You Won’t Succeed Without These 10 Must-Have Digital Marketing Skills
Claiming the title of digital marketer takes a little more than have a basic understanding of paid and non-paid promotional channels. Despite the skills one needs, digital marketing careers have increased in popularity. If so many skills are required, then why are so many people flocking to this profession?
There are huge earning potentials for those who have what it takes and have developed the right skills to be an expert digital marketer, but what exactly does that take? If you’re looking to make an impact and kick-start your digital marketing career, then take a look at these ten must-have skills, before you can even think about playing with the big dogs.
1. Make Sense of Marketing Fundamentals: It’s All About Consumers
Before you can market anything, you have to be able to identify and effectively understand how your consumers and potential customers think. How they buy. Moreover, what channels that use to get information. You have to know how your audience will use what information is available about your product or service and how that will affect their decision through the buyer’s journey. Once you have an understanding of how to learn your target market, you can start developing, honing, and marketing effectively to increase client ROIs.
2. Paid Advertising: Optimizing Paid Channels to Optimize ROI
For marketers, we know there seem to be endless paid marketing channels, each with their own unique traffic flow and promises of results. However, mastering each of these channels is most desirable for those marketing under these channels. While being an expert on all of them can be very time consuming, fully understanding the advertising giants like Google, Facebook, and other top giants. You’ll need to know how these ads will be displayed, what message they will send, and what type of people will be targeted with your paid promotions.
3. Organic Advertising: Watering Your Organic Efforts to Grow Value for Your Marketing
Organic means consist of SEO, Social Media, and other content produced to provide a sense of value to your audience. Mastering this technique means that you know how to effectively orchestrate the creation of content that once put in place will earn clicks, impressions, and revenue without further investment. Some forms of this are blogs, white papers, ebooks, and social interactions.
4. Understanding the Channel Benefits of Your Marketing Strategy
It takes more than knowing the difference between which channel will save you money and which ones cost more. To offer the best results, you’ll need to know which channels are going to deliver the results you are looking for. For instance, a large budget dedicated to one channel that isn’t really performing well doesn’t do much for your campaigns, while on the other hand, knowing a few different avenues that can be used to get your desired results is required. Big money doesn’t always mean a big payout, but that doesn’t mean rule out big-budget channels, as they have a place in specific marketing strategies.
5. Master Marketers Are Expert Communicators: How Do You Communicate Your Brand
This is by far the most important skill an exceptional digital marketer needs. In order to be a top digital marketer, you will need to demonstrate a masterful control over consumer communication.
For an example, let’s look at ADIDAS. Everywhere you turn where there’s ADIDAS posters, signage, and billboards, what do you see? It’s clear, concise, and even makes you think: ‘Impossible is Nothing’. Once you enter the digital realm and dig into the internet, what type of advertisements are you faced with? ADIDAS will promote branded content. They’ll promote adversities of fitness. They will also praise sports, running, and other athletic activities. Once you step into an actual store, now what type of advertisement is present? A superior athletic shoe offering the maximum comfort. Can you spot the difference here in brand messaging as customers move through the funnel? Top funnel promotions present the brand and a message. The middle of the funnel incorporates physical athleticism and fitness, while the bottom of the funnel provides more intimate details on the product.
In order to succeed as a digital marketer, you will need to think on this level. Every step of the customer journey must be understood in order to communicate the right message, on the right medium, at the right time.
6. Structuring Data: Essentially, Data is Your Best Friend
Data is like your childhood friend. You tell each other everything, even secrets. Data can provide you the marketer with numerous secrets like, why your site might not be performing or which part of your site has the highest conversions. Unfortunately, all of the data you need isn’t conveniently located in a single place.
This is where you the digital marketing extraordinaire come in. As an expert digital marketer, you’ll need to know where to find certain data and how to extrapolate the meanings behind the numbers. For the most part, a good majority of your data will be located in your Google Analytics dashboard, your hosting CRM, and your sales team. Ensure you have developed an efficient method of keeping track of things and keeping tabs on where you can find your data and what it means.
7. Develop Technical Skills: Increase Project Speed
For most digital marketers, this is where the real heartache comes in. For any small changes in a project, a digital marketer without basic skills will have to run back and forth between different specialty teams (engineering and technology). What if you needed to edit an existing banner on a site? You’ll need to touch base with your front-end developer in order to have the changes in coding made.
Now, on the other hand, if you have a basic understanding of most common technical skills, then you will be able offer more streamlined solutions when sudden changes need to be made.
8. Look at Digital Marketing as Product Marketing
It may not sound like it, but when you look at digital marketing, and break down the components, you are essentially marketing a product. A product can take form in many shapes. A person. A service. And the obvious one, an actual product. You’ll need a firm grasp on the importance of product packaging as well as the four P’s of marketing: product features, price, place, and promotion. Understanding your product to this magnitude will definitely aid in the success of your campaign, as well as your ability to stand out from other marketers.
9. Productivity Mastermind: Experience in Project Management
Knowing how much time certain activities will take is vital to the success of a digital marketer. If you ever thought project management was not considered a skill for a digital marketer, then think again. Take a second to consider how much time actually goes into interacting with clients, meetings with team members, and all of the other tasks required in order for projects to be functional. Developing strong project management skills is a very powerful tool as a marketer and will help when things start to expand. You’ll want to be able to keep control.
10. ABC: Always Be Connected to Your Industry
Being a digital marketer also means being very passionate about your profession. There is always a lot to take in and the scene is constantly changing, which means you’ll need to be able to quickly adapt, learn, and deploy new strategies. Another way top digital marketers stay ahead or inline with rapid industry changes, is their drive to experiment. Real digital marketers know that nothing is completed without performing experiments to learn what works. Innovative and industry-changing digital marketers push the envelope and try out-of-box experiments.
Succeeding as a Digital Marketer
As a digital marketer, the perks are rewarding, the job always challenging, and the scene forever changing. Honestly, what more could you ask for in a profession? However, if you’re looking to succeed and really be a key player in the industry, you’ll need to make sure you have a good handful of these must-have skills in order to avoid an epic career fail.
