Digital Marketing is slowly becoming one of the most in-demand jobs of the 21st century. Not only that, but the sheer number of people who want to work in the industry has skyrocketed in the past few years. According to McKinley, 44% of firms intended to recruit additional marketers in 2021, up 16 percent from the previous year. Particularly in content creation and digital media, there is an abundance of opportunity for new and budding marketers. This should be music to your ears if you have hopes of jumping into the digital marketing field!
In terms of perks, management positions are handsomely compensated. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, marketing managers earned an average annual salary of $127,560 USD, much more than the US (median) average of $37,000. Additionally, digital marketers can pursue freelance consultancy jobs and become a digital nomad, working from anywhere in the globe while simultaneously establishing a career, as the world becomes increasingly mobile-oriented and location-independent.
In today’s world, every marketer is also a digital marketer. Every marketer must understand a number of important areas, whether they are assisting companies in implementing digital transformation or building their own online development plans.
In this blog, we take a look at 12 skills you need to master if you want to stay competitive as a digital marketer.
Must know Digital Marketing Skills!
Soft Skills
Intuition
You won’t always have the data you need as a marketer especially if you’re at a newer company or you’re trying to break into a new target demographic. When you don’t have all of the knowledge you need to make an informed decision, you’ll have to rely on your instincts. It is counterproductive to be afraid of the unknown in these situations; instead, you must trust your instincts as a lot of marketing can be trial and error to some extent based on past performance. When you have a thorough grasp of your business and your consumers, your “intuition” becomes more than simply a guess; it’s founded in fact based on prior performance.
Curiosity
Marketing as a field is always evolving, therefore every digital marketer must have the curiosity, enthusiasm, and desire to learn more about new marketing tactics, tools, and approaches. For example, if you were an SEO specialist in 2017 and haven’t learnt anything new since then, you aren’t regarded as smart in your industry any longer. Your expertise would be obsolete to the point of becoming useless. Whether it’s social media or content marketing, the same principle applies. You must be interested in order to keep up with all of the newest marketing news and trends.
Persuasion Skills
Because marketing is all about persuading people to buy a thing, it’s no surprise that great marketers excel at it. Persuasion refers to your ability to align yourself with executive aims while maintaining your own sense of what is best for the business. To reach your own goals, you must be able to persuade your boss to do experiments and invest in technology. If you fail, don’t give up; remember that marketing is all about trial and error, and not everything you do will succeed the first time.
Hard Skills
Media Strategy
Media purchasing and planning are two of the oldest advertising techniques still in use today. Every marketer who wants to work on the numerical side of digital marketing has to know how to buy media inventory directly or through programmatic advertising, as well as the targeting choices and pros and cons of each strategy. Finally, both agency and in-house digital marketing positions require the ability to provide a comprehensive media plan that will be backed by data in showing that you can get a good return on investment with your plan.
Social Media Marketing
Our lives have become increasingly reliant on social media. The social media marketing environment is continuously increasing and developing. To be able to conceptualize and produce powerful, relevant, and attention-grabbing social media content, every content marketing expert needs to have a fundamental understanding of how social media algorithms work. Furthermore, as a social media specialist, you should be among the first to adopt and test new social media channels and strategies as these are constantly evolving to keep up with algorithm changes and new features.
Search Engine Optimization
Understanding how search engines index websites and rank pages will provide you not just with one of the most in-demand digital marketing abilities, but also with all of the basic knowledge needed to handle web development and content marketing initiatives. This is ultimately how you’re going to get your company’s page on page 1 of Google without the need for paid ads. Additionally, SEO abilities are required for optimizing product pages on e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay.
Data Analysis
Data-driven marketing isn’t just a trendy term; it’s also a necessary digital marketing skill. Every digital marketing action generates data, therefore digital marketers should be able to deal with and display data using tools like Excel or Google Analytics at a minimum. Every job in today’s digital marketing business comes with a plethora of data to collect and analyze. A social media marketer, for example, will be expected to report on the efficacy of social media initiatives, much as a pay-per-click (PPC) specialist is expected to report on the success of paid media.
Financial Literacy
To thrive in the digital marketing sector, you must understand the fundamentals of business and money. The ultimate goal of digital marketing is to make money for the company. You’ll be inundated with terms like CPA (cost per acquisition), CPL (cost per lead), CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions), and more as you enter the digital marketing sector. One of the first talents you’ll need to develop is the capacity to comprehend these data and link them to the “big picture.” You need to constantly be thinking about ROI and understand industry benchmarks in what is considered a good ROI based on the campaigns you’re running.
Copywriting
For any digital marketer, copywriting is a must-have talent. The goal of digital marketing is to deliver the appropriate message to the right audience at the right moment. Everything a digital professional does revolves on the skill of generating engaging communications. In pretty much every area of digital marketing, copywriting is involved whether it be in social media advertising, landing page development, banner ad development, or paid search ad creation. This is a skill that takes practice as you usually only get a second or 2 to get your message out so you need to practice on being extremely concise yet thorough. This one takes a lot of practice but once you get it, it’s an incredibly valuable skill to have.
Design and Editing Skills
The need for marketing graphics is stronger than ever in an ever-expanding digital marketing landscape. Every content marketing expert should be able to think of, produce, and change marketing materials and material on the go. You certainly will want to get working experience with programs like Photoshop and online platforms like Canva as these are heavily used in Digital Marketing.
Digital Tracking
Performance marketers must be digital tracking specialists, which means they must be able to create and implement a digital measuring strategy. They should also know how to set up conversion tracking on various platforms, how to properly utilize UTM tags or different tracking codes, and how to use third-party tracking solutions if necessary. In order to run successful campaigns, you need to know exactly where your audience is coming from, where they are spending their time on your website, and what pages they most visit and you can do all of this through digital tracking.
Pay Per Click Capabilities
PPC, or pay-per-click, refers to the most common kind of digital advertising, such as Paid Search on Google, Facebook Ads, and Amazon Ads among others. To build up and optimize PPC campaigns successfully on various digital marketing channels, every digital marketer must grasp the PPC advertising auction logic as well as basic platform basics. You must have a basic understanding of how to build an audience (this is who your ad will be shown to) as well as have an understanding of the bidding process so you can determine if you can get a good return on investment from your ad spend.
Project Management
With Digital Marketing, you’ll never just be working on 1 thing. Also, you’ll likely be working with several other team members in order to get marketing campaigns running in a timely fashion. So, you’re going to need to make sure that you’re able to stay highly organized so that all aspects of a campaign are inline with one another and you’ll need to make sure that you’re a good communicator so that other members of your team that may be working on different aspects of the campaign understand exactly how things are progressing as a whole.
User Experience Design (UX)
You need to make sure that potential customers like your website, your emails, your social media, and your ads. Afterall, this is their first impression of you. You need to ensure that you are giving them a good experience no matter where online they are interacting with you. Once they get to your website, you’ll want to ensure that your website is built in a logical way so that the most important content that your customers want are easy to find. You want to make sure you take a look at your analytics and see what pages your customers visit the most and then possibly build your blog structure around this as your whole goal should be to make their experience as seamless as possible as the more they like their experience with you, the more they’ll likely become a customer.
Presentation Skills
If you aren’t used to presenting just yet, this is something you are going to want to get used to. You’re not only going to be in charge of coming up with a marketing strategy, but you’re then going to have to be able to present your strategy to other members of the marketing team or to the executive team and be able to back your findings as to why you believe this strategy will offer a good return on investment. Yes, this can be scary at first, but over time and with good data to back your findings, you’ll get used to doing this in no time.
Further Develop These Skills Through Reading
Books
Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk
- The book underlines the relevance of social media marketing in today’s world while also presenting a winning strategy for establishing an engaged community that will pay you back in the long term. We all desire sales, but we earn the right to ask for anything in return by first providing value to our audience.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
- “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” often considered as the marketer’s bible, gives a short and practical foundation for understanding what leads to humans making decisions. Cialdini utilizes storytelling and real-world examples to smoothly lead readers through six persuasion principles that many marketers rely on to write email copy, frame social media advertising, and create nearly every memorable marketing campaign in recent history.
Blogs
Niel Patel
Neil Patel is one of the most active writers in the field of online digital marketing, and he’s become something of a cult figure. Neil has invented a number of marketing tools, including Quick Sprout and Kissmetrics. Whether you want to study marketing statistics or read up on content development and ideas, his blog is brimming with pearls of wisdom gathered from years of business expertise. Content created for his numerous businesses, software tools, YouTube videos, and podcasts is all organized here, making it a useful collection of digital expertise.
Hubspot
Hubspot is the king of inbound marketing strategy, and millions of digital marketers use the site on a regular basis. Inbound marketing is a method that attracts customers by ensuring that your website contains high-quality, generous material that keeps them coming back for more. For years, the site has been providing material on a regular basis, teaching marketers everything under the sun connected to internet marketing. It also has a plethora of free tools and materials that may be downloaded.
JobPrepped
We at JobPrepped post regularly to ensure you are getting the most up to date information from marketing hiring managers so you know exactly what you need to know in order to get hired quickly. We provide only modern day tips and the best and most current marketing strategies to make sure you are utilizing the most efficient and economically sound tips and tricks in your digital marketing strategy. Unlike many of these other blogs that I’ve mentioned, our articles are geared specifically for those that are trying to get their first full-time job in marketing.
Conclusion
A successful digital marketer will be able to adapt fast and learn on their own, as well as pivot into new digital jobs as they see fit or as needed if their current talents become less in demand. They will be working with a variety of teams and clients, so they must be able to communicate effectively and form great teams. While there are a lot of things you’ll need to do to be successful in the digital marketing sector, don’t forget to leverage and improve your hard and soft talents as you go into new roles. If you need any free help from marketing hiring managers, feel free to reach out to joseph@jobprepped.com as we’ve helped 3,000+ grads get their first entry-level marketing job and would love to help you too.
Good luck out there!