How Do You Become a Digital Marketing Expert?
- Shay Zaidenberg
- Dec 1
- 8 min read
The Honest Answer I Gave a Recent Grad
Not long ago, during one of my volunteer sessions helping students and recent grads plan their careers, a young graduate raised her hand and asked me:
“How do you become a digital marketing expert?”
She didn’t ask, “Which certificate should I buy?” or “What’s the fastest way to learn Google Ads?” She really meant: How do I get good enough that real companies trust me with real budgets, people, and results?
I’ve spent more than two decades working as a digital marketing expert in performance marketing. I’ve worked with tiny test budgets and with accounts where a 1–2% change meant hundreds of thousands of dollars gained or lost. I’ve sat with founders, sales reps, CS teams, and finance people, all looking at me to explain “what the marketing is doing.”
And even for me, that question still makes me pause.
Because the real answer is not “get a degree” or “learn these three tools.”
The answer is a mix of:
continuous learning,
measured execution,
and very real interaction with all levels of an organization — across cultures, roles, and personalities.
From “Just Build a Website” to Running the Nervous System of the Business
When I started my career, digital marketing was just getting started.
If a company had:
a basic brochure website,
an email newsletter,
maybe some banner ads on a portal,
they felt pretty advanced.
Today, digital marketing is an entire operation and the nervous system of the business:
Externally, it shapes how you reach and nurture customers: search, social, video, email, SMS, content, retargeting, reviews, affiliates.
Internally, it influences how teams work: lead routing, CRM stages, sales enablement, reporting, forecasting, communication between marketing, sales, and operations.
Operationally, it drives automation: journeys, triggers, lifecycle flows, win-back and upsell campaigns, experimentation and optimization loops.
If you unplug digital marketing today, most businesses go blind very quickly.
That’s the environment we’re talking about when we say “digital marketing expert.” It’s not someone who knows how to boost a post. It’s someone who understands how this whole nervous system works and how to change it without breaking the organism.
The Power Shift: Tools Moving From IT to Marketers
One of the biggest shifts I’ve lived through is who controls the tools.
When I was getting started, everything flowed through IT:
Want to add a pixel? Open a ticket.
Want a new landing page? Open a ticket.
Want to change tracking? Definitely open a ticket.
Today, the stack has moved into the hands of marketers:
Google Tag Manager (GTM) lets marketers deploy and manage tags without constantly waiting on developers.
Klaviyo, Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and others let us build journeys, segments, and automations directly.
WordPress, Webflow, Wix, and GoHighLevel (GHL) let marketers launch pages and tests in days instead of long dev sprints.
Integration tools like Zapier or Make connect ad platforms, CRMs, and analytics without custom code, and proper pixel tracking and event architecture make it possible to build smarter audiences over time and better track and convert leads.
Major media companies Google, Meta and TikTok heavily invest and promote full campaign management tools driven by AI
This shift is empowering and dangerous.
Empowering, because you can now move fast, experiment, and shape the customer experience end to end. Dangerous, because you can now also create chaos at scale: duplicated contacts, broken attribution, misaligned notifications, and very frustrated teams.
And this is where the human side enters the story in a big way.
The Part You Don’t See in Tutorials: Colleagues and personal connection
Here’s something you almost never hear in tutorials about “becoming an expert”:
You can know every tool, every shortcut, every hack, and still fail if you don’t know how to work with people.
Over the years I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that my job isn’t only to make campaigns perform. It’s also to connect:
With sales, who live the reality behind your leads.
With customer service, who hear every complaint and friction point.
With operations, who actually have to deliver what marketing promises.
With finance, who care about cash flow, margin, and payback periods.
With my team, who drove our department goals to success.
With leadership, who need clarity and new ideas not dashboards full of noise.
I’ve had campaigns that looked great on paper…until I talked to the sales team and heard:
“These leads don’t show up.”, “We’re wasting time on the wrong people.”, “We can’t see which campaigns work once they’re in the pipeline.”
I’ve seen companies buy powerful software, add endless automation, and yet stall because teams didn’t trust the numbers, didn’t understand what was happening, or weren’t aligned on goals.
That’s when you realize:
All the tools and automation in the world can’t replace the power of a team that communicates, trusts each other, and works toward the same outcome.
Digital marketing expertise lives in that tension: between what’s possible with technology and what’s real with people.
Where University Fits In (And Where It Doesn’t)
I also gave the graduate the “degree” answer, because it matters.
I studied for my BA and my master’s degree while I was working full time. I wasn’t just reading textbooks; I was running campaigns, learning from direct response marketers, and watching live numbers every day.
Looking back:
University gave me structure and a starting network: how to research, how to write, how to collaborate, how to think critically, and exposure to disciplines I probably wouldn’t have explored on my own
The job gave me reality checks: the advertisement either worked or it didn’t; the funnel either produced profitable customers or it didn’t.
The challenge today is that universities move slowly, while our industry moves very fast.
At the same time, we’re entering a world where:
Knowledge is widely accessible.
Learning can be customized to your level and goals.
AI is evolving into a kind of personalized “super tutor,” trained on the best educators and practitioners in the world.
So no, I don’t think university becomes irrelevant overnight. But I do believe they need to transform or become irrelevant.
The people who will thrive are the ones who treat learning as continuous, self-directed, and tied to real execution that help businesses operate and grow.
Growing Up in Direct Response: My Real Education as a Digital Marketing Expert
If you scroll through my bio, you’ll see a long list of companies, roles, industries, and budgets. But the real education came from where I chose to stand.
I grew up professionally in direct response marketing, the kind of work where you’re always a few steps from the cash register:
Did the phone ring?
Did the form submit?
Did the sale happen at the right cost?
There’s no room for vague language there. You don’t hide behind “awareness” if your job is to drive measurable action unless you prove it with a positive correlation to sales.
Along the way, I moved through different roles: media buying, analytics, conversion rate optimization, marketing leadership, consulting. Each seat forced me to see the same problem from a different angle.
And crucially, I wasn’t just looking at dashboards alone in a room. I was:
Sitting with sales reps listening to recorded calls.
Talking with support teams about common pain points.
Reviewing reports with finance to understand cash flow, margin, and payback.
Walking executives through what the numbers actually meant for the business future.
All of that shaped how I think about “expertise” today.
What Measured Execution Really Looks Like
You hear “test and learn” everywhere. But in real performance marketing, that phrase can be dangerously vague.
What I’ve learned to practice—and to teach—is measured execution. It looks like this:
Start with a clear business question. Not “Should we try TikTok?”, But “Can we profitably acquire customers from a new audience at or below $X CAC within Y weeks?”
Turn the question into a simple hypothesis. “If we target audience X with offer Y and creative Z on [channel], we can generate at least N qualified leads per week at or below $X CPL.”
Instrument the test before you touch ‘Launch’.
Events and conversions set up correctly in GTM, pixels, and the ad platforms
Audiences and events structured for future optimization and remarketing (retargeting, lookalikes, value-based audiences)
Leads flowing into the CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive, etc.) with clear tracking
Alerts or basic reports so teams can see what’s happening without logging into five tools
Align the team around what success means.
Marketing team have projected metrics that are expected as an acceptable results
Sales knows what kind of leads are coming and how to handle them
Leadership knows the test goal and time frame
Everyone understands we’re running an experiment, not making promises
Execute with discipline.
Let the campaigns gather enough data
Avoid changing big variables every 24 hours
Check in regularly with the teams impacted: “Are these leads making sense?”
Review the results honestly with your team, not just in a slide.
What does the data say?
What do sales and CS say?
Where did the process break?
Decide together: scale, refine, or kill.
If the test works, align on how to scale without breaking operations
If it’s borderline, adjust and try again
If it fails, shut it down, document the lesson, and move on
Build a playbook for scale
That loop—question → hypothesis → instrumentation → alignment → execution → review → decision—is where expertise is built.
And yes, you need both: the technical chops to set it up, and the human skills to bring everyone along.
If You’re Starting Out: A Practical Roadmap
So what did I tell that graduate who asked how to become an expert?
Here’s the short version of the roadmap I shared:
Pick a starting lane. You don’t need to master everything at once. Start with one main area: paid search, paid social, CRM/email, analytics/CRO, or content/SEO.
Build a small but real lab. Don’t just study theory. Run a small project: your own site, a friend’s business, a side project. Set up basic tracking. Spend a small budget. Feel the pressure of real numbers.
Learn from practitioners, not just instructors. Follow people who share real case studies and mistakes, not just slides. If you can, work under someone who is responsible for a real P&L, not just a classroom. Get a mentor, develop your network.
Use AI as your learning accelerator. Ask it to break down concepts. Have it critique your plan. Let it generate practice scenarios. But always be the one making decisions.
Talk to people, not only to tools. Sit with sales. Ask them what makes a good lead. Talk to support. Learn what frustrates customers. Ask leadership what really keeps them up at night. That context will make you 10x more effective than another “dashboard expert.”
Document your tests and your lessons. Keep a simple log: what you tried, how you set it up, what happened, and what you learned. That’s your real “textbook.”
Stay close to the money. Always connect your work to revenue, margin, or long-term value. The further you are from the cash register, the harder it is to become truly valuable.
So, How Do You Become a Digital Marketing Expert?
You don’t earn that title from a single course, a degree, or a job change.
You become an expert by:
Continuously learning as the landscape shifts
Running real campaigns and owning the outcomes
Designing tests instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall
Measuring what matters and facing the truth in the data
Working with people across the organization, not around them
And repeating that loop for years, letting each iteration make you a little sharper
Digital marketing has evolved from “we have a website and an email list” to being the main operator of internal and external communication and automation for a brand.
Software and automation give us leverage. Teamwork and human interaction and common goals give us direction and greater purpose.
When those two line up, tools and people, data and trust that’s where the real magic happens.
That’s the path I’ve walked. It’s the path I try to model when I mentor the next generation.
And it’s the same answer I’ll keep giving to anyone who asks:
If you want to become a digital marketing expert, build a life where you never stop learning, never stop testing, never stop measuring—and never forget that behind every click and every metric, there’s a team and a customer you need to understand.
