I am sure that anyone who is reading this post has the basic idea of what Digital Marketing stands for. You would be surprised to know that more than 3 Billion people use the internet across the world. That is 40% of the earth’s population. This data ensures one thing if not anything else, and that is the Internet is one of the best mediums of communicating to the end-user in today’s day and age. Digital Marketing has a lot of branches under its umbrella.
Management students, aspiring Digital Marketers or anyone who is remotely associated with the marketing spectrum is familiar with the expanse of it. Be it a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) or a Search Engine Manager (SEM), a Content Developer to a person creating an online campaign; all of them are acting as support functions for Digital Marketing as a whole.
Now let us see how digital marketing is affecting the advertising world and touching our lives. The data that I am about to share with you is not only staggering but mind-numbing as well. Talking about the most popular mediums on the internet – Facebook & YouTube, the numbers can make you hyperventilate. Facebook serves an unbelievable 7 Billion Ad Impressions on a daily basis.
Whereas YouTube has 98 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers running campaigns on it. With over 800 million unique users every month and 4 billion videos being viewed daily, YouTube has become a part of our lives in a huge way. It is statistics like these which make us understand how well the medium of Digital Marketing has penetrated into the society
The image below shows how drastically the number of internet user has grown in the past two decades.
With approximately 8 new users getting on the web every second Internet has a better market penetration as compared to any other marketing media.
Steering into the direction of emerging trends in the Digital Marketing spectra we can notice a lot of new and useful data. A recent study talks about the top 3 B2B marketing strategies for the next year which can deliver exceptional results – (a) Educational Webinars (b) Content Marketing (c) LinkedIn are being touted as best marketing traits prevailing on the internet.
The year 2015 saw a lot of new trends in Digital Marketing. It was in 2015 that a lot of Digital Marketers stopped relying on Google in entirety and started finding new ways of engaging directly with their target audience. Also, the year 2015 saw a rise in the new kinds of online payment methods, expansion of marketing automation and content creators becoming a necessity. These are few of the examples that can be cited as the change in trends in the year that just went by
Like any other emerging technology Digital Marketing and its branches are giving rise to the demand for skilled professionals. Digital Marketing as the medium is expanding its reach all across the industry. With a significant growth in the Start-Up industry, Digital Marketing has become even more popular as a medium as the advertisements over this medium are cost-effective and have a longer shelf-life and even the reach and accessibility of these ads is higher.
Coming back to the career trends in the Digital Marketing industry there is a considerable talent-gap which needs to be filled by skilled & certified professionals. There are certain jobs in digital marketing which are popular than the others and employers are seeking professionals for such work of whom there is quite a shortfall. To cite some examples Analytics is witnessing a talent gap of around 37%, whereas content marketing and social media have a shortfall of 27%. The following image shows the talent gap in a few other digital marketing arenas besides the ones discussed above.
These talent gap trends are prevalent among agencies to global brands and from small businesses to individuals working as digital marketers. There is a dire need for educating and training marketing professionals to gain skills and for aspiring digital marketers to get into one of the most thriving areas of business & industry today.
It is trained & skilled employee force which would make the difference. Agencies would be able to win more deals and retain clients. A global brand can work towards expansion and an increased market share. For a small business, it can turn the state of survival to thriving. And lastly for an individual getting trained would mean getting one of the best paying jobs and also fantastic growth opportunities. To support this hypothesis the following graph depicts the average job-wise salaries of Digital Marketing professionals.
Here is another statistic from 2015 which shows a graph of monthly active users on various social media platforms in the month. This data is from January 2015 and given the growth of internet users at the rate of 8 new users per second we can imagine how this number will increase in future.
