Digital marketing is the skill to learn in 2024. I have 30 year old friends who are making more than 1 lakh per month with this skill. I started with this field exactly ten years ago and it has completely changed my life. It’s quite simple and I will explain it to you in five steps. And I will also share an amazing study by HubSpot which will help you make a better decision in your career of digital marketing. So keep reading till the end.
You have to understand that digital marketing has various types, different platforms, different strategies and different end goals. With that in mind, The first step is to understand the basics of all the different types of digital marketing. Everything from social media marketing to email marketing to landing page optimization, lead generation, understand about blogs, SEO, and much more. There is an amazing blog on Neil Patel’s website, which is all about digital marketing. Go read it to have a basic understanding. The next step is to check out Google’s course on digital marketing. It’s a professional certificate that you can do. In just a few hours, you’ll understand why is digital marketing important for businesses and how can you use it to benefit businesses and help them get more customers and end up with more revenue.
Now while you do that, it’s also important for you to understand the different keywords in digital marketing. So everything from a pay-per-click campaign to ROAS, cost per landing view, cost per page view and so much more. There are so many keywords that you can learn and that will give you a basic understanding of this space. when you will get into the career of digital marketing, they will be throwing these keywords left, right, and center. And if you need to succeed, you need to have a basic understanding of all of these keywords and what they really mean. Okay? So the first step is to understand the basics, learn the different types of digital marketing, both organic and paid, and also learn about the different types of keywords.
The goal here is if anyone asks you about anything or references anything, you should have a basic understanding of it in the realm of digital marketing. That’s the first step. Now, when we are talking about digital marketing, it’s equally important for you to know the current trends affecting this industry and how other marketers will work in 2024. But to be honest, it’s hard to keep up with all the trends and marketing strategies. There is something new every day and keeping up can feel overwhelming. But this is where marketing reports can help you. HubSpot and their team of experts conducted extensive research and created their annual The State of Marketing report for aspiring digital marketers just like you. This report dives deep into the trends and provides you an in-depth look at the shifts shaping marketing this year.
The report is divided into various sections and the one in which they discussed AI tools for efficiency really intrigued me. It’s fascinating how much potential AI has for marketing. From automating repetitive tasks to identifying qualifying leads, this report shows you how to leverage AI to save time and work smarter. So if you want to dive deep into the world of marketing trends, and discover the best business strategies for 2024, check out the link in the description to download HubSpot’s 2024 state of marketing report for absolutely free. Also, thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this video. And now let’s get back. The next step is to specialize. Yes, that is very important in 2024. You can’t be a typical digital marketer. You really have to pick one niche and build your expertise on it.
So from all the types of digital marketing I’ve said, pick one, right? For example, you check out this report by HubSpot which talks about what field of digital marketing is generating the most ROI for businesses and realize that the first one is SEO and then there are others as well. So you now know that which part of digital marketing is driving the most ROI for businesses and hence they would want to pay you for that a lot as well. So you pick one of those fields depending on your interest, right? Always understand it’s all about interest. You don’t need to do something you don’t really enjoy and have fun while doing it so it could be SEO it could be LinkedIn optimization it could be social media content it could be paid advertising it could be any of these types but pick one and then start learning about it again learning is very simple just simply go on YouTube go on udemy go on blogs and start learning about it. As I said, Neil Patel has an excellent blog about it. Seth Gordon has a beautiful blog where he writes every single day about marketing in general and that will give you more perspective on why marketing is important and how to become a better marketer overall. Just go on youtube and start searching. Search engine optimization course. LinkedIn marketing course. YouTube marketing course. Instagram growth strategy. And you will find amazing courses that will help you to start learning for completely free. One thing to keep here in mind is Pick the right people to learn from. There’s too much noise on YouTube about what you can and cannot do with digital marketing. You have to pick a few people who have years of experience in this field and start making them your guru and learn from them from their videos.
All I’m saying is don’t think that just because someone has a lot of subscribers, they are right versus someone who has 1000-2000 subscribers and is making a course on Facebook advertising. It’s possible that their courses, their videos, which might have less views, can be more valuable. So always keep this one thing in mind. There’s too much advice, too much noise. Pick the right signal. Along with this, while you’re learning about this field, make an account on Twitter and just search about it. For example, you could be searching for YouTube strategy. You will find some amazing accounts who are themselves running these campaigns in this field for their clients and they are sharing their learnings on this platform. Brilliant way to learn from case studies and then apply those learnings in your own work.
Please do this every single day. Make it a habit to go on Twitter and read 10 threads, 10 case studies about what digital marketers did and how did it help the company grow. You will be surprised about the number of learnings you can have in a whole month. But while you’re learning all this, it’s equally important for you to note things down. Our brain is wonderful at coming up with ideas, not so good with storing them. So go on Notion and start writing everything down. What are you learning every single day? What was the case study you thought about? Write it down over there. Be very specific about it. And if you do that every single day, over the next 90 days, you would have built a complete directory.
You would have built a second brain for yourself to learn things from. That is the second step. The third step, however, is probably the most important. While you’ve learned everything, it’s very, very crucial for you to start applying your learnings. And you can do that very easily by working on projects. It could be your own project or work on company’s projects. I’ll tell you an example. I went on AngelList and I found this company who hired me for 5,000 rupees per month to help them run their Facebook ads. Now understand, I did not care about the money. I wanted to apply my learnings of running Facebook ads on this project and see how effective my thought process is and then improve on it later on.
Of course, don’t do it for free, but get your foot in the door with these internships and start learning. Work with an e-commerce company and learn about landing page conversions and optimizations. Work with a creator, get paid a minimum amount and start working on their LinkedIn posts, optimize it, get them more reach. and this will create your own case study. Now the question I’ll get is, how do I create a great case study? It’s all about mentioning the numbers. Whenever you do a project, you work at an internship, you work on a campaign, you will be having certain numbers. What was the ROAS? What was the invested amount? What was the profit that you generated? How many sales did you get? Whatever these numbers are, impressions, views, what is the CPV?
What is the CPL? Or any other metric. Start taking note of that and include it in your own case study. Because what happens is whenever I’m looking at anyone’s portfolio to hire a digital marketer, I’m always looking at the impact, the ROI. What did you generate for this business? Show me the numbers. And that is also the essence of building a great portfolio as a digital marketer. It’s all about mentioning the project you worked on. How did you work? What did you give them in return? What did you learn? And then what are the numbers? So you have to put that into perspective. So once you’ve worked in a couple of internships and have some case studies to show in your portfolio, we now approach the fourth step, which is to start applying for full-time jobs or working as a contractor.
Now, why do I say contractor? Because it’s actually much easier for you to get to work as a contractor. Maybe you work at one company and you optimize their YouTube SEO for two months and that is your project. It’s much easier for you to get that than to get a job working at a company, that is a bit hard because then they would look at your degree, they will look at your experience and they would be very choosy in terms of who are they hiring. But as a contractor, it’s easier for you to get that experience working full-time for a client. So the first step is to start applying for these opportunities you will have to go and check out either LinkedIn, you will have to go for Twitter, you will have to also start reaching out to people.
Right? Now, this is really important. You have to build a funnel just like you have it in digital marketing. The top of the funnel being all the companies that you want to work at. Find their emails and start reaching out to them. You can use tools like apollo instantly. You can even use Hunter. But the idea here is to get access to their email and shoot them an email. Put your portfolio. Also, have a look at their digital marketing strategy and suggest changes in another doc. so just say that please find attached a doc where I’ve listed all the ways in which I can help your digital marketing strategy improve. It could be any of the different domains that you have expertise over.
So please do that. And then the next step is to just do this over and over and over again, right? Make sure that you can track every single reply that you are getting on an excel spreadsheet and start going on these calls. Now one blunder I was doing in the last two years when pitching to companies in my agency was to always talk about what will I deliver. So I was like, okay, we will help you create 12 videos a month, we will help you create 10 shots a month, we will help you maybe get X amount of views. But does that really matter? To the company what matters? The revenue, the profit, the cost of acquisition, the CAC of the customer. So the great learning I had in this whole experience is to talk to the company in terms of the ROI.
So always tell them in my example that I will help you reduce your CAC from 20 rupees to 5 rupees. I will do that with the help of organic content created which is shareable on YouTube. And that is an excellent pitch. They can actually quantify the numbers. So if they, for example, are spending 2 crores every month to acquire users, they now have to spend maybe 50 lakhs to acquire the same people. So you’re helping them save 1.5 crore rupees every month. And it’s very easy for you to charge 25 lakhs from the money that you’ve saved for them. And they would be much more happier to give you that money every single month. Just an example. But the idea here is to always focus on the ROI that you can generate for a company.
If you’re still not getting opportunities, start going to networking events, especially here in Bangalore. Events happen pretty much every single day. Tons of founders, like my digital marketers, you will find them start networking with them. They will refer you for other people, but just start building your network, start learning what is happening in the market. And that is really important. Now let’s say by doing all of these things, you get your foot in the door and you get your first job at a company. It’s very likely that this will not be the best job that you can get. And that’s where the last step comes in, which is upgrading yourself, start upskilling in this particular field, right? It could be any field that you are a part of in digital marketing, but just get into this habit of constantly learning better and sharing your learnings in public.
That is really important. Start creating case studies. You have recently seen a lot of reels of ambani wedding on Instagram, right? You might have seen reels of radhika Merchant, anand Ambani, of all the people who came there and they performed over there. That is an excellent pr and digital marketing campaign. talk about it. Talk about what did you learn from this whole experience. Talk about what can you do for other people and start doing that every single day. You will notice that people would start recognizing you. People would want to work with you and you will become someone who holds value on these social platforms. So start getting into this habit. The goal you should chase is to never settle. Right? The first few jobs are not the best jobs.
But once you start learning in public and build your brand, a lot of opportunities will start pouring in for you. And that is what will pay you a lot more. You will get to work on exciting projects and you will have even better learnings. So start implementing this five-step process and you will get amazing opportunities in 2024 as a digital marketer. And while you’re upgrading yourself, it’s even important for you to use ai to become a better digital marketer. Just go to ChatGPT and start writing this prompt. I’m creating a Facebook ad to target people between 20 to 25 age group located in Delhi. As a senior digital marketer specializing in Facebook ads, look at my strategy and give me points where I can improve to become better and have better ROI.
Just use this simple prompt and you will be amazed by how much insight can ChatGPT provide to you. Now again, you don’t have to blindly copy everything. You have to look at what it is saying Apply your own logic and mind into it and then derive the insights and use it yourself. So always check and then start using it and employ it in your own strategy as a digital marketer.
