Digital marketing can be a fun and rewarding job, but letâs face it, it is also a highly saturated industry, with many competitors in the form of agencies, consultants, and freelancers.
As a good digital marketer, you’re able to ensure that you can help your client sell effectively, but have you thought about how you’re selling yourself?
How to stand out and win in a competitive field
The field of digital marketing has been expanding immensely, especially with the rise of social media in recent years. With everyone’s lives heavily intertwined online, including working, entertainment, and shopping, going digital is now at the forefront of marketing for many brands and companies.
Digital marketing can be a fun and rewarding job, but let’s face it, it is also a highly saturated industry, with many competitors in the form of agencies, consultants, and freelancers.
As a good digital marketer, you’re able to ensure that you can help your client sell effectively, but have you thought about how you’re selling yourself?
Social proof yourself
Every digital marketer understands the importance of social proofing for a brand. Likewise, you should also social proof yourself by having a good social media presence. Social proofing ensures that you can create a visible brand image as a digital marketer, which will increase your prospective clients’ trust in you. In other words, you have to treat yourself as your own influencer.
You can build up your portfolio with your very own social media page, be it on Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms. Not only can you share about your services, but you can also put your previous works on display, and network with others to expand your circle. Get creative and share some of your own unique content, be it on marketing or other areas you’re interested in which can be proof of your quality of work. For example, you can create video tutorials to share your knowledge, or even start your own podcast!
Reviews are always important be it for products or services, so you can encourage your previous clients to leave a good review, or ask your friends and family to leave a good word when you’re just starting.
Furthermore, you may also go the extra mile and create your own website. You can run a marketing blog on your website and share your own insights and tips to provide value to your audience. An advantage of great content is that it can drive more traffic to your website and help you rank higher on search engines. It can also be great content for your social media pages.
Everything is done with a quick Google search now, so when your client is trying to look for a good, trusted digital marketing service, you’ll want to make sure that they are able to find you.
Upskill yourself
Digital marketing incorporates a wide variety of specializations, such as social media marketing, content creation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), data analysis and more. While it’s good to start off specializing in a certain area to ensure that your skills are mature, you can expand your expertise to a broader field to help you stand out from the crowd and help you with creating better end-to-end marketing strategies. With the abundance of training courses and workshops available, it won’t be hard to spend some time sharpening your skills.
This doesn’t only apply to areas within digital marketing, but also to related areas. E-commerce is usually heavily tied to digital marketing, so you may find it highly beneficial to learn more about e-commerce platforms and sales techniques. Just some basic skills can go a long way. If you’re feeling more ambitious, skills such as graphic design, creative writing and video editing are all great additional skills for content creation that will add great value for your clients.
Remember, a jack of all trades may be a master of none, but it’s oftentimes better than a master of one.
Create Your Own Unique Selling Point
Each good product will have their own unique selling point, so what will yours be? In a competitive field, you should always find something that will set you apart. Perhaps you have your very own niche, such as being an expert in marketing for beauty products.
In terms of services, what other services can you provide that are not provided by others? You can consider offering complementary services which may require some sourcing on your part. For example, your client may be looking for marketing services, but they will also need a website landing page or live-streaming service for their social media. You may form a partnership with agencies providing these additional services, which will be a win-win situation for you and your partner, while also saving time for your client by serving as a one-stop solution. This is also a good way to retain your clients as they are more likely to think of you when they require additional services in the future.
There are many industries nowadays that can partner well with digital marketers. As live-streaming is a big part of social media engagement, you can look into providing eye-catching live-streaming backgrounds, greenscreen production and mini-game features. There are also great virtual solutions such as virtual malls, virtual exhibitions and virtual conferencing solutions that can tie in with your digital marketing service. Any virtual event will require marketing, therefore it will be a great industry to explore to expand your business prospects.
In a nutshell, whether you’re a freelancer or working at an agency, always treat your work as your very own brand. Expand your horizons and think outside the box, and you’ll find that it will do wonders for your career progression.
After all, if you can sell yourself, then you’ll be able to sell anything.
