Specialist or Generalist? Building A Marketable Skillset

Would you rather know a lot about a little, or a little about a lot?

Why not both?

A career in digital marketing can be overwhelming with an increasing number of platforms available, all of which contain their own niche subjects that need to be understood in detail. To complicate things further, digital marketers are also expected to have a working knowledge of SEO, website optimisation and attribution in order to fully understand the impact of their role.

With so many options to choose from, is it a smarter career strategy to focus on building a broad knowledge base, or to become the expert in one specific area?

What if there was a way to get the best of both options? Let’s think long term to understand how that can work.

Think back to the first day of your digital marketing career. After meeting your team and getting set up, you started to learn about the different platforms that were being used. The following weeks and months were a blur of certifications, training and learning about the ways in which each platform was utilised. It’s easy to miss in the moment, but those early years are crucial for career development as exposure to different areas builds a strong knowledge base and the ability to apply information and lessons from a previous situation to new challenges.

Fast-forward a few years and you’re confidently managing smaller accounts across a variety of industries. Your time is split between Google Ads, Meta & a rotating cast of smaller platforms with quality results and strategies for each. The problem is, you’re ready to take the next step in your career but you don’t have the deep understanding of one platform required to manage accounts with spend in the hundreds of thousands or even millions per year.

So what do you do?

Over time, there will be one platform that stands out to you. It might align with your way of thinking, you might enjoy the specific challenges or you might even like a platform because you disagree with the way another one operates (Meta). Once you’ve identified that platform, you can dedicate more time to becoming a true expert with a deep understanding of every aspect that drives success.

As your expertise grows, you’ll be able to apply that deep knowledge to new clients and industries while marketing yourself as a platform specialist. Moving a level deeper, you can even market yourself as an expert within a particular niche on that platform. This deep knowledge allows you to work on larger accounts and build your own client base, using case studies as you go to prove your knowledge. At the same time, you’ll be able to draw on your early experience with other platforms to give good wider marketing advice and understand how your work complements other digital strategies within the same business.

Whatever platform you end up specialising in, don’t forget the lessons those early years will teach you. A lesson from a Google Display campaign five years ago might hold the key to driving performance for a TikTok campaign in 2023. Without broad experience early on, your deep knowledge of one niche isn’t as useful as it could be and as time goes on you’ll see the benefits of both general & specialist knowledge and how they work together to create well rounded marketers.

For specialist Google Search knowledge, or general digital marketing advice, get in touch.