Are you a digital marketer who would love to scale up on digital marketing skills or you’re planning to build a career in digital marketing? Also known as online marketing, digital marketing is a vast field and it’s booming in the contemporary era.
The industry presents a wide range of opportunities for those who would love to pursue a career in the field. From being an SEO executive, content marketer, digital marketing executive, and social media influencer, to a blogger, one can surely find their niche in the digital marketing field.
However, although the digital marketing field presents a vast range of opportunities, it is becoming more and more competitive. Today digital marketing isn’t all about posting about a company’s products and services on Facebook a few times a week and that’s it!
There is a range of marketing platforms that serve as excellent grounds for attaining marketing goals, yet each with its practices. These include platforms like YouTube, Instagram, podcasts, web-based approaches like pop-up ads, and PPC ads (pay-per-click) to websites.
To elucidate, the advent of top-notch technologies like VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and AI (artificial intelligence) isn’t also leaving the field of digital marketing the same. Generally, the more technology becomes advanced, the bigger its impact on digital marketing.
On the other hand, modern customers are also becoming more demanding, making it hard for businesses to ignore the ever-emerging trends in the digital marketing world.
Practices like personalization, target marketing, and omnichannel marketing are common as they enhance digital marketing efforts. Precisely, the field of digital marketing comprises a variety of facets!
In this post, we’ll look at what a digital marketer does and the top in-demand skills that every digital marketer must have.
What Does a Digital Marketer Do?
First and foremost, digital marketing is the practice of promoting brands, goods, or services using digital channels. Within the field, you will find tactics like search engine optimization, social media marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing, and influencer marketing among others.
The advancement in technology, digital transformation, and the increasing use of the internet are major drivers of digital marketing.
The latest internet user statistics indicate that over 5 billion people worldwide use the internet which is equivalent to 63% of the world’s population. To substantiate, 4.7 billion people (59%) of the world’s population are social media users as of 2022.
With that, the internet serves as the perfect ground to enhance digital marketing efforts, reach out to wider audiences, and for brands to establish a stable presence in the public.
Besides that, digital marketing channels are ideal for driving brand awareness, lead generation, and promoting a company’s goods and services. This precisely shows what is expected of a digital marketer.
However, apart from that, digital marketers are responsible for analyzing a company’s products or services and curating the most effective digital marketing strategies.
They must analyze a brand’s market position, strengths, weaknesses, and competitors. Besides that, they must craft marketing content, and manage and track campaigns. They are also responsible for implementing changes to marketing strategies.
Now and then, digital marketers update their skills to ensure that they stay ahead of the game. That is because every technological advancement today affects digital marketing practices in many ways.
For example, virtual reality. Many brands like Nike, IKEA, and BMW currently leverage VR to improve conversion rates, render customer journeys enjoyable, and expand their customer base. With that, every digital marketer must upskill because digital marketing is technology-driven.
But what are digital marketers’ essential skills?
7 Essential Skills Every Digital Marketer Must Possess
Modern digital marketers need a range of soft and hard skills to excel at what they do. However, the skills largely depend on one’s niche. Dedicated search engine optimization professionals may require data and analytics skills whereas email marketers may require writing and communication skills.
It should also be noted that it may not be impossible for you to possess every digital marketing skill, but there are must-have skills to render you effective and competent for a job of a digital marketer.
More so, technologies are always reshaping the digital marketing landscape, meaning that it’s staying updated that can help you stand out or stay ahead. All in all, here are the essential skills that present-day marketers must have;
Data Analytics
Leveraging data as a guide to a digital marketing strategy can make a huge difference. Today whether you’re a search engine marketing executive, SEO professional, or video marketer, analytics are vital to every marketing strategy.
Data analytics refers to the process of analyzing information or data to gain insights. With the retrieved insights, businesses can predict future trends or implement strategies to boost website traffic and conversions.
Currently, there is a range of avenues that act as data collection points for digital marketers and businesses. That is due to the increase in the use of the internet, digital tools, and platforms.
These platforms make data more accessible and easily available to businesses. Platforms like websites, social media sites, and chatbots allow marketers to attain actionable insights that help them make more informed decisions.
With these tools and platforms, marketers can understand the most effective marketing strategy, where the customers come from to a site, and what they do after interacting with a brand. Digital marketers can then know the size of the customer base and where to put more effort.
Data analytics are essential when it comes to targeted marketing, where marketing efforts must be tailored to customer needs and expectations.
Today, tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEO tools like Ahrefs allow marketers to attain actionable insights into a site’s performance and what visitors do on it.
With that, it’s crucial for marketers to understand the value of data and how to utilize it.
Digital Literacy
Digital marketing is all about leveraging digital platforms to promote a brand and cultivate relationships with the outside world.
So, how can a digital marketer set and achieve SMART Goals without being digitally literate?
The explosion of technologies and digital transformation has made digital literacy essential for modern professionals. Today digital marketers have gone from the level of simple writing and communication skills to advanced capabilities like data interpretation and visualization.
Digital marketers deal with a lot and may run several campaigns in the same period. To manage every campaign and keep track of it, digital literacy is crucial.
With the right digital skills, a digital marketer can automate tasks and leverage every necessary tool to enhance productivity. Currently, marketing automation and content creation tools save digital marketers time and money.
Some of the commonly used digital marketing tools for efficiency include HubSpot, SendGrid, Sprout Social, Unbounce, and SEMrush among others.
These tools are vital when running campaigns on websites, via email, and social media platforms.
It should be noted that the digital marketing realm is ever-changing and there are many tools and digital technologies that evade the industry every year.
Keeping one’s digital skills up to date and having the desire to learn can help a digital marketer stand out and remain relevant in this competitive digital marketing field.
On the other hand, besides possessing digital skills, stretching to advanced technical skills like HTML and python can set a digital marketer apart.
Having a basic understanding of core programming skills and content management systems like WordPress can make a digital marketer flexible and versatile.
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management or CRM is a wide facet that generally deals with managing a brand’s relationships with its customers and other stakeholders. It also involves technologies, practices, and strategies aimed at understanding and improving customer journeys throughout their lifecycle with a brand.
Knowing how to manage customer relationships can help a digital marketer understand customer needs and preferences. Today’s customers have become more demanding and desire the best experience every time they interact with a brand.
If a digital marketer is aware of what makes a brand’s customers happy, it becomes easy to generate leads and retain customers.
However, a lack of CRM skills may prevent a digital marketer from attaining sizeable goals.
Today there is a range of CRM tools that can be used to streamline operations and automate repetitive tasks.
They also centralize customer data and drive business growth.
These can also promote efficiency and cater to the best-in-class experiences for the customers.
As a digital marketer, you must know the different CRM tools and how to leverage them to your best advantage.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing technique that focuses on improving the quality of a website to help it rank better in search.
The practice is aimed at increasing traffic to a website to maximize the chances of would-be customers or leads landing on the site.
Organic traffic is one of the most crucial marketing key performance indicators that any business with a website must pay attention to.
Currently, whether it’s a small, medium, or enterprise-level business, every business acknowledges the importance of SEO.
SEO comprises different facets such as On-page, Off-page, and local SEO. It also stretches to other activities like link building, keyword research, page optimization, and competitor research.
Although a digital marketer may not be proficient in every area of SEO, it’s essential to possess basic SEO skills. For example, keyword research, competitor analysis, and website analysis.
A digital marketer should also know the different SEO tools that can be leveraged to analyze a site, its traffic, and its ranking on a search engine.
SEO can support a range of other digital marketing techniques like search engine marketing, Google AdWords, etc.
Therefore, improving your SEO skills as a digital marketer can help you become reliable. It can also allow you to help brands establish a stable online presence and develop their relations.
Content Marketing
Digital marketing is largely about content marketing. Whether a business wants to improve its brand awareness, and ROI or attain a bigger customer base, content is the answer.
These days, content can also be delivered through different mediums such as images, infographics, videos, blogs, and emails, among others.
However, content marketing isn’t about driving any type of content to online users. The content must be engaging, purposeful, and of high quality. To create such kind of quality content you can use an online video editor.
You can find out why it is important to invest in quality content for digital marketing.
Besides that, it must be SEO-friendly and without errors and grammatical mistakes.
Any digital marketer must know the most engaging forms of content for a specific audience and purpose.
Today, video marketing is a form of content marketing that has proven effective at driving brands and businesses to potential customers.
However, digital marketers must ensure that the video is of good quality.
This means that a digital marketer must be informed of the latest content marketing strategies and how to leverage them.
Furthermore, a reliable digital marketer is one who never stops learning and implementing new strategies to push a business forward.
Communication, Honesty & Transparency
A good digital marketer must possess good communication skills.
Effective communication between the digital marketing team and the management can lay a foundation for sizeable goals.
Good communication also becomes vital when a digital marketer is working remotely.
Effective communication can help build strong teams and allow a marketer to be approachable.
Besides possessing excellent communication skills, a digital marketer must be honest and transparent.
Being honest and transparent means having good discerning skills and being able, to tell the truth.
It is very important not to rely on assumptions, but rather on facts. For example, any strategy must be implemented depending on the available data. This can help make a digital marketer reliable.
Also, only honest and transparent digital marketers build stable and long-lasting customer relationships.
Collaboration
Building and developing brands require collaborative efforts i.e from designers, developers, SEO-friendly professionals, and writers.
Collaboration skills are vital to digital marketers. Any digital marketer who can collaborate with other teams i.e sales, CRM among others can make a difference.
Like communication, collaboration can help in problem-solving and implementing strategies.
Through collaboration, digital marketers can learn the different approaches to executing their responsibilities and attaining goals.
It can help a digital marketer obtain several insights that can drive any digital marketing strategy and optimize its results.
Besides that, collaboration gives room for efficiency and updating one’s knowledge about the latest digital marketing trends.
Conclusion
Digital marketing presents a wide range of opportunities, however, the field has become more competitive than ever before.
That means that anyone who wants to become a digital marketer must stay up-to-date and ready to find means of outstanding others.
In this post, we have discussed the different skills that modern digital marketers must possess.
Working on your skillset will help you become more adaptable, flexible, and reliable.
It can also help you advance your career and land better opportunities.
