Have you ever wondered how do you get various information on offers or products through different channels? How an ad you see is relevant to what you were searching for earlier? How a website makes you want to buy everything because the offers are irresistible? It’s all the doing of digital marketing.

What is Digital Marketing?

Any kind of marketing using digital channels to reach consumers is digital marketing. Digital marketing has changed how we interact, build relationships, and do business. Our behaviour has evolved with the advent of high speed internet, smartphones, and social media.

Look at all the products you own, the apps you use, and the clothes you wear and think where you first got to hear about them. 60-70% of your purchases are influenced by digital marketing. Be it the 1+1 movie ticket offer, the Paytm cashback you get, the Big Billion Day sale, or the one-on-one Dominos offer you wait for, a major part of these promotions happens through digital marketing channels.

What are these digital marketing channels?

To be present everywhere, you can imagine the number of channels digital marketing may have. Here are the major digital marketing channels used by companies.

Email Marketing: This is an economic and rapid means of communication between companies and potential customers. If you’ve received any Big Billion Day sale or New Year special offers via emails, you know what I am talking about.

Social Media Marketing: This refers to the marketing of a product or service via social media. Even political parties have adopted this as a major campaigning channel after the 2008 Obama victory, where Obama utilized 15 social media channels to directly communicate with the American citizens, and we all know what the result was.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): To rank a webpage on the top of Google searches, SEO is required which makes it easier for Google to understand how relevant the page is with respect to the search made by the user.

Online Advertising (Search, Display, YouTube, etc.): Ever see ads on Google when you search for shoes online or ads on Facebook about college admissions or studying abroad or video ads on YouTube? These are the examples of search, display, and video ads respectively. In case you didn’t know, these ads can be customised by digital marketers and they can also control the audience for these ads.

Sounds exciting, right?

India has embraced digitization rapidly in the last decade which has led to an exponential increase (of about 29%) in the number of people accessing the internet. With government initiatives such as Digital India, the demand for digital marketers is skyrocketing high.

How do you get started?

Now that you know that digital marketing is the next big boom in the job sector, you may want to consider learning the skills.

As a digital marketer, you must do a thorough market research to understand the target audience. The next step is to explore the channels on which your audience are more active on and create a marketing plan using those channels.         

While hiring a digital marketer, the organisations look for people who have analytical rigour, data-driven, understand how a business works and a keen eye to understand the behaviour of the audience. If you have copywriting skills and are a social media enthusiast, then it’s a plus!

You do not need to be an MBA graduate or have any previous knowledge of marketing or advertising to become a digital marketer. Anyone can learn digital marketing and master it by dedicating only 5 hours a week over a month!

(Sarvesh Agrawal is the founder and CEO of Internshala, an internship and trainings platform)