Brandon Grimes
What is digital marketing? This is a pretty simple question compared to questions like: How are a PR coordinator and a Link outreach coordinator different? How about the ever daunting question: What is SEO? Digital marketing is much easier to answer. Its’ definition reads “digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital channels to reach consumers.” It is that simple. Whether the channel is e-mail marketing, paid advertising, or search engine optimization; they all have their place under the digital marketing umbrella. When it comes to applying these channels to a business or service, they all have one goal. Increasing return on investment.
Becoming a Digital Marketer
Today it is all about niching down. Finding your talent and developing your craft as much as you can to become an expert. You can do the same with the elements of digital marketing. SEO managers rely on seminars, other experts, case studies to learn and develop their skillset within SEO. Paid advertising coordinators learn the art of bid strategy, while Social Media marketers learn how to manage an online reputation. However, (I am not saying it will) what if tomorrow one of these channels become obsolete?
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.
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