Internet sales are booming and showing no sign of slowing down. Companies hire Digital Strategists to plan websites, social media campaigns, and content strategy for advertising and marketing. To succeed in the field, you will need a deep understanding of how the digital landscape works, including analytics, SEO, website best practices, and advertising. If you enjoy working with people, making data-driven decisions, and working across digital channels, Digital Marketing Strategist could be a good career path for you.
What Do Digital Strategists Do?
Digital Marketing Strategists plan and create marketing campaigns across the internet. They choose the most appropriate social media channels and type of blog content for a product, monitor website performance, and make a strategy for future growth according to company goals. Your job as a Digital Strategist can vary widely depending upon where you are employed. In large established companies with many employees, tasks are more stratified, and you may only handle a few areas while other team members are in charge of the rest. In smaller companies and startups, however, you may find yourself handling everything from regular social media posts, to running analytics to keeping tabs on how a campaign is doing, to researching new tools to improve your company’s digital marketing.
Job Prospects for Digital Strategists
According to Indeed.com, Digital Strategists earn an average base salary of $63,088 per year, plus benefits, although salary levels depend on location. Denver, Colorado has the highest reported salaries, with an average of $73,407 a year, and Chicago, Illinois comes in slightly below average at $62,224 annually. Salaries also depend upon your level of experience.
Digital marketing is a strong career path that shows no signs of slowing down. Consumers all over the world are buying more and more items online, and companies need Digital Marketing Strategists to help their products stand out from the crowd. This career requires some experience, so it is not really an entry-level position, but one to work into in the future.
What Skills Do Digital Strategists Need?
Digital Strategists need a mix of soft and hard skills to have a successful career. Some of those soft skills, or personality traits, are creativity, people skills, communication skills, and insight. Hard skills can be learned and include business training, knowledge of digital marketing, and analytics.
Soft Skills:
- Creativity - To be a successful Digital Marketing Strategist, you need to be a creative thinker. You need to be able to identify opportunities to amplify the brand you are working with, locate niches that the brand could use, and create engaging dialogue with customers. Finding that new way to amplify the brand voice is key.
- People Skills - Digital marketing is about building relationships, so Digital Marketing Strategists need to enjoy working with people and understand how they tick. Digital marketing is much more personal than traditional marketing, and Digital Marketing Strategists need to be able to envision and cultivate relationships with customers.
- Communication Skills - Digital Marketing Strategists need excellent communication skills to create marketing plans, write reports, and present the findings to clients.
- Insight - One of the most valuable skills a Digital Marketing Strategist can possess is insight. This is the ability to take the long view, predict trends, and to see the next step down the road. As a successful Digital Marketing Strategist, you need to be able to look at the data and decide what to do next.
Hard Skills:
- Business experience or degree - Perhaps more than any other digital marketing career path, Digital Strategists need a good business foundation. To make predictions and plans for the future, Digital Strategists need to understand where the business has been, identify coming trends, and choose the right path for the future.
- Familiarity with digital marketing best practices - A good Digital Marketing Strategist understands the importance of setting goals, understanding the target audience, researching the competition, and never forgets about mobile. To make a successful strategy, you need a strong foundation.
- Knowledge of digital touchpoints - Digital touchpoints are the places along the customer’s journey where they interact with your brand’s marketing and content. Just as with best practices, you need to understand the journey to draw an accurate map.
- Understanding of analytics tools - It’s proven that using analytics is a great way to improve your site’s user experience. It’s also imperative to use them to glean useful information about where people who visit your site are coming from and what they are doing on your site. You can also use analytics to set up goals for important key performance indicators (KPIs). These may include destination (where people go when they visit your site), time (how much time they spend on each page), how many pages they visit, and/or events (such as signing up for a newsletter, clicking a video, or making a purchase). You can even get as specific as figuring out what keywords potential customers enter into the search bar and incorporate that into your site.
Learning Digital Marketing
If you want to change careers and become a Digital Marketing Strategist, you could go to college or you could sign up for a digital marketing bootcamp. For example, Noble Desktop’s Digital Marketing Strategies Bootcamp covers the role of digital marketing in today’s business landscape, as well as how to design successful email campaigns, optimize websites and landing pages for conversions, and create content to drive traffic to your or your company’s website by engaging your audience. SEO Bootcamp will teach you how search engines work, how to do keyword research and competitor analysis, and how to use SEO-driven content to increase web traffic. You can also sign up for a Google Analytics Bootcamp to learn how to set up an account, know which metrics to track, and understand the Google Analytics reports. Each bootcamp includes 12 hours of instruction and costs $650.
Another way to prepare for a career as a Digital Marketing Strategist is a digital marketing certificate course. Noble’s Digital Marketing Certificate includes the digital marketing, SEO, and Google Analytics bootcamps, plus Google Ads and classes on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and X (formerly known as Twitter) marketing, as well as content marketing with blogs. You can choose classes that meet in-person or online. Some people prefer to attend brick-and-mortar sessions when learning new information, but that isn’t always available. Live online classes have a similar set-up with a real-time, remote instructor who can answer questions and take control of your monitor—with permission—to show you how to do things. Training is part or full-time and available weekdays, weeknights, or weekends.
It takes 78 hours of instruction to complete a digital marketing certificate through Noble Desktop, and the tuition is $3,295. An installment plan and loans are available. You can choose between full or part-time classes and classes that meet during the day, evening, or on weekends. When you complete the course, you will receive a verified digital certificate of completion recognized by the New York State Department of Education that you can download or post on your LinkedIn profile. This type of certification can help you get a job as a Digital Marketing Strategist.
Conclusion
If you want to learn more about digital marketing careers, check out Noble Desktop’s Digital Marketing Certificate or Social Media Marketing Certificate. Choose between in-person sessions in NYC at Noble’s location or sign up for live online courses and attend from anywhere. Use Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me to find other courses in digital marketing in your area.