The Digital Marketing industry offers a wide variety of exciting specialist opportunities; jobs in Social Media, Digital Accounts, Customer Relationship Management, Search Engine Optimisation, Digital PR, and Analytics are some of the many roles available. Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting and taking a closer look at some of the unique positions within the Digital Marketing environment in a series of blogs.
The landscape of the world is changing; as each year passes technology becomes increasingly prevalent in the everyday lives of the average person. Traditional marketing is something that companies enforce a vast emphasis on and seem to forget about the importance of the everyday digital consumer in the process. To be successful in today’s environment, marketers need to take all digital channels into account.
At the moment, there is a skills gap in many employees’ digital knowledge and experience, and companies are buckling under the pressure. Businesses, especially start ups, need to have an employee base with a broad range of digital skills in order to survive in the modern business environment. Modern marketing departments have to be able to balance the creative and the analytical together.
There is a definite need in Scotland for more individuals to have proficient digital skills within marketing roles; this can be seen when even searching for a so-called ‘non-digital’ marketing position. Simply just by visiting a recruitment site, such as ScotGrad, a number of Marketing Assistant or Marketing Graduate jobs can be found. Clicking on the mentioned positions will show that recruiters indeed desire graduates with digital skills, despite not being advertised as digital marketing positions. Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver or even quite a broad statement of ‘digital expertise’ is now becoming commonplace in marketing job adverts.
According to PwC’s latest UK economic outlook, the Scottish workforce is estimated to increase more that the UK average over the coming ten years, as more jobs will emerge in digital industries. Further, the report states that almost 6% of Scottish jobs are in digital industries that did not exist 25 years ago.
Scotland is home to a wealth of digital marketing agencies. The number of Digital Marketing agencies has been increasing in Scotland in last few years and now there are a number of agencies in located in both busy cities and more rural areas offering their support to businesses that lack digital expertise. There are smaller agencies that are based in only one location, whilst others are part of a larger network with head offices in London or even situated abroad.
Digital marketing agencies can benefit local and smaller business that may lack the digital knowledge or cannot afford to employ individuals with the desired skill set. However, it is not only small businesses that reach out to digital marketing agencies to help with digital campaigns as most large and well known companies work with agencies to design and implement their digital campaigns. DigitasLBI, a company that supports the MSc Digital Marketing course, have worked with on various campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, eBay, Sony and Volvo to name but a few. According to the Drum, digital agency, Fifth Ring’s major achievements in the past have included rebranding Oil and Gas company Expro, rebranding an international marine engineering company, and creating a brand for a Scottish Canadian oil operator.
Overall, it can be said that the current state of digital marketing in Scotland is healthy, as far as digital agencies are concerned, but at the same time more digital skills are needed to be taught in education, or else the digital skills gap in Scotland will likely only increase.