With increased internet usage over the last few years, the digital and social media landscape in India has witnessed a paradigm shift. About 87 per cent brands leverage digital and 38 per cent of them allocate a whopping 1/3rd of their budget to digital marketing. This only mirrors the fact that more and more businesses are embracing digital to attract, engage and transact with their customers and this is being aided by increasing investments in better internet connectivity and growth in internet and social media usage.

The reason for this enthusiasm for digital marketing is simple: digital marketing is perhaps the only cost-effective and most viable method to get your message out and build a solid consumer base. It is not only great value for your money, but also, the barrier to enter and scale up are miniscule compared to traditional media. In other words, you can have great impact on a limited budget which has leveled the playing field between big and small companies, thereby giving a great fighting chance to new talent to compete with the biggies, without fear of being trampled.

Here are six reasons to drive my thoughts further.

1. You’ll be in high demand

No matter what field of business you are in, marketing is going to be the true winner. Yes, product development is important but if you don’t understand your customers’ needs and communicate them the benefits of your product, how will you sell it? Marketing and sales are the only functions within a business that provide instantaneous measurable ROI.

I was reported that 85 per cent marketers are tracking revenues generated through digital marketing with 50 per cent of them reporting that e-Marketing activities are contributing more than 10 per cent of their revenues. This just goes to show the growing influence of  digital marketing. Things were different a few years back, when businesses were busy building breakthrough products. Today, product development has become easier and faster with outsourcing and better technologies. The only way a company stands out in the crowd is through concrete marketing activities.

Not just companies, even political leaders are greatly relying on digital marketing to grow their influence. The unseen hand of digital marketing is what is behind Narendra Modi or Donald Trump’s sensational campaigns.

Good digital marketers who can conduct high-quality campaigns help build brands from scratch. Eighty per cent of Indian marketers believe that integrated campaigns on email, social and mobile can result in significant increase in conversion rates. The sudden diffusion of smartphones, hand held devices and access to high speed internet has changed how media is consumed, thus altering people’s buying behavior. But there are not enough highly proficient digital marketeers out in the market. Remember, it’s this scarcity that has created great demand.

2. Lucrative job opportunities 
What follows is anybody’s guess : when supply is less while demand is more, it goes without saying that a good digital marketer will get big bucks. Plus, the higher you go up the ladder, so does your pay scale.

3. Laying the groundwork to help you become an entrepreneur
A lot of product heavy startups bootstrap, raise capital from their savings, inheritance or through investors and are able to build a product in a couple of months. However, if you don’t know how to market that product, the business just won’t take off. When marketing is done right, scaling the business is easier.
Your experience in digital marketing, will not only get you better job opportunities, but will be immensely helpful if you plan to become entrepreneur in the near future. You will understand of customers’ needs better, evaluate market fitness of products and assess demand in the market. You will also be sensitive to the changing needs of your customers and their perceptions.

4. It’s a challenging job but equally exhilarating
Digital marketing is not for everyone. If you’re weak hearted, you’ll not be able to handle the uneven territory that comes with marketing. With new online campaigns, you could succeed or you could falter. Over a period of time, as and when you figure out what works, you scale up.
Nevertheless, the other interesting aspect is because you will be working around the internet, where you work from is not crucial as long as your work is accomplished. Who wouldn’t want to be the master of their time?

5. Choose what sector interests you.

Digital marketing is a huge industry and there is a lot going on under the umbrella. You can hold a multitude of roles in digital marketing for a wide variety of dispositions and skills. You can become content or email marketer, social media or mobile marketer, e-commerce executive, inbound marketer, a SEO or PPC executive or you can be an online PR expert. Isn’t it always great to have more to choose from?

6. No specific educational background

This, in my opinion, is the biggest testament to the democratisation that digital media has brought into our jobs market: that you don’t need a specific set of qualifications to be able to pursue digital marketing. Your passion, not qualification, matter. The best part is you don’t have to begin your career from scratch if you want to make it big in the business. All you need is passion.

Here I would like to add a quote by Swami Vivekananda. He’d said,”Stand up, be bold, be strong. Take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders and know that you’re the creator of your own destiny.” If you’re really serious about it, digital marketing can do wonders to your career and take you places. Its dynamic, progressive, well-paid and a critical part of the industry now.

Digital marketing is becoming mainstream in India. Until 2010, many businesses did not take digital marketing seriously. They were not ready to change and were stuck with traditional marketing practices.

However market forces have made sure that you either start doing digital marketing or fail. Because compared to digital marketing, traditional marketing is extremely inefficient. In fact, if you do not have a digital marketing strategy and an online presence, customers are bound to shy away from you and buy from a competitor.

Before digital marketing became mainstream, freelancers and entrepreneurs were able to get the first mover advantage. People who did good content marketing and search engine marketing were able to scale up the business very fast. Traditional companies did not even know what digital marketing was.

Everyday more companies are waking up to the fact that digital marketing is very important and is not an optional strategy in marketing anymore. They are catching up late, but they have to catchup, there is no other option.

This shift in marketing practice is giving rise to a huge opportunity in digital marketing jobs. Times of India had reported that Digital Marketing will create 1.5 Lakh jobs in India by 2016.

“With both businesses and consumers increasingly shifting their focus to the digital medium, there will be 1.5 lakhs jobs available by 2016″

In this article we will have a look at the salaries offered for digital marketing professionals and the various job positions available under digital marketing.

Here’s a list of the various digital marketing positions available for those seeking a career in this arena:

• Digital Marketing Manager
• Content Marketing Manager
• Content Writers
• Inbound Marketing Manager
• Social Media Marketing Experts/Specialists
• Search Engine Marketers
• SEO Executives
• Conversion Rate Optimizer
• Copy Writers

Here’s a rough hierarchy of a digital marketing team in a mature organization.

The above chart is not definitive and the reporting structure could be a little different in different companies. Now let’s look at the roles, responsibilities and purpose of each of the digital marketing job positions we just discussed above.

Digital Marketing Manager

If you have 5+ years of experience in digital marketing and if you have projects that prove you are a digital marketing expert, you will be hired easily.

Such digital marketing experts are in huge demand and companies hunt for these kind of people. It is not necessary that you should hold an MBA or have certifications in digital marketing because your projects will be the proof that you know digital marketing.

Salary: The salary range of such digital marketing experts is from 15 to 20 Lakhs INR per annum. But it can go as high as 40 Lakhs plus equity in certain companies and as low as 8 lakhs per annum in very small startups.

Responsibility: Digital Marketing Managers have to lead the digital marketing team and they will report to the V.P. of Marketing in the company they work for. DMM is a mid-senior level manager position.

Digital marketing managers are responsible for bringing together the different component of digital marketing together and make it efficient. They are the only people who can create an execute an integrated digital marketing campaign.

Content Marketing Manager

Content marketing managers are responsible for content marketing. Content marketing includes managing the blog, sales page copywriting, email communications, drip marketing campaigns, a little bit of PR, ebook publications, video marketing and guest blogging.

Content marketing managers report to digital marketing managers or the head/VP of marketing. Content marketing managers can be solo contributors or they can manage a team of content writers.

More often than not, content writers who report to content marketing managers are freelancers who write content by working from their home or as a part time job.

Content marketing managers will earn anywhere between 10-15 lakhs per annum on average. The experience required for such position is 3-5 years.

Again, there is no clear requirement for qualification. Having digital marketing certifications and an MBA can help if your projects do not showcase your content marketing expertise. However if you have a project that speaks for itself, certifications and degrees are not necessary.

Inbound Marketing Manager

Some organizations need inbound marketing managers but some do not. The responsibilities of an Inbound Marketer and Content marketer overlaps a lot.

If you have to define separate role for an Inbound Marketer, his responsibility will be more towards managing the funnel and conversion at each stage. Drip marketing, lead nurturing, conversion rate optimization are important components in Inbound Marketing.

An Inbound marketer can create a strategy for attracting customers. One of the inbound marketing strategies is content marketing. While the inbound marketing manager creates a strategy on how to attract customers using content marketing, the content marketing manager can focus on execution of that strategy.

Social Media Marketing Expert

Social media marketing has two areas. One of the areas is spreading the owned content via social media channels. This can also be done by the content marketing manager or a person in the content marketing team.

However, running paid advertising in Social media requires some expertise. For example, advertising on Facebook has become a complicated task nowadays. New features and targeting options are added everyday and a content marketing manager or digital marketing manager cannot handle it on their own.

Search Engine Marketer / Specialist

Search engine marketing is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. Search engine marketing is a broad term to define marketing via the search engines, but because Google is the biggest search engine – search engine marketing almost always just refers to marketing via Google AdWords.

If it is a small company, the search engine marketing is taken care of by the digital marketing manager himself. Sometimes, it is outsourced to a digital marketing agency who will take care of the search engine marketing campaigns for a fee.

Bigger companies need a dedicated SEM (search engine marketing) specialist and sometimes there is requirement for a team for search engine marketers.

Search engine marketers will report to digital marketing managers. The goal of a search engine marketer is to bring the target number of leads and clicks from the given marketing budget. Most of the work is involved in analysis, bid management, keyword research, ad copywriting and split testing the ad campaigns.

There is no specific range for the years of experience required for a search marketing expert. Small companies hire freshers but some established companies need people with several years of experience.

Search Engine Optimizer (SEO Executive)

With good search engine optimization, one can get free traffic from Google instead of spending money on Google AdWords campaigns. The job of an SEO expert or SEO executive involves keyword research, user experience optimization, using Google webmaster tools, getting pages indexed, manage duplicate content and so on.

An SEO expert should have experience in using the various kinds of SEO tools in the market. For example, Moz.com is a well known SEO tool for digital marketers and webmasters. There are plenty of other tools which will help you improve your performance in the search engines.

Practo.com, one of the companies I have worked for before has good experts in SEO. Practo.com receives majority of their traffic via the search engines (Google organic search) and it helps them save a ton of money in AdWords and easily rise above their competition in terms of traffic.

SEO experts will report to the digital marketing managers and mostly do not manage a team. Most of the SEO experts I know are individual contributors. Sometimes there will be two SEO experts working on the team and they will give constant feedback to the product and web development team.

Conversion Rate Optimizer

Conversion rate optimization is the art of increasing the conversion ratio in each stage of the marketing funnel. The CRO expert can be just another person in the digital marketing team but he/she will work with various people. For example, a CRO expert can help the inbound marketing manager in creating landing pages that convert well.

A CRO Expert uses various tools to achieve higher conversions. Heat map tools such as CrazyEgg.com give insights on how people interact with landing pages. Optimizely.com helps split test various elements on the web pages to find out which colors and text give better conversions.

Increasing conversion rate is important at each stage of the funnel. The ad copy or the site title should attract more clicks, the visitors should convert into leads, and the leads should convert into paying customers.

Copywriter

Similar to a CRO expert, a copywriter will work with many people in the digital marketing team. The copywriter can help the search engine marketer write better ad copy, help the social media manager post better words on social media channels, help the content team refine their content for better reception.

Many organizations do not have a dedicated copywriter in the team. Sometimes the CRO expert who has copywriting skills can do the job of a copywriter.

Conclusion

I hope this article gave you a pretty good idea about the digital marketing jobs and career options available in India. The same is also applicable for other countries but the pay scales could be a little different.