What is digital marketing? This question is much simpler than ones like: How do a PR coordinator and a link outreach coordinator differ? Or the more complex question: What is SEO? Digital marketing has a straightforward answer. It is defined as “the marketing of products or services using digital channels to reach consumers.” It’s that clear. Whether through email marketing, paid ads, or search engine optimization, all these methods fall under digital marketing. When these channels are used for a business or service, they all share one aim: to boost return on investment.
Becoming a Digital Marketer
Today, it’s all about focusing on a niche. Discover your talent and work on improving your skills to become an expert. You can apply the same approach to digital marketing. SEO managers attend seminars, consult with experts, and study case studies to enhance their SEO skills. Paid advertising specialists master bidding strategies, while social media marketers figure out how to handle online reputations. But what if, for some reason, one of these channels becomes outdated tomorrow?
Introducing the T-Shape Digital Marketer
The T-Shape Web Marketer, or as I’d like to call it the T-Shape Digital Marketer concept, has been around for some time. This type of marketer is not an expert at a new marketing channel but rather a type of factotum, or jack of all trades. The T-Shape is basically understood as a marketer that has a good amount of knowledge in all other aspects of marketing, but a in depth deep understanding of one or a few specific channels. So with that being if you’re an SEO expert, but Google decides to change their algorithm up to the point to where SEO dies (again not saying it will); what will the SEO expert do? While an SEO expert may fail, a T-Shape digital marketer will thrive. You see if a digital marketer’s main focus was SEO, but had a good amount of knowledge in say PPC advertising or E-mail marketing he would not be as worried.
T-Shape Digital Marketer Benefits
Having a vast array of knowledge in other areas of digital marketing has other benefits as well. Not only will it save you stress from finding another job in a rare event, but it will help you understand your main concentrations even more. Being an expert in SEO will help you understand user reactions to landing pages on websites and how they are utilized with paid advertising. Being well versed in the arts of analytics can help in understand how social media marketing affects ROI in a business. In summary, get to know all the channels. Become an expert in one or two areas, but become good at everything.