• passion for technologies and digital news
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• great skill in the use of computers and mobile devices
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• basic or advanced traditional marketing skills
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• fluid and creative writing skills
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• in-depth knowledge of all the most important strategies, tactics, and techniques of online communication and marketing.
How to acquire the necessary skills?
All these skills are almost always formed at the university or in general in the entire course of study that has been carried out. On the other hand, online communication and digital marketing are very rarely issues that universities address adequately within degree courses.
To have preparation in these areas, it is necessary to study specific books independently, closely follow blogs, and online sites that deepen these topics, or attend courses or post-graduate masters.
The digital marketing courses are the main way to acquire the basic skills necessary to become online marketing professionals because they offer a quick overview of everything related to the internet and web universe from the company business perspective.
It is essential to learn to distinguish poor courses from really good ones. To this end, we suggest reading our article which explains how to understand the value and quality of a training course.
Among the courses that we invite you to consider, there are also those organized by Communication Village, which for more than a decade has been involved in training resources specialized in digital marketing and communication in new media in this field.
Currently, it is possible to enroll in the third edition of the Social Media and Digital Marketing Course that we are organizing in distance learning mode in live online streaming.
It offers a complete picture of all the skills needed to work as an online marketing and communication professional. It starts on November 18, 2020, and is divided into 30 hours of training
For more information on the program and course specifications and to register: Social Media and Digital Marketing Course.
See: Cheap Instagram Followers UK
Conclusion
Many times attending a single course is not enough, because perhaps it is very specialized and does not provide all the professional skills required of a digital marketer or because it simply expresses the points of view and approach of a specific trainer or group of trainers. Another trainer could cover other topics or propose different overviews that can further enrich the specific culture of marketing and online communication.
A course and all the targeted readings that can be done cannot replace the experience in the company. Anyone who wants to become a digital marketing and online communication professional must necessarily do internships and learn the profession directly in the field. In this it is necessary to choose the right company to propose, trying to guess if the role it will take on will be only marginal or if you will have the opportunity to stay in contact with the professionals who carry out the main activities.