Roman Kumar Vyas, the founder of Refocus, EdTech company with a mission to provide high-demand digital professions for Filipinos, explains how to build a career in digital marketing from scratch.

Digital marketing is one of the most in-demand digital professions

It gained enormous popularity during the pandemic when many companies needed additional sales promotion and the transition to online. A digital marketer is a specialist who runs ads in social networks, adjusts search engine placement, and does whatever it takes to lower customer acquisition costs.

The Philippines' largest HR portal, Jobstreer, now has almost 2,000 job postings for Digital Marketing Manager, Customer Acquisition Specialist, or Social Media Marketer. A trained digital marketing specialist can easily earn 40 000 pesos per month working from home. But don't limit yourself. If you have some experience, an income of 100 000 pesos per month is also quite doable for you.

What makes this discipline even more attractive to explore is that there are many areas in digital marketing. This allows one to enter the profession with a minimum amount of knowledge and gradually expand it.

Step 1: Choose a specialization

There are hundreds of tools in marketing, so the number of areas in which a specialist can progress is also huge. Although vacancies on HR websites usually describe a wide range of tasks, qualified specialists are highly valued and earn good money if they become industry leaders. Digital marketing experts can be divided into several groups:

Contextual Advertising Specialists

These are experts who work on search engine results. They select keywords that customers can use to find a business on the Internet and make sure that the cost of acquiring a customer through a search is minimal.

Job titles: Contextual Advertising Manager, Contextologist, Digital Marketer for Contextual Advertising, CPC specialist.

SEO Specialists

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO specialists are responsible for the organic search results. These are the results that appear in a search twice: after the first three and the last two positions. It is the content that the algorithms have identified as most relevant to the user's query.

Job titles: SEO-specialist, Website Promotion Specialist

CRM Marketers

CRM stands for Customer Relationships Management and involves working with client bases via email and messengers. These specialists have to study customer behavior, fuel the audience's interest after their initial ad engagement, develop email campaigns, and make sure that emails do not end up in spam.

Job titles: email marketer, CRM specialist, CRM marketer, CRM personalization manager, AMO CRM specialist, loyalty manager.

Targeted Advertising Specialists

These specialists customize social media ads to only serve the right target audience. The main goal is to attract as many customers as possible at the lowest cost, working with advertising creatives and landing pages. Such marketers can specialize in specific promotion channels: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on.

Job titles: Targeted Advertising Specialist, Media Buyer, Traffic Manager, Acquisition Manager.

Social Media Marketers

SMM specialists develop strategies for interacting with users through social networks. Responsibilities can range from writing texts and launching campaigns to focusing solely on strategies.

Job title: content manager, SMM-specialist, SMM-marketer, specialist on promotion in social networks.

Step 2: Start learning digital marketing skills

Higher education institutions rarely have high-quality digital marketing programs. The professions are recent, and universities can not adapt syllabuses so quickly.

Of course, a degree in marketing can add benefits, but it is expensive, time-consuming, and not always practice-oriented. There is no point in spending four or five years to gain knowledge and skills which can be mastered in a few months.

If you don't have time for long training, short-term programs with a focus on practice and employment are the best choice.

In the Philippines, the online course platform Refocus offers the Comprehensive Marketing Course. It covers various specializations, teaches how to manage digital marketing channels, analyze data, allocate budget, and create marketing campaigns from scratch.

The next course enrollment starts on January 6th.

At first, course tutors cover fundamentals of the profession: target audience analysis, digital channels, consumer data analytics, setting up advertising offices. The next step is to practice what has been learned.

To ensure that the course is tailored to the needs of employers in the Philippines, the founders of Refocus deliberately underwent numerical interviews for marketing positions at top companies.

During the Course Journey, students get exactly the experience they are asked about in interviews. The program also involves looking for the first client and working with real businesses.

Step 3: Build a professional portfolio

Anyone who enters the profession by taking a long-term online program usually receives their first cases during the course. In a well-organized curriculum, each module of information ends with the completion of an independent project on the topic. In addition, at the end of a course, there is a final certification, which is also a separate comprehensive project.

Different courses offer a variety of options for final projects. Among the choices, there are tasks on a student's personal company, exercises on a non-existent business, or a full-fledged project from local or global companies. For example, at Refocus, all projects for students come from real Philippine businesses.

The principle of portfolio case description is standard: it is necessary to specify the name of the project (company, type of activity), the starting point, the task, the marketer's workflow, the tools used, and the results in numbers.

A portfolio with cases can be available both on the specialist's own website, created for self-presentations and in social media or freelance platform accounts.

Also, already during the first practical cases execution, the specialist needs to start investigations into a winning CV. The resume consists of three parts: personal information, education and professional experience.

Rookies in digital marketing can benefit from describing the areas of activity and tools that were learned during the course and, in practice, after the Learning module. For example: content marketing, advertising networks (CPA), b2b-marketing, managing social media groups.

Step 4: Get a job

Most digital marketers start their careers as freelancers. This can even start during the coursework and helps with getting the first portfolio cases. Another excellent way to enter the industry right after the course is an internship at a digital agency.

If an educational company cooperates with digital agencies, after the course the best students have a chance to get an internship. It's also good practice to check the marketing agencies' websites yourself and look for the Careers section, where job opportunities for newbies may be posted.

If you don't have time for an internship and need a paid job right away, look for a junior position. Here are a few options:

1) In-house marketing department. This is an opportunity to join a close-knit product team with well-established corporate processes and build a base for future career growth in it. These jobs are visible through the company's career pages, and jobs aggregators: JobStreet, Indeed. You may also find open junior positions in Facebook Groups.

2) A digital or marketing agency. This is an opportunity to work in a team with the same expertise and try interaction with different companies in a number of industries. You should look for a job the same way as for an internship: choose several agencies you are interested in and write directly. Some of them have a Join us button in the Team section.

3) Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company. You can apply for a junior marketer position in an outsourcing company that provides other businesses with digital marketers. This way you can get a higher salary, sign-on bonus, health maintenance, and opportunity to gain experience in foreign markets.

But also you need to keep in mind that the work schedule is not fixed in some of these companies, and you may even have night shifts. But if you're okay with that its a perfect opportunity for you.

The digital marketer is one of the most in-demand professions in today's dynamic corporate and IT workspace. At the same time, it is relatively quick to master, even though it requires constant practice: the tools that are effective today will no longer work tomorrow.

Therefore, digital marketing education is a necessity not only for the newbie but also for an experienced marketer who wants to stay a high-class professional and be aware of new directions and trends in the industry.