The term “buzzword” dates back to 1946, when Harvard University students applied it to the key words in a lecture. Buzzwords are infectious and seem to multiply with each new technology.

Today, those looking for careers in digital media contend with countless buzzwords, including a job title itself: digital media marketing strategist.
 

Unbuzzing the Buzzwords

Digital media are emerging media. Media are methods of communicating (one is a medium). Digital media are digital because they are based on computers, which use digits (numbers… and fingers!) to put in (input) information.

Social platforms, internet video, and web content production are all aspects of digital media.

Marketing strategists study a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOTs) and help the business identify a path forward for their marketing efforts. If you wonder how to get into marketing, you should know that digital media are growing while other marketing segments are diminishing.
 

What You Do Each Day

Most digital media marketing strategists get educated through digital media colleges and supplement their core education with specialized training.

Generally, a day’s work will build upon four key purposes:

• Pinpointing opportunities and challenges for a business in which online presence (web pages, email, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.) could be part of the solution
• Identify unmet goals and needs of anyone—customer, vendor, your own company’s employees—outside and inside your business for which online presence could offer relief
• Strategically plan ways the online assets could answer internal needs (of your company’s employees) and external needs (of customers and vendors)
• Develop and prioritize online initiatives to deliver solutions

Opposition Research

Digital media schools will provide core courses that allow digital media marketing strategists to support their companies’ goals by reverse-engineering the competition’s strategies.

• A strategist may spend part of the day researching clients and competitors
• For clients, the strategist may analyze how effectively the clients’ web presence answers their needs
• Against competitors, the strategist will de-construct the competitors’ attempts at marketing, reverse-engineering their strategy in order to counteract it

Media Schools

Your work as a digital media marketing strategist will bring you into contact with many interesting people, such as your company’s lead marketing strategist, information technologists, brand managers and more. You may have to learn—or even create—a few buzzwords along the way, but the work can be richly rewarding both financially and professionally.

To get started on your career as a digital media marketing strategist, contact our Media Schools to learn how emerging media could be right for you.