How to Become a Digital Marketer with No Experience in 3 Steps

There have been times when our students have asked – “okay, I’ll take up the digital marketing course, learn the skills, but how to be sure if it help me become a digital marketer?” 

Let’s address the doubt.

So, you want to make a career out of digital marketing but have no experience in it. Chances are, you might even be sure about which digital marketing field to choose and excel at. Now, how do you take a step forward to become the digital marketer of your dreams? Let’s help you out.

How to Become A Digital Marketer?

We’ve seen people having a knack for understanding users, and marketing. But, when the question arises – “how to become a digital marketer?”, second guesses have taken away some charms from the digital marketing industry. In an attempt to change this, we’re here to give you some steps you MUST follow to become a digital marketer.

Follow the steps below and become a digital marketer: 

• Build Your Digital Marketing Skills on Your Own
• Build Your Resume to Be More Digital Marketing Focused
• Prepare Yourself to Crack Any Digital Marketing Interview
• Strategically Apply to Companies to Increase Your Chances of Selection

Build Your Skills to Build Your Digital Marketing Portfolio

You could enroll in hundreds of courses to learn digital marketing, but what can actually help you develop your skills is when you learn practically, with your own experience. How? 

• Start Your Own Website: Get a Wix or a WordPress Domain.

After you buy a domain, using some free courses, from Ahref’s Academy, Neil Patel’s YouTube Videos, and more, you can set up your website where you can do your SEO, and sell any product if you want to. Write blogs and sell those as products. You can also advertise them on different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. 

Create landing pages and set up a Google Analytics, Google Search Console, account to track your website’s growth and analyze data.

• Create Your Own Shopify Account to Learn E-Commerce Marketing. 

By setting up shop on Shopify, you can learn how to optimize your products for a better sale, online or offline. You can even manage your own inventory, set up payment procedures, and a lot more. 

• Start Creating on Social Media to Make Your Social Portfolio. 

Just post your work online if you’re interested in creating content. Maybe you do an analysis of a brand’s marketing strategy, post it. You found an interesting book and shared its learning with the world. And learn what Instagram Insights tells you, where you’ll learn how to analyze data and improve your content and strategy.

Build Your Resume to Be More Digital Marketing Focused

You see, building a stellar resume is the first, most important step to help you get through the recruiter’s gate that’s guarded by gigantic dogs posed as Applicant Tracking Software. 

Now, how do you get through the gate regardless of your experience in digital marketing? 

Why is Keeping Relevant Information in the Resume Important?

You’re reading this blog because you’re interested in cracking a digital marketing job, and you want to be job-ready for that. If we were to include a random topic, say, pancakes here, would it appeal to you? No. 

It would have thrown you off because that is not what you were looking for. 

Similarly, recruiters, when filtering out resumes, also have an intent – to find candidates with suitable skills and experiences that they can leverage and grow their business. Call it a product-market fit where you’re the product, and the company you’re applying to is the market. That’s why putting every piece of relevant information on your resume matters.

For example, an SEO student from our digital marketing course included a pointer like this to showcase their skills and experience:

So, What Should You Put on Your Resume?

Does not matter if you’re a fresher, or if you do not have relevant experience. For a digital marketing role, your resume should showcase the skills and experiences that you can deliver on. Something you’ve learned either in your previous job or during your college, even. 

And how you showcase these skills has to be done with a little strategy. Let’s help you do that.

What to Include in Your Resume If You Are A Fresher With No Experience:

Follow a reverse chronological order of placing information – with the most relevant skill set or experience at the top. 

The order of the information will be – 

First, Include Digital Marketing Skills: 

Here, the skills you’ve learned by either volunteering or interning at a company come into play. If you’ve been in some live courses in some areas of digital marketing, this is the time to mention them. 

Common Skills That Recruiters Look for:

After going through 100s of Job Descriptions of entry-level digital marketing roles, we have found that these are the most common skills that recruiters look for in a candidate: 

• Analyzing and reporting various campaigns (influencer, social media, ads, etc) 
• Experience in planning and strategizing campaigns 
• Intermediate Excel knowledge
• High sense of ownership and delivering within deadlines
• Ability to solve problems quickly
• Coordinating with different departments and clients to deliver campaigns 

If these look like gibberish to you, here’s what they mean: 

To help recruiters understand that you can do these things well, show them instances where you’ve practiced some of these things on your resume through the experience you’ve gathered by working in a job or even during college.

Second, Add Relevant Certifications to Add Credibility

Maybe you’ve learned some digital marketing skills in strategizing ad campaigns, or you’ve learned to write blog posts and social media posts. This area gives you room to add credibility to the skill you will apply in your job. And if you haven’t yet, here are some free certifications for you to get started: 

Google Ads Certifications (free)

Google Analytics Certifications (free)

Amazon Certifications (free)

Simplilearn Free Basic Digital Marketing Course

And, if you want to get deeper into these courses, here’s a treasure. 

You may want to read about: 6 Best Online Digital Marketing Courses in 2024

Finally, Add Achievements You Are Proud of

This includes anything that helps the recruiter see you as more than a candidate.

Let’s give a context.

Say you had to organize a fest at college. You needed sponsorships so you could bring in a larger audience to create the buzz for the fest. So you talk to brands, negotiate with them, cut a deal with them and they show up. 

Throughout all of these, you also had to manage different departments doing different chores for the fest. One was handling budgets with the local vendors to get food and influencers for the fest. The other department was helping to create games to play. One team was creating buzz for the fest on social media, to attract more and more people. 

There was one department that would call in influencers, comedians, singers to play at your fest. And there was a team that would manage all these teams, making sure everything was working out.

Here, talking to sponsors, cutting a deal with them, and even with all the teams you managed are negotiations. You learned to communicate effectively and move the ball in your direction, which resulted in catering to a larger audience. This is an important digital marketing skill. 

The teams that you managed throughout the event taught you event management in a space that’s close to marketing. This entire experience also taught you project management, quite an essential skill in digital marketing.

You must have had a fair share of crises throughout the fest that had to be solved. The budget for the entire fest had to be split to get the best deals. This taught you problem-solving – apt for digital marketing again! 

And every activity that happened during the fest was to delight the students of your college or the group of students that lived near your college. You created games for them, called influencers, and singers, to be a part of the fest so the students of your college have a good experience. This taught you user-centricity, the core digital marketing skill.  

If you have an experience like this or any other experience that taught you these skills, MENTION them here!

What to Include in Your Resume If You Have Prior Work Experience BUT Not in Digital Marketing?

Your resume becomes more experience-focused, as you have the experience to back your skills up. The chronological order of information that you’ll put in the resume remains the same except – you mention prior experience first here. 

However every experience is not relevant to the digital marketing role you’ll be applying for. Then how do you showcase your skills?

Let’s understand that with an example from one of our students. 

A student from our digital marketing course worked for an  IT company before joining. They were in the client servicing department where they had to handle negotiations with the client and with coders. Throughout the project, they faced problems with the code of the product and were asked to update the database for the same product for an insurance company.
Hence, the project involved a lot of discussions with the client to understand what they wanted and get the project moving. 

Now, your experience may be different, but you’ve worked with teams and worked on projects that involved a user. All of these experiences translate into understanding user-centricity and being able to communicate. And as we’ve mentioned above, the core digital marketing skills!

Mention specific experiences where you’ve solved good problems for a user – handled communications, managed a project, or your team members. These are transferable skills and are highly appreciated digital marketing skills for a candidate. 

Step 2: Prepare Yourself to Crack Digital Marketing Interviews

First things first, interviews are NOT an examination. They’re conversation starters between two people. And conversations always include stories about yourself and the one you’re talking to. 

Think of your interview as your first date with a girl you like. As much as you’re the topic of the conversation, the girl wants you to ask about her, too. Similarly, the company you’re interviewing for will also want you to ask about the company and the role you want to play in that company if they hire you.

And for any date to be successful, the better you know yourself, the better you show them who YOU are and what you bring to the table. This is the main essence of an interview. This happens when you learn storytelling to showcase your digital marketing skills. You see, storytelling in interviews is not only a great way to continue a conversation, but it also helps the interviewer be interested in you.  

Learn Storytelling in Interviews – Through This Framework

Here’s a framework that helps you frame answers to any question that’ll be thrown at you. 

The framework – 

S: Situation

A: Answer

R: Result

Let’s understand the steps by addressing a question that we had asked one of our students: 

 

Q: “What do you consider as your most significant achievement to date – life and career?” 

Their answer was,

A: “What I consider my most significant achievement to date would be when I had gotten the opportunity to manage a team of 8 members as an Event Coordinator for the Hult Prize at North-Eastern Hill University by the United Nations in December 2021. 

We had mentor sessions and a mock pitch session before the main competition took place. The main competition was divided into semi-finals and finals. Despite the competition being brought to campus for the very first time, the Organizing Team brought in all the expertise required. 

We had to promote our competition so we could gather more participants. So we organized a Food Campaign as the theme for the competition that year was “Food For Good”. For the campaign, we asked the participants to enroll and share their delicacies on Instagram by tagging us, so it would make others aware of the competition, too. This way, the team was able to gather a total of 130 participants who were further divided into groups of four. 

Since it was an online competition due to the pandemic, I prepared decks for each event, facilitated the events by preparing schedules, and delegated tasks for the competition to be carried out smoothly. We successfully conducted the competition for 21 days, and I was in the driver’s seat for the very first time. Though I had a lot of responsibilities, it felt fulfilling to do them. I emerged as a better leader, a better people person.”

Here, as you can see, the answer has a complete story of what happened with an impact. 

Let’s now divide this story into three parts: situation, action, and result:

Situation: “What I consider my most significant achievement to date would be when I had gotten the opportunity to manage a team of 8 members as an Event Coordinator for the Hult Prize at North-Eastern Hill University by the United Nations in December 2021. 

We had mentor sessions and a mock pitch session before the main competition took place. The main competition was divided into semi-finals and finals. Despite the competition being brought to campus for the very first time, the Organizing Team brought in all the expertise required.”

Action: “We had to promote our competition so we could gather more participants. So we organized a Food Campaign as the theme for the competition that year was “Food For Good”. For the campaign, we asked the participants to enroll and share their delicacies on Instagram by tagging us, so it would make others aware of the competition, too.

Result: “This way, the team was able to gather a total of 130 participants who were further divided into groups of four. 

Since it was an online competition due to the pandemic, I prepared decks for each event, facilitated the events by preparing schedules, and delegated tasks for the competition to be carried out smoothly. We successfully conducted the competition for 21 days, and I was in the driver’s seat for the very first time. Though I had a lot of responsibilities, it felt fulfilling to do them. I emerged as a better leader, a better people person.”

The Situation-Action-Result (SAR) framework used gave the interviewer, and us, a backstory of the interviewee’s accomplishment, why it mattered to them, and how they delivered the result, the result being impactful and also showing excellent skills related to digital marketing!

So, as you prepare for your interviews, you’ll come across various questions, even the simplest “Tell me about yourself”. 

Ace your answers by following the SAR framework to frame the answers to the questions, and you’ll deliver impact just like that, showing them who you are and how you’re the perfect fit for them!

Apply to Companies to Help You Become the Digital Marketer of Your Dreams

While we say “apply”, by now you should know that it’s not enough. You see, your application gets drowned in hundreds of other applications. And thus, your chances of getting hired go down to a flicker of hope and lots of waiting. 

But when you have the skills for the job, you would want to stand out, right? 

Step 1: 

Select the companies you want to work for – either on Naukri, LinkedIn, etc. 

Step 2: 

Create a presentation of what you can do for the company. You can suggest changes to their existing marketing strategies to showcase your digital marketing skills. 

If you’re into search engine optimization, you could show them how you can create an SEO plan catering to the metrics that can help them rank better on search engines. Maybe, you are a content person, then you’d want to select some content spaces for them, and write a little something for them to show what you can do for them. 

Step 3:

Share it with them, preferably on LinkedIn or over email. You can even send cold emails to them. 

When you’re approaching them, start out by showing how interested you are in their company. You can show them that by appreciating some parts of their business, maybe some marketing campaign that they did woo you. Then you can go on to showcase your digital marketing skills to show how else you can help them. 

Say you’re interested in creating a bidding strategy for their paid marketing campaign, show them how you can add to the campaign. 

If you want to create content for their social media marketing, you can create even those. 

But, as Ankur Warikoo says, be persistent with reaching out. It may happen that you do not get a response. That doesn’t mean you’re declined the role. Reach out to them, and state the solutions you have for their social media strategy. 

There’s also another way you can crack a digital marketing role, this time with more skills and experiences as your leverage.

Kraftshala’s digital marketing course teaches digital marketing skills and gets students placed. Every piece of content covered in this blog, from resume building that happens for at least a week, to answering interview questions framework, and building a proof of work to show recruiters, is practiced by hundreds of students who are now hired for digital marketing roles for brands and agencies like Nykaa, Beaconstac, GroupM, and Performics, just to name a few. 

Frequently Asked Questions:

 

Q1. How do I start a career in digital marketing?

To start a career in digital marketing, begin by educating yourself on digital marketing concepts and strategies through online courses and tutorials. 

• Gain practical experience by creating your own website, blog, or social media profiles, and experiment with various digital marketing techniques. 
• Build a portfolio showcasing your projects and successful campaigns to impress potential employers or clients. 
• Network with professionals in the industry through social media and LinkedIn, and consider internships or freelance projects to gain real-world experience. 
• Obtain certifications from reputable platforms like Google or Facebook to add credibility to your skills. 
• Stay updated with the latest trends and tools in digital marketing as the industry evolves rapidly. 
• Apply for entry-level positions in digital marketing or related roles, and show enthusiasm and adaptability to stand out. Continuous learning and improvement are essential to succeed in the dynamic field of digital marketing.

Q.2 What should I study to become a digital marketer?

For a digital marketing job, you should first figure out what the role is asking out of you. If the role is any of the following, study the following key areas:

1. Social Media Marketing: Learn how to effectively utilize various social media platforms for marketing purposes. Look at some brands to get more ideas that you can share with the company you’ll be interviewing for.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Understand how to optimize websites and content to rank higher in search engine results. 
3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Familiarize yourself with running paid advertising campaigns on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads
4. Email Marketing: Learn about creating and executing successful email marketing campaigns.
5. Content Marketing: Understand how to create valuable and engaging content to attract and retain customers.
6. Brand Management: Understand the importance of brand consistency and how to manage a brand’s online presence.

Remember, digital marketing is a constantly evolving field, so staying updated with the latest trends and best practices is essential for a successful career. Continuous learning and practical experience are key to mastering digital marketing skills.

Q.3 Can a 12th pass become a digital marketer?

While you can definitely start on your own, and become a digital marketer, for you to find jobs, you need to have a minimum qualification of a Bachelor’s Degree.

Q.3 What is the highest salary in digital marketing?

Two roles that give the highest salary in digital marketing: 

1. Digital Marketing Director/VP of Marketing: These senior-level positions often involve leading and strategizing digital marketing efforts for the entire organization. In India, salaries for these roles can range from ₹15 lakhs to ₹40 lakhs or more per year, depending on the company’s scale and industry.
2. Chief Marketing Officer (CMO): CMOs are responsible for the overall marketing strategy of the organization. In larger companies, CMO salaries can range from ₹20 lakhs to ₹60 lakhs or more annually.

Q.4 Is digital marketing a hard career?

Digital marketing as a career can be demanding and tough, but for those who thrive on change and creativity, it offers a fulfilling and impactful career path. Successful digital marketers stay updated on the latest trends, algorithms, and technologies across various platforms. They possess a mix of creativity and analytical prowess to develop effective campaigns, interpret data, and optimize strategies. Hence, it can be challenging, but it definitely is rewarding.