What it takes to become a Digital Marketer
What does it take to become a digital marketer?
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This is my story of what it took to become a digital marketer…
My story is not unique
My story is not unique. Hey, I’m sure if you Google a bit, you’ll find other people like me. Truckloads full of them.
But what I want to share with you is what it took for me personally to get to a level where I felt that I knew enough to start with digital, social and content marketing.
And then actually start doing that across the organization. And getting results.
A massive request for change
When I became convinced that digital, social and content was the way to go, the first step was to convince my management. Change was needed. Lots of change.
And that’s what we’ve gone through the last 2 years. And when looking back, the change that I was asking was massive: Read more 
Have you ever wondered why marketing professionals start blogging ?
Have you ever wondered why professionals start blogging ? Well, me too, until recently.
Somehow on blogs, bloggers need to have their first post, and this happens to be my first post. Some start immediately with providing their thoughts on a topic an post it straight away, which is just fine. Now, I went through a different process.
Blogs where not new to me, and I had used them to find information before, but I never really quite understood why people actually would spend time on doing research, and put their thoughts in text, videos, podcast or photos on-line. And then start tweeting, put status updates in LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+, and have conversations with people who react to their blog posts. And this on top of their already busy lives.
For me the “switch” was last summer when I was on holiday in Italy. I read books when I am on holiday, so I started reading a book on social media which started confirming to me that I was doing marketing totally wrong:
- I knew that I had to focus on the needs of the customer, their pains, but somehow I consistently doubted if my understanding of marketing was effective.
- I knew how to spend spend thousands of euros on great looking advertising, massive trade-show booths and great looking customer cases and other marketing collateral.
- I knew how to run webinars, push out press releases, and do mailings to customers and prospects.
Well, let me rephrase that : I thought I knew.
