The culture online has resulted in an area of niche marketing where expertise and experience are difficult to find. Digital marketing, be it SEO for dentists or targeted ads for florists, necessitates a set of skills that often varies significantly from one position to the next. Hiring a digital marketing expert has become a trend that has risen with around 44% of companies that are now interested in hiring more marketers in the last two years.
1. A Higher Demand For Skillsets
56% of companies that were surveyed have included plans to hire over the course of this year will include expertise in digital marketing with a certain set of skills. Some of these skills will include:
• SEO and SEM
• Social
• Mobile
• Lead generation
• Content curation and creation
These skill types are not only unique to digital marketing positions. They will also spread into the more traditional types of advertising positions.
This will result in making it very important for individuals within this industry to participate in training and courses to ensure they remain valuable and relevant in this job market that continuously experiences changes.
2. Digital Marketing Initiates Professional Development
With the increasing need for talents in digital, hiring digital marketing experts has also grown.
In fact, in only a year there happened to be a 19% increase for experts in the digital sphere. In addition to this, expertise in this area will remain in demand, and reports have shown that of the people that were hired, 42% of these happened to be permanent positions.
In the US, digital skills are driving professional development markets, along with a forecast of around $8.5 billion by the year 2020.
3. Smartphone Invasion
The smartphone invasion is something we cannot escape, along with its major use in every area of communication.
The figures collected from Statista has shown that smartphone global use is astounding:
• UAE – 3.9 million users
• Singapore – 4.3 million users
• Hong Kong – 5.6 million users
• Australia – 19.4 million users
• USA – 260 million users
This same report has forecasted that in 2020 there are going to be about 3 billion smartphone users.
4. Skills Gap
Many of the required skills in traditional advertising and marketing roles have gone onto saturate the markets. These skill-sets range from analysis and product marketing to research.
The gap in the market is quite significant with demands for talents at 56%, and supply at 24%. Within the creative skill sets, there is a 27% supply and a 35% demand.
The EC (European Commission) has stated that digital use has increased in 90% of workplaces over the last five years. These skill gaps have become increasingly prominent with 38% of workplaces that are discovering that the lack of these skills is having an impact on performance, along with a 46% drop in productivity.
Over and above this, 88% of workplaces have admitted that they have not done anything in order to improve the skill gaps within their own companies.
5. Digital Invasion
The digital invasion has taken control of every aspect of communication, which has made it the ultimate method to reach audiences.
The jobs for digital marketing should be supporting advertising across the different social media platforms, as it carries on growing. According to a recent report from Hootsuite’s and We Are Social, using the top-rated platforms on social media experienced close to 1 million brand-new users each day in 2018, with around 3 billion people that use social media across the globe each month.
Here is a list of the more revealing numbers:
• The internet user numbers are up 7% year-on-year
• The mobile-phone user numbers are up 4% year-on-year
Final Thoughts
The demands associated with digital marketing experiences will carry on growing, which leaves ample fertile ground when it comes to teaching opportunities for colleges, training providers and universities.
With workforces coming up short in relation to the skills that are required to add to the efforts of digital marketing, an increasing interest in courses that cover digital marketing will make it a worthwhile investment for the educators.
