If “career change” landed a spot on your list of 2019 New Year’s Resolutions, take a look at the world of digital marketing. As businesses continue to invest in their digital capabilities and new marketing channels gain prominence, there’s never been a better time to consider a career in the field.
Just take a look at this omnichannel marketing chart produced by Smart Insights below:
Each of the downward-pointing arrows represents a different marketing strategy – and each of these strategies represents a skillset you can hone as you prepare to dive into a specialised, in-demand digital marketing career.
But where should you get started? If you’re new to the world of digital marketing, it can be difficult to determine where you’ll fit in. Let’s take a look at what we expect to be some of the best digital and Search Marketing career opportunities in 2019, based on trends we’re seeing in the industry.
The Best Digital Marketing Jobs by Skill Set
If You’re Detail-Oriented: SEO
The SEO of 2019 bears very little resemblance to the SEO of 2009 and earlier. Rather than worrying about deprecated tactics like keyword stuffing to a particular density, modern SEOs are tasked with covering everything from user intent optimisation, to voice search, to content gap analyses and more.
That’s what makes a career in SEO such a great choice for detail-oriented pros. You must be extremely well organised to keep track of all these different initiatives, as well as motivated to keep up with the continual changes occurring in the field.
If You’re the Creative Type: Content Marketing
According to the recent B2B Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America report published by the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Conductor, B2B content marketers were more likely to report an increase in spending on content creation over the last 12 months than on any other area (including staff, paid content distribution and technology).
Simply put, companies continue to invest in content – and that means more jobs for the digital marketers who create it. Even better, plenty of different jobs exist within the wide world of content marketing, making it possible for anybody to find a position that’s tailored to their unique background.
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- If you’re a strong writer, photographer, graphic designer or videographer, translate your skills to content creation for B2B or B2C companies.
- If you’re more strategic than creative, look for work as a content strategist or as a content campaign manager.
If You’re Naturally Social: Social Media
Social media in 2019 is about so much more than posting to a company’s profile. Social media these days is all about engagement – and that takes a number of different forms, based on the business’s goals.
For instance, B2C companies may prioritise influencer outreach and engagement in their social media activities, while B2B businesses may treat social media as more of a customer support and troubleshooting channel. In either case, your job as a social media pro will be to function as the company’s voice and to uphold its standards in all communications with prospects and customers.
Another interesting opportunity for the socially minded comes from the proliferation of live chat technologies. As more chatbots and live chat tools like Drift and CloudTask are released, real, live human beings are needed to handle queries that have been escalated beyond gatekeeper bots. Working with the producers of these tools to manage their deployment is quickly becoming a viable career path.
If You’re Analytical in Nature: Digital Advertising
Finally, if your strongest skills center on the numerical, look to digital advertising analytics for rewarding work. Certainly, the world of digital marketing offers plenty of opportunities to flex your analytics muscles. If you can unpack insights from data, your career options are virtually unlimited in this field.
But managing digital advertising campaigns is an especially interesting prospect these days, given how quickly campaign technology is evolving. Take the latest generation of dynamic creative optimisation programs, which leverage machine learning to generate custom-tailored ads on-the-fly, according to user activity data.
As tools like these continue to evolve and gain further traction in the market, digital advertising specialists who can work effectively with complex programs will continue to be in high-demand.
How to Get Started with 2019’s Best Digital Marketing Jobs
Hopefully, the suggestions above will have given you a starting place for your 2019 digital marketing career search. But if you’re still uncertain, use the questions below to further narrow down your options:
- How much are you willing to invest in learning a new trade? Take the case of social media, which most of us have used to some degree in our personal lives. Translating these skills to a career is a very different prospect than learning something completely new – especially in the case of more technical digital marketing disciplines, like digital advertising analytics.
- How much money do you want to earn? Generally speaking, to succeed financially in a digital marketing role, you need two things: an in-demand skill set and an ability to solve problems for businesses. Content creators and social media specialists, for example, are a dime-a-dozen. It is those who have carved out unique niches within their spaces and learned to deploy their skills in a way that makes businesses money that are ultimately most successful.
- Where do you want to work? Do you want to work for an agency when you’re ready to join the digital marketing workforce? Do you want to freelance? Do you want to work full-time or part-time? Research the most common work scenarios of those in the specialisations you’re considering to see whether or not future positions are likely to match your expectations.
Once you’ve done your research and chosen a digital marketing career, look online for free training resources. It’s almost never necessary to go back to school to learn digital marketing. Study from existing materials, test them out on your own, and you’ll be well positioned for a new digital marketing job in 2019.
Header Image: Pixabay