Career opportunities for a Digital Marketer
Since the time we were able to access the internet from our homes, businesses have been trying to grab our attention via online channels. Who was (and still is) the person in that business responsible for doing that? The Digital Marketer. That person might have had a different job title back in the day, but in essence he/she had the responsibilities of what is called now a Digital Marketer. With the improving internet speed, with more people connected to the internet, and the increase in online media consumption, the role of a Digital Marketer becomes more important and more in demand. This brings great career opportunities for a Digital Marketer.
Career paths are never set in stone
Before we dive into different career paths or opportunities, it’s good to understand that a career is never set in stone and that’s because of life. Life can take turns in different and unexpected directions, which could impact your career choices and opportunities. Next to that, you develop yourself as an individual with personal preferences, interests, and sometimes values change over time. What you find fun and interesting to do at the start of your career, might turn into something boring a few years later. So perceive the next part of this article as information about career opportunities or directions within Digital Marketing, rather than fixed career paths.
Specialist vs. Generic Roles
Careers in Digital Marketing can be distinguished by role type and organisation type. As covered in our previous blog post about roles in Digital Marketing, there are many different Digital Marketing roles from generic roles covering all aspects of Digital Marketing to more specialised roles. As a specialist, you can develop your career to become more of a generalist. This often comes with experience because when you’ve worked in a particular role for some time, you’ve been in touch with other aspects of the business or project that might have captured your attention and you start taking over or adding on some of those tasks to your role. Moving on from specialised to generalised roles is common in any industry. The follow graph illustrates how skill types develop by age.
Source: Technology & the Future of Work: Next-Gen Perspective, by General Assembly 2021.
On the contrary, developing your career from a more generic role to a specialised role is less common, and more so seen in the early stages on one’s career, which if often developed from a passion. If a Digital Marketer finds he/she is most interested in one aspect, let’s say in website analytics, a logical step in his/her career would be to become more specialised and would be keen to work as a web analyst.
Agency side vs. Client side
When you think about your next career move, you could change companies which comes with thousands of options, but you can bring it down to two different organisation types with roles at either agency side or client side. Possible reasons to move on from agency side to client side, besides broaden your horizon, is possibly better career opportunities and higher pay, as agencies are not known for their high salaries.
Moving on from client side to agency side roles occurs more regularly for people in specialised roles where either the industry, project, or tasks are very specific which could be of great advantage to people who’d like to develop their expertise. To give you a personal example: I once was recruiter for a Paid Search specialist role at Netsociety in the Netherlands (before they merged with global digital agency iProspect) when I was working as an online marketer of which paid search was one of my tasks.
To conclude
What ever direction you’d like to go within a Digital Marketing career, there are plenty of options from specialised to generic roles, at agency or client side. And for as long as internet is part of people’s life, possibly forever, digital marketing will have a role at any type of organisation.
In the following blog post we’ll discuss how to get started as a Digital Marketer and get your foot in the door of this industry.
For comments or questions, please reach out to Lidy (Founder of Lente) via mailto:Lidy@LENTE.com.au.
