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Digital Marketing Apprenticeship – Top tips

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Are you interested in learning about digital marketing and getting experience in the industry?
Then a digital marketing apprenticeship may be for you.

Jobs and entry criteria

The entry requirements can differ from each employer, however to apply, you will need at least a grade 4/C in Maths and English.

The digital marketing apprenticeship provides opportunities for an apprenticeship to learn the skills required to perform typical marketing roles. The set of skills and knowledge developed on this apprenticeship is highly sought after in the job market. It provides an excellent start in the industry. The average annual salary for a marketing executive in the UK is £27,000.

The apprenticeship is 15 months long, and you will earn 3 qualifications. This includes the Digital Marketing Level 3 apprenticeship standard, the BCS Principles in Coding and Marketing Principles and the Google Analytics IQ.

Digital Marketing, Typewriter,

Key responsibilities of a digital marketing apprentice

The primary role of a digital marketer is to execute campaigns, analyse them and optimise for better results. Digital marketers are typically involved with planning and building campaigns, based on briefs.

They can work across a variety of paid, owned and earned channels including paid or organic search, affiliate marketing, programmatic marketing and social media.

Digital marketers monitor the performance of campaigns to ensure they deliver the best results based on the main objectives and goals. They do this by establishing key performance indicators – these are metrics related to the objective that help them know if their campaigns are on the right track.

As a digital marketer, you will have a good understanding of the basics of marketing such as the marketing funnel, customer lifecycle and SMART goals. In addition to this, you will understand how to use a range of analytical tools and different advertising platforms.

For more information on this job role visit https://www.apprenticetips.com/.

Digital marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, pay per click marketing, google analytics, content marketing

Core competencies

As part of your job role, you will carry out duties that will satisfy 13 competencies, which ensure you have the knowledge and skills of a digital marketer. Some examples are:

Implementation – this is to build and implement digital campaigns. To do this you will need to take the brief from the planning stage to the activation.

Digital Analysis – this is showing that you can measure and evaluate the success of your digital marketing activities. By doing so, you can make recommendations for optimisations.

Research – this is showing that you can analyse and contribute to the digital environment short and long term. There are different types of research carried out for different channels.

My top tips for meeting the competencies

Figuring out how to meet these competencies can be overwhelming. Here are my top tips for ensuring that you do. 

Be clear on what they are 

Throughout your apprenticeship, you will have many opportunities to meet different competencies. However, if you don’t know what competencies you need to meet, you will not be collecting evidence for them along the way. My advice is to have a basic understanding of each one and what you need to do to meet them. Try to summarise them, like I did above.

Gather evidence from the beginning

One thing that really helped me get my portfolio started was gathering evidence for my competencies as early as possible. I would initially break down my portfolio into the competencies and provide the evidence for each corresponding skill, as I met them.

Then, I would rearrange the slides to make them cohesive and aesthetically pleasing. Over time, you will begin to view your projects and tasks through the lens of the competencies. It also makes you feel accomplished, to have evidence that you are improving and becoming the digital marketer you aspire to be.

Ask for help

Worried that you won’t be able to meet a competency because of the nature of your role in your company and team? Then speak to your line manager or coach as soon as possible. They will work with you to find a solution so that you can pass the end point assessment!

Check out https://www.prospects.ac.uk/jobs-and-work-experience/job-sectors/marketing-advertising-and-pr/marketing-apprenticeships to find out more about marketing apprentices in the UK.

Dos and Don’ts for Google Analytics in Digital Marketing

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Photo of Google sign on the top of a building.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics software used to look at the current performance of websites and identify web traffic. It has many capabilities and is arguably a tool that you could continue developing your skills in with time.

DO: Take the time to do Google Certifications

There are free Google Analytics certifications that you can complete which are provided by Google itself. They’re extremely comprehensive and give you the opportunity to learn more about the platform from a theoretical and practical standpoint.

Google Analytics Academy only requires a Google account so it won’t require a separate account. If you have no prior knowledge about Google Analytics, Analytics Academy will walk you through the report and analytics basics. If you already know the basics, there are Advanced Analytics courses you can complete which will give you a better understanding of more advanced things you can do on Google Analytics.

The form of each learning differs, but most follow the structure of videos that goes through the learning. If videos don’t work for you, there are transcripts which offer as much information as the videos. On certain modules, there are additional resources you can use to help recap what you have learnt. Other modules have Google Analytics demos so you can walk through what it would be like to create reports and generate data.

If you are someone that works best with mini assessments, then you’re in luck! Analytics Academic has small assessments at the end of each module that recaps what you were taught. You can’t progress any further until you get a pass mark of at least 80% and completing that in every assessment means you can gain a certificate of completion.

You can also complete the Google Analytics Individual Qualification which is available on Google Skillshop. This certification only lasts for a year so you will need to refresh your certification every year. However, it tests you on knowledge from the Google Analytics for Beginners and Advanced Analytics courses.

DON’T: Forget to include Google Analytics tracking code to webpages!

It’s all well and good to have Google Analytics to collect data, but where does it come from? Without linking the Analytics account to the webpage, it won’t collect any data. For any webpages you want data on, connect it to Google Analytics using the Google Analytics tracking code.

If you find there is still no data coming through, check to see if your tracking code is up-to-date. Any outdated or invalid tracking codes will not collect any information, so this will be worth updating for Analytics data.

Photo of someone working on a laptop with a Google Analytics report.
Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash

DO: Make use of segments

Segments are a subset of your visitors that match certain criteria that you set ahead of time. They can be extremely useful to understand how people of different demographics may behave and see if there are trends in any particular data. You can get extremely detailed with segments and this can be applied to other reporting. Segments can also help you create custom audiences for your marketing campaigns as well as providing clear insights.

For example, you can create segments with a geographical segmentation of people living in England, or a town in England. You could also create segments that track returning users based on browser history or IP address.

DON’T: Lose sight of what you are tracking

Google Analytics has a lot of capabilities and it can get very complicated and overwhelming if you try to understand everything at once. Therefore, it is important to understand what you want to look for, and what your targets are. Important metrics like bounce rate and organic traffic are good ones to always look out for as it can give you an idea of what to improve on your website.

Take some time to sit down and do some research on industry benchmarks so you know what to reach for. Analytics does update regularly, but work on your website will take time, so it’s good to be patient and wait to see how it improves.

DO: Use Google Analytics’ Custom Reports

Using Google’s standard parameters, whilst handy, has limited personalisation to your business. Custom Reports are ways of creating reports with specific filters or segments that can make your reports more personalised to your business as well as easier to navigate. It is likely you will be looking at many similar reports, so using Custom Reports to create reports that are personalised to what data you want will be extremely beneficial.

With Custom Reports, you will be able to customise five elements of custom reports: users, sessions, hits, metrics and dimensions. You can change the presentation of the report as well, so it represents your data in the best way possible. The different report types include: explorer, flat table and map overlay. Explorer is the basic report with a line graph and data table; a flat table is a sortable data table; and a map overlay is a global map with colours to indicate engagement, traffic, etc.

For example, you could create a custom Acquisitions report to look at the activity on your website at specific dates and times. This could help you understand what times your website has more traffic and try to identify why this may be.

DON’T: Forget to check your Google Analytics data regularly

This may be an obvious tip, but if you leave your data for a long while, you won’t get a long-term view of how your website is performing. It’s good to pull weekly and monthly data to see if there are any sudden changes on your website. You can also leave notes on reports so you know what the state of your website was at that time.

The longer you have Google Analytics, the more data you can use to your advantage. Keeping a reporting spreadsheet can be extremely beneficial to not just yourself, but to any SEO and SEM work.

Conclusion

This isn’t an exhaustive list and there are definitely more things you can and can’t do with Google Analytics. As a digital marketing apprentice, you will learn how your company uses Google Analytics and what you can do. With basic training and application, you’ll find the data analytics software to be incredibly useful across multiple marketing disciplines. By remembering some of these key tips and spending time to familiarise yourself with Google Analytics, you will be a pro at generating data and reports in no time!

If you’re interested in finding out the technical applications of Google Analytics, check out some of our other articles:

Dos and Don’ts for PPC Digital Marketing Campaigns

How to Build a Strong Website and Increase SEO

UTM tracking parameters | Digital Marketing Apprenticeship Tips

Top 3 Tips To Kickstart Your Career In Digital Marketing

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Do you have no experience and want to learn what digital marketing is and how you can get a job role in this industry? After reading these three tips you will be on your way to landing your dream job in digital marketing.

Tip #1 Gain experience and certificates from free online courses

Google Garage offers many free online courses that can help you understand what digital marketing is and gain experience using digital marketing platforms and tools. Some courses reward you with a certificate upon completion which you can add to your CV, this can get you ahead of the competition as your potential employer can see you are a self-starter and keen to learn more about digital marketing. These courses among many others can give you a great advantage when it comes to securing a job in digital marketing:

LinkedIn, jobs

Tip #2 Updating your online presence

Landing a job in digital marketing isn’t easy as it is a highly competitive job market. Updating your online presence on LinkedIn is by far the best way to secure more interviews. Making sure you have a professional profile picture and up to date profile with all previous work experience will give recruiters a much easier time to pick you when they are looking for employees. Make sure to add your certificates from the online courses above.

Tip #3 Work experience

A good way to start gaining real work experience is to start an internship or an apprenticeship in digital marketing. It will teach you the roles and responsibilities that digital marketers have and it could lead to a full time job offer after completion. Another way to gain experience is to start your own projects. Creating and managing social media platforms is a great way to gain experience in social media marketing and it will show your potential employer how create and passionate you are about marketing.

Conclusion

The opportunities of securing a digital marketing role are increasing as there are more remote jobs due to the pandemic, lots of employers are looking for new candidates to help them grow their business online, it’s a perfect time to start your career in tech. If you are looking to start your career in digital marketing, make sure you follow these three steps to help you understand what different roles and responsibilities you can have in a digital marketing role and land your dream job. If you want to learn more about digital marketing make sure to sign up to receive more insights on digital marketing.

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Top 3 Tips for a Great Start in Digital Marketing

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It’s essential that people have the right knowledge, skills and confidence when getting started in apprenticeships. With digital marketing apprenticeships being a specific and unique profession to get into, I thought I’d share my top 3 tips into getting started and ensuring a good and solid foundation for success.

Realise it for yourself

You’ll find that you are probably involved in one aspect of digital marketing every single day. Whether that’s typing in your favourite products on a popular search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) to scrolling through social media or watching your favourite youtubers and coming across paid ads as an result, it’s needless to say that digital marketing is around us everywhere.

Seeing and appreciating Digital Marketing in this way will only help to raise your interest, awareness, but also develop your knowledge concerning the industry. As most young people have the opportunity using these aspects everyday, I’d suggest utilising them through the lense of a digital marketer. As you use these tools it would be good to raise a few points like:

  • Why does a search engine suggest keywords when finding a product on Google?
  • Why are the ads on social media telling me to ‘swipe up for more’ and what does swiping up do?
  • Why are companies constantly emailing me with incentives like ‘10% vouchers’?

There is always a reason behind these things and when going into Digital Marketing as an apprentice it definitely stands out and makes an impression on you that you can’t forget.

Get Familiar with Digital Marketing Tools

It’s important to familiarise yourself with tools that are needed for digital marketing. This way you’ll be able to track webpages and marketing campaigns and have a good understanding of how they perform.

KPIs and metrics such as form fills, page views, bounce rate, click through rate, open rate, organic reach and many more can all be measured on platforms such as:

And many more…

Commit yourself to short and free courses

One way in which I was able to get a great start in my Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship was through short and free courses that I searched for on Google.

There was a variety of courses that I completed prior to starting and during my apprenticeship. Doing these courses really established a foundation of knowledge that I was able to develop. The courses that I covered answered some questions that I had such as:

  • What does SEO stand for and what does it mean?
  • What tools do you use to measure paid campaigns?
  • How do I track the performance and data of a webpage?
  • How does Google Analytics work?
  • How do I know that emails are effective?

I recommend the following resources that provided all the latest updates, information and education needed for a great start in Digital Marketing:

Conclusion

In conclusion it’s important to integrate all of these tips, tricks and methods when getting into the field of Digital Marketing for any young person. Having these standards in place will definitely give any young person seeking an apprenticeship a great advantage in the field.

For the latest resources, updates and information around everything apprenticeships connect with us by filling the form below.

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Create reports using – Google Analytics / Adobe analytics.

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Image of laptop with data analytics.

Within digital marketing, many campaigns are carried out over the course of the fiscal year. Companies want to manage the success of their campaigns and see how well they performed by creating insights on the campaign. One way of measuring campaign performance is by using an analytical report such as google analytics or adobe analytics. These bespoke reports can help identify trends in the market and where your customer base lies. Read my top tips below on what to look out for when creating reports!

Customer database – field/region/category

When creating reports, first identify where you want your data to come from. Within your business first, decide which customers you want to focus on, this can be done by filtering the data by region, customer age, price range, and all sorts of factors. For example, ApprenticeTips could create a report to see which apprenticeships are most common in London. They can then filter this by choosing a level of apprenticeship from level 3 – level 7, this report will then only show data from London and apprentices doing the specific level of apprenticeship chosen. Once you have determined your customer base, you’re ready to work on your report!

KPI – help measure key metrics.

KPI stands for key performance indicators. These are metrics that help measure how successful your marketing campaign is going. Metrics such as open rate, click-through rates, visits, orders, revenues, and conversion rates. These can be used to measure the success of a campaign, when using metrics data can be compared from campaign to campaign to see the growth or decline of the business. ApprenticeTips can use metrics such as views to see how many users are visiting the webpage (Apprenticetips.com).

Click-through rates can also be used to measure how many customers are clicking on the content you have provided. For example, if a business sends out an e-mail, they can find out how many customers opened the email and what page they were directed to from the e-mail. Al businesses can create a bespoke report which will measure metrics most useful to the business. An e-commerce business may focus on revenue, orders, and unit metrics when creating an analytical report.

Exporting reports.

When the report has been created, it needs to be exported so It is in a presentable format to the team/business. Reports can be shown as

  • Pie charts
  • Bar charts
  • Tables

There are many ways to showcase the data found from the reports created, tables can be a great way to separate data by region, category, or metrics. For example, a company wanted to measure how much revenue they generated in a specific month. This can be shown in a table with date ranges, products and revenue generated. A tool that can be used to create tables and charts in Microsoft Excel, Excel allows you to showcase data in a simple and effective format which can then be shared with the wider team.

Pulling insights.

Businesses can use google analytics to create insights for the campaigns. Insights can help businesses answer the why question to the success of the campaign. For example, if an e-commerce business sees an increase in views for the month of December, they could conclude that they had offers for Black Friday or Christmas boxing day which is why they saw growth in views for December. By looking at this data they can conclude that views we’re up due to demand for gifts during Christmas. They can also compare data from December last year to data from December this year. This will show the trend of the business YOY (year on year). Insights can be used to create targets and objectives for the business.

Conclusion.

Overall, analytical software such as google analytics and adobe analytics are a useful way of looking into a business’s performance. Businesses can use metrics to measure the success of a campaign, these metrics can be compared to previous data to see the growth of the business. Reports can help set targets for the business. If you would like to learn more day-to-day job roles as a Digital Marketer, check out the post on this apprenticeship.

If you are interested in learning more about Google analytics and Adobe analytics, you can click on the links provided to gain more knowledge or reporting analytics.

Top 5 tips to improve your Google Analytics reporting

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Statistics, Analytics, Google Analytics

As part of your digital marketing apprenticeship journey, you will come across a variety of digital tools to analyse your web or social performance online. Google Analytics is a tool recommended and used by marketers globally, as it can track and report website performance data which can help optimise your website through marketing plans.

A lot of company’s setup Google Analytics yet don’t fully understand all the tools that it offers, these top 5 tips will help you on your analytical journey and get the most out of your Google Analytics reporting.

1. Set Up Goals and Goal Values

Goals and values are a key feature and tool that Google Analytics offer to allow you to better track specific aims when reporting. Make sure to have your Google Analytics goals configured correctly with a goal value attached to each of your goals.

When doing this I recommend to not only look at your most important goal, but also at the minor or micro goals as well. By utilising goal values, you have the ability to better analyse your website traffic and make impactful decisions. Many decisions may not even require you to drive more traffic to your website. Instead, they may generate more value to your business just by better understanding and optimising to the traffic you already have.

2. Set Up Annotations

Google Analytics annotations can be significant help in your data analysis, you can comment on many things in your data, for example:

  • Tracking issues
  • Offline campaigns
  • Traffic Spikes
  • Campaigns being paused or put-on hold

It goes a long way to add these annotations because if you look back on data from the previous year and you or a colleague wasn’t notified of something that happened offline, for example on one of the days the traffic was extremely low but that was due to a tracking issue. The annotation will allow you to clearly state what happened rather than relating it to an unknown issue, which doesn’t look good if you’re showing this report to stakeholders.

3. Build custom reports

Every business is different and has its own Goals & KPIs. Custom reports are directly related to metrics and dimensions and they allow you to build reports from scratch or combine standard reports within one custom report.

It’s easy to create custom reports via the “Customization” tab in Google Analytics:

A few things you need to choose:

  • Report type: explorer, flat table or map overlay.
  • Metrics: your desired metrics.
  • Dimensions: your desired dimensions.
  • Filter: pre-filter your data
  • Views: the views you want to add this report to.

Custom reports that are focused on your data analysis are really helpful to make your reports more KPI focused.

4. Landing page reports

Landing page reports is a great feature to use when conducting your reporting process. The landing page reports offers page information, in terms of specific landing page performance. This is great to find out what pages are performing well and what pages need improvement.

Each page performance is broken down into metrics so if a page needs improving you can optimise it based off what metric needs to most support. It can indicate whether a page has been created with a good user experience based off of the bounce rate, and how long a user is on the page for.

All this information goes a long way when breaking down plan to improve the site as you can demonstrate the pages that need the most improvement.

5. Add Custom Segments to Enhance Your Insights

Segments are powerful since they help you isolate and compare different traffic sources, you can always start with an overall analysis, but real insights are hidden in segments.

Segments help you to analyse a particular segment of your data. It’s a very powerful method since you can apply your segments to historical data as well.

Filters are applied to the data you collect from the moment you apply the filter to your view, however Google Analytics allows you to compare four segments at the same time.

As with traditional customer segments, in Google Analytics, segments group visitors who share common characteristics. There are lots of characteristics of visitors that are collected by default by Google Analytics, from details about their browsers to the sites that they come from and the types of pages they view.

Analytics, Google Analytics, Stats

Conclusion

In conclusion from the tips provided you can see that there are many simple yet effective tools the Google Analytics offer to improve and optimise your reporting process. Take your time when going through each process and fully grasp why each tip matters as it could be the key to improving your sites performance, or finding room for optimisation.

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