Do You Need Help with Digital Marketing?

Believe me, at some point everyone will need help with digital marketing. And no, this is not a proposition to avail my digital marketing services. I am pausing on this one for now, and focusing on being employed full-time.

But to the topic at hand, everyone will need help with digital marketing. I have been applying for digital marketing roles for a few months now, and throughout the years of being a professional in this field I have seen how digital marketing roles have changed.

Digital marketing was not originally a role that consolidated all related skills. It’s either you were a SEO specialist, a PPC specialist, webmaster or developer, or a content marketer. Back then, it was understood that content marketing encompasses different platforms that enabled publication of online content – from websites, blogs and internal newsletters, to emails and later on, social media.

Back then, when you needed help with digital marketing and are working with experts on these fields, you really feel the specialization. Even the digital marketing agencies incorporated these experts to be able to offer a variety of services as a one-stop shop, vs. hiring multiple specialists and incurring a potentially higher overhead (it still depends on the kind of agency you hired, but the logic was you didn’t need to pay for benefits for individual hires).

More free resources then have become available to more people on learning more about digital marketing skills, and soon more marketers learned these skills. Because information is no longer gate-kept by the experts at the time, and information has been made more available to everyone, this resulted to more folks becoming experts. I know this, because I learned most of what I know about digital marketing through blogs, training videos, certifications, and technical platform documentation.

And as such, the good ones needed to diversify. A lot of them have become generalists, taking advantage of the wealth of information to learn as much as they can, and become skilled in more than just one specialization. Soon after, a lot more companies have also started hiring for generalists, and considered digital marketing as a skill that encompasses being knowledgeable with most, or all, of known digital marketing skills.

Now, expectations on digital marketers have grown so much that job descriptions on digital marketing roles require a team’s worth of skills and expertise. We’re not yet even talking about being adept at formulating strategy – these are still just technical requirements, and a lot, if not all, of the digital marketing job descriptions now require not only the technical skills but also strategic ability.

I’m not complaining, and I am just detailing the current state of the role of digital marketers and the seemingly growing expectations on them. If you needed help with digital marketing now, the rapid growth of AI makes it more available for use in daily workflows. AI, when used well, expands one’s bandwidth and because of this, digital marketers are now expected to be able to do so much more. I am also not choosing between being a generalist or a specialist, because while I know I’m proficient in pay-per-click ads and digital marketing analytics, I know and have the technical capability to do most, if not all, of what folks would expect from digital marketers.

If I had a choice and a say in the matter, I would prefer that generalists define the strategy, and they worked with specialists to execute. That would be an ideal working relationship, as this takes advantage of the abilities of each classification of digital marketers.