So you’re trying to decide whether or not going into digital marketing is a good career choice. Well, in this article, we’re going to dig into seven reasons why digital marketing is a good career choice. By the end of this article, you’re going to have a stronger understanding of why this field is rapidly growing.
Reason 1: High Demand and Insufficient Qualified Supply
The first reason why digital marketing makes for a great career choice is that it’s exceptionally high demand and insufficient quality supply. What I mean by that is there are still a ton of universities that don’t actually have a formal digital marketing program. And so as a result of this, it means that for the most part colleges don’t prepare you all that much for digital marketing right now.
On top of that, when you look at the actual job demand data, you would see some interesting trends. For example, late last year LinkedIn pulled the data and listed digital marketing as the number six most in demand job with 860,000 jobs available. In a follow-on article, they reported how digital marketing jobs had grown 33% since last year.
Some of the skills sought out included social media, content strategy, SEO, marketing channels, Google analytics, and Google ads. What this should signal to you is that digital marketing is a high demand skill that simply doesn’t have enough supply right now in terms of employees that can do it.
Furthermore, aside from bigger corporations, there are also more and more venture-backed companies that are also investing in digital marketing early on in their go-to-market strategy. This just means that there are going to be a ton of jobs in digital marketing for your taking.
Reason 2: Competitive Compensation
For a digital marketing analyst level one, which is pretty much an entry-level position, your average national salary is 57K. This is 14% higher than the average US salary of 50K a year. In some cases as well, depending on the company, a bachelor’s degree is optional. So this is great for people that potentially didn’t love college, and simply didn’t finish.
While this starting salary isn’t something truly comparable to traditionally prestigious roles like investment banking, consulting, or trading, it’s a good starting ground because there is enough open runway for future promotions. For example, once you reach level two in a digital marketing analyst sort of role, you’re already making a 70K median salary, and that can happen within one to two years of working at an organization.
Once you get to level three, you’re getting closer to 90K a year and then if you make it to the director level, you’re talking about a 163K a year on the median basis. And this is typically isn’t including some sort of additional cash incentives or bonus structures and things like that.
The key takeaway for you here is that it’s fine for where you start out and that there’s a lot of healthy upside for people that potentially liked traditional employment more and have no plans of being self-employed or things like that in the future.
Reason 3: Highly Transferrable Skills
The third reason why digital marketing is a great career choice is that they are highly transferable skills. Everyone wants to go digital with their business these days, whether it’s a small business or a big business. So what this means is that even if you were to leave your traditional digital marketing job after a year or two, you would still have a ton of valuable skills that you can use for consulting or making some extra money in bridging your next potential employment.
You’d have some core skills like understanding SEO or content strategy that works that you’d be able to offer up as services to people in your local community. And even in the case where you don’t feel like your local community would have enough opportunities, you could always create a Fiverr gig or go on Upwork and essentially find some freelance work with your digital marketing skills.
Reason 4: Outcome Driven Profession
One strong suit of digital marketing is that it’s easily leveraged. You can do something really, really exceptionally well, and then reap the rewards of those efforts multiple times over. Because it’s an outcome driven profession, people typically don’t care where you went to school when it comes to digital marketing. Instead, what they care about is your past projects or your past results in terms of digital marketing things that you have taken on.
In job interviews, people are going to measure you based off of your outcomes like how much organic traffic you generated or what your content strategy was for that particular project you may have run.
This means that even if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, for example, you can still get a digital marketing job because you might have some SEO projects that you’ve done in the past, that would be relevant to the job that you’re applying for.
The fifth reason why digital marketing can be a good career path is because it caters towards remote friendly work. A lot of digital marketing jobs are actually fully remote already. So that means that if you are trying to live your best.life and live that nomadic lifestyle, you can do so if you’d like. Just find a company that supports that.
There are some tech companies, for example, in which the culture is to have all the sales reps come into the office and it’s all about butts and chair, as opposed to having that flexibility to work from home. In my opinion, this sort of butts and chair culture is simply makes you dread your job more and burn out faster. So it’s really nice that a ton of digital marketing work can be done remotely. Obviously your mileage may vary, but I’d say just prioritize companies that are friendly in this department.
Reason #5: Remote friendly work
The fifth reason why digital marketing can be a good career path is because it caters towards remote-friendly work. A lot of digital marketing jobs are actually fully remote already. So that means that if you are trying to live your best.life and live that nomadic lifestyle, you can do so if you’d like. Just find a company that supports that.
There are some tech companies, for example, in which the culture is to have all the sales reps come into the office and it’s all about butts and chair, as opposed to having that flexibility to work from home. In my opinion, this sort of butts and chair culture simply makes you dread your job more and burn out faster. So it’s really nice that a ton of digital marketing work can be done remotely. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I’d say just prioritize companies that are friendly in this department.
Reason #6: Expansive
The next reason why digital marketing is a good career path is because it’s so expansive. There are so many different facets to digital marketing there’s performance marketing and within that, there’s even just the difference between Facebook ads, Google ads, et cetera. And there’s also organic SEO and a ton of other topics as well.
So you can spend several years mastering just one of these areas of digital marketing and still have a ton to learn in another area of the field. This is really great for this sort of personality in which you might get really easily bored with doing the same thing in your job every year. Because digital marketing, if you truly get bored of it, you can just enter a different side of digital marketing and then start to master that side of digital marketing as well.
Furthermore, even if you’re not required to learn these skills in your work, you can take it upon yourself to find other resources and learn these different facets digital marketing in your free time. One of the best parts about digital marketing is that it’s an incredibly self-teachable field. You don’t really need to actually spend any money to truly learn it. You just need to find projects that allow you to apply what you know. And so if you’re the sort of person that’s a self-sufficient learner, it can be a great space for you to work out of.
Reason 7: Side hustle friendly
Reason number seven as to why digital marketing is a good career path is because it’s side hustle friendly. This relates back to reasons number one and number three. Regardless of whether you work in an agency or an accompany, a ton of digital marketers are able to find consulting gigs and freelance opportunities to use their digital marketing skills. The nice thing is that with these clients, you’re able to charge two to three times your normal rate because it’s a freelance job.
As a result, digital marketer is able to command several hundred dollars an hour worth of work from the skills that they know in their career. This can be great if you just like to have some variety besides what you’re doing in your immediate work, and you want to make some money in your free time as well.
There are countless examples of this in marketing subreddits, in which digital marketers share how they manage clients beyond their normal work. And even in some cases, they end up going full-time and starting their own agencies a few years later.
Big takeaways
There are two things that I want you to remember from today’s article:
- The first big takeaway is digital marketing is definitely a good career path to consider.
- The second takeaway is that tons of upside and high demand are the reasons for why it’s a good career choice.
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