There are only 5 basic rules to follow if you want to become a successful digital marketer:

1. Connection with a community of successful marketers.

Trust me when I say that it is a fairly small community and closely guarded. It is fairly difficult to identify good marketers primarily because the outliers will not be found in the typical networking event. However, as a digital marketer, when you connect with qualified professionals in the industry, you are likely to benefit on multiple levels.

A typical mistake people make with building communities is that they overlook the importance of following up regularly. The secret of a good marketer (or any professional for that matter) is to always keep in touch with their peers and engage in as much constructive discussion as possible.

LinkedIn is a tool that greatly simplifies this task with a LinkedIn group and messaging. Facebook and Viber are not really the platforms where one converses about ROI and other digital marketing trends, and here, LinkedIn gives you the perfect platform to connect with local and international marketers.

2. Sound Technical Understanding

By technical knowledge, I am referring to a fundamental understanding of the numerous digital platforms and an intricate overview of what it takes to be working there. While it is very easy to be pitching a mobile app or a microsite to the client unless one has knowledge of the resource requirements and communicates with developers or vendors accordingly, deadlines are going to be missed and execution is going to be sloppy.

If you are in this industry, you should have a functional knowledge of what it takes to work with people and execute projects and at the same time understand the role of the respective members of your team.

If you cannot define the responsibilities of your team, you will probably end up with gaping holes in your final execution. It is not wise to rely on human intuition and expect people to “somehow manage”. That is not a way to deal with people in scale and will undoubtedly create organizational bottlenecks. At the same time, you do not want to create bureaucratic approval processes.

3. Defining In Details

Successful digital marketers are always good at taking a task of any size and breaking it down into smaller, more manageable tasks. This is one of how one creates agile processes and an iterative feedback system where a developer or a designer gets feedback from every stage of the process from stakeholders as opposed to when delivering the final product.

Make lists of whatever needs to be done, and keep a clear picture in your head as to who is accountable for what.

4. Ability to Ship

Ideas are not what makes successful digital marketers. You need to be able to ship a product and have the mechanism to rapidly improve it. There is no value in huddling over minute details and disrupt the development flow within your team. Quality always matters, and if you have an inexperienced team, rapidly shipping may give you a not-so-top notch product.

However, it is more important to instill a sense of rapid development and as your team ships more campaigns and products, there is going to be an exponential increase in institutional knowledge and the quality of your team’s MVPs is going to go up.

5. It is not a one-man show

Marketers are only as good as the team that backs them up. This is why successful marketers have the ability to ship and thereby keep up team morale. Clients and campaigns are always going to come and go, but those successful in this industry acknowledge the importance of working with key players in their teams and growing with them so that even under tight deadlines and work pressure they are able to consistently improve the quality of their output.            

It’s that simple and only requires some effort on your part. So it’s only a matter of time before you become a successful digital marketer