If you aren’t clear if you want to become a digital marketer or a data analyst—you are not alone! Each is a new, exciting career with rapid growth and excellent career opportunities. However, digital marketing and data analytics will absolutely be very different and have very different skill sets within different industries and career paths. So, how do you know if one of the careers would benefit you more than the other?
In this article, we will take a look at what digital marketing is, what a data analyst is, the differences between digital marketing and data analysis, and thoughts on whether you would go into digital marketing or data analysis. To wrap up, we will answer some additional FAQs that might help provide closure in deciding between digital marketing and data analysis.
In simple terms, digital marketing is about communicating the marketing message to a consumer with digital media such as websites, social media, email, and much more. Or, it is the art and science of taking a consumer to a business and turning a consumer into a customer and a customer into a repeat customer.
Digital marketing has many elements of strategies and tactics:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is just making your site more visible in a search engine.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) means things like Google AdWords and Google AdSense.
Social media marketing is things like using social media presence—Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Affiliate marketing is when you are paid just because you promoted someone else's product on your website.
To excel in digital marketing, it is important to have creative, innovative, and analytical skills. Here is a brief list:
Creativity: Making interesting material and innovative & imaginative marketing campaigns.
Communication: Writing interesting facts and questions and interacting with clients or managing social media conversations.
SEO Knowledge: Know how search engines work and how to optimize content.
Data Analysis: Major looks at metrics to track the performance of campaigns.
Technical Know-how: Knowing tools like Google Analytics, social media ad managers, and email marketing platforms.
If you enjoy writing, developing concepts, and testing strategies to increase someone's interest, digital marketing is a good place for you. It's stimulating, fun, and thrilling if you want to see how your promotional efforts impact individuals literally as they're happening. Your personal passions and longer-term vision will play a role in helping you determine if digital marketing is your appropriate fit.
Understanding Data Analysis.
Data analysis is the process of optimizing business operations, finding inefficiencies, and cleaning, transforming, and modeling data to find useful information, draw conclusions, and support decision-making. Organizations heavily depend on data analysis to evaluate consumer behaviors, monitor achievements, and project future behaviors and activities.
Data analysis is unique, as it helps the company understand the "why" and "how" of actions. In contrast to the approach of digital marketing, which is aimed at whatever it takes to reach or convert customers. Data analysis contains a more valuable method of collecting data to identify "new" information by examining figures, trends, and patterns of information that can be used to make organizational decisions.
Skills Needed for Data Analysis
If you are going to start doing data analysis, you should be comfortable with both numbers and technology.
Analytical thinking—the ability to look at raw data, such as numbers in a spreadsheet, and figure out what the data means and what it stands for.
Basic understanding of statistics—the ability to read simple statistics such as averages, percentages, and trends and to tell if something is just coincidence or something of significance.
Data Visualization: The ability to take the data you have and utilize programs (Excel, Tableau, Power BI, etc.) and draw charts and graphs that are easy to read and tell an interesting narrative (out of those boring numbers).
Working with Code: The ability to utilize programming languages (e.g., SQL to pull from, or Python and R to analyze, for more in-depth analysis) and do things that are more complex and get more from the data.
Staying Organized: The ability to stay organized in your train of thought, your files, and your projects, so you don’t get lost in all the information and people can follow what you are working on.
Data analysis is probably a good career path for you if you like to find patterns and numbers and dig up and study hidden data. You need a special mix of technical skills, critical thinking, and problem-solving to do data analysis.
This industry is ideal for those who like to go deep into information and take action based on data.
Key Differences of Digital Marketing vs. Data Analysis:
Now that you're aware of both concepts, it's time to compare digital marketing against data analysis on a few key vectors.
Digital Marketing: The primary purpose is to attract customers, build brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales by driving traffic to our websites using various online platforms and strategies.
Data Analysis: The purpose is to analyze data simply to draw insights, become predictive of trends, and inform decisions for businesses.
Digital Marketing: Your day-to-day life may include making marketing campaigns, writing content and blogs, running ads, assessing the performance of the campaign, making graphics, and cleaning up your campaigns as necessary.
Data Analysis: You'd spend your days either collecting and cleaning data, supporting the building of reports, identifying trends, and making recommendations based on what you found.
Digital Marketing: Digital marketing needs a good amount of creativity, especially when it comes to content creation and developing new strategies to engage your audience.
Data Analysis: Although there is some creativity, data analysis requires more logical, problem-solving, and technical skills to truly analyze and manipulate data meaningfully and accurately.
If one is involved in digital marketing, he/she is likely familiar with using digital marketing tools to gather data on how people interact with your website. Google Analytics collects information on website traffic, while Mailchimp is a tool that assists in sending a marketing message via email. WordPress is a popular platform for managing website content. Hootsuite or Buffer provides the ability to manage different social media accounts, but some may just use Hootsuite or Buffer on their own accounts. All of these tools help one track what performs well and what's not as effective.
Digital Marketing
Some roles in this field include content strategist, SEO expert, social media manager, digital marketing manager, and PPC analyst.If you enjoy being innovative, coming up with plans of action, and using the Internet, then this career is a good option for you.
Data Analysis
Examples of job positions in this industry include data analyst, business intelligence analyst, data scientist, and marketing analyst. If you like working with numbers, identifying trends, and determining patterns that lead to solutions, this is the path for you.
So, which one should you choose?
The response to this question is based on your interests and skills, as well as your long-term goals. Here is a useful breakdown of each.
You appreciate creativity and the inspiration to create new marketing initiatives.
You expand your customer interaction or create relationships through content and social media.
You strive to produce results and want to know how your marketing projects contribute to a business's success.
You embrace change and are continually willing to learn about new tools, technologies, and trends.
Have an interest in engaging with numbers and discovering patterns.
Have the ability to solve problems and make data-driven decisions.
Enjoy working behind the scenes, making sense of the data.
Have a passion for working with statistical tools and coding languages.
You don't have to stick to just one. In actuality, a lot of professionals do both—data-driven digital marketers use data to optimize their campaigns, and data analysts usually support marketing teams with useful perspectives.
Digital marketing and data analysis are becoming more integrated. Knowing some of both gives you a significant competitive advantage.
Still not sure? You can also go the route of exploring free stuff (like Google Digital Garage or SQL/Python tutorials) on either path and see what fits for you.
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