Digital marketing skills are arguably one of the hottest skills to acquire in today’s business scenario. With the digital marketing industry growing at a whopping 40% rate, the market is bursting at the seams with digital job opportunities.
In fact, every employer across the world is on a lookout for professionals to fill the skills gap in their business and drive revenue into the company. However, to become a digital marketer, you need to possess an assorted set of skills.
I’ll be honest – the skills required for digital marketing might look a little intimidating. But, it’s not as complex as it sounds. With just a dash of determination and a willingness to learn a new skill, you can master the digital marketing skills needed to launch a successful career.
To become a successful professional in any field, you need to gain a combination of hard skills and soft skills. Hence, before we delve into digital marketing executive skills, we’ve listed a few soft skills that employers look for in a digital marketing professional. And they are:
- Limitless Curiosity
- Brilliant Communication Skills
- Multitasking Skills
- Impeccable Persuasion Skills
- Ability to Change and Adapt
- Strong Intuition
- Willingness to Learn
- Project Management Skills
Now that we’ve got the soft skills covered, let’s dive into the hard skills needed for digital marketing. To help you gain a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving field, we have listed out the top digital marketing skills you need to know to transform your career.
Table of Contents
The Top 8 Digital Marketing Skills Needed in 2020 and Beyond
1. Data Analytics
We live in an age where marketing deals with a lot more than creative campaigns. Businesses today need digital marketers that bring both; creative and analytical skills to the table.
With the sizable amounts of data collected by businesses every day, it is the job of a digital marketer to collect, analyze and extract valuable insights from this data to enhance the influence of their marketing campaigns.
Are you still wondering how data analytics will help you as a digital marketer? Allow me to break it down for you.
Imagine if you could track your customer’s entire journey down the conversion funnel, sounds like every marketer’s wildest dream, right? Well today, technology has allowed marketers to do just that!
Through analytical platforms like Google Analytics, you can track each and every interaction a consumer makes with your digital marketing efforts. By analysing data, you get a closer look at your target audience’s buying behaviour. And, you can also deduce which efforts are generating revenue and which efforts are not.
2. SEO Skills
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) skills are one of the most crucial skills you’ll need in 2020 and beyond. But wait, what is SEO? SEO is the efforts taken by a digital marketer to rank a company’s website on the first page of a search engine.
Why? Ask yourself this, other than that one desperate time you needed information for a school project, have you ever opened the second page of Google? Me neither! Hence, digital marketers optimize a company’s website by collaborating with other disciplines like content marketing, paid search, social media marketing and more.
SEO is a fairly advance discipline, and it constantly evolves with the changes made in the algorithms of search engines. To master this skill, besides learning SEO practices you also need to keep up with the trends in the field.
For example, voice search SEO wasn’t the talk of the town two years ago. But today, with voice search built in almost all our daily devices, SEO experts have had to optimize their content to beat their competition.
To truly excel at search engine optimization, you need to get some hands-on experience on a few popular SEO tools and platforms to peak in your career.
3. SEM Skills
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or popularly known as PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising has a symbiotic relationship with SEO. While SEO deals with organic search, SEM deals with paid search.
To make a website rank on the first page of a search engine through SEO practices takes a considerable amount of time. Hence, digital marketers opt for SEM practices for the speedy ranking of their website on the first page of a search engine.
In SEM, you ‘pay’ or rather ‘bid’ on keywords your consumers are most likely to type on a search engine’s search field. And, who do you pay this money to? Search engines like Google who have a separate platform called Google Ads for SEM experts to create their advertising campaigns.
4. CRM & Marketing Automation
A digital marketer generally has a lot on his plate, hence, automation is a must. As the name suggests, marketing automation helps you to automate redundant tasks and optimize your marketing efforts.
Marketing automation tools give you the ability to streamline your customer’s entire journey down the conversion funnel. Besides that, you can also interact with your customers via automated emails, SMSs, chatbots, etc and increase the chances of conversions.
In today’s day and age, employers are looking for digital marketers familiar with marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, MailChimp, Pardot and Marketo to automate their tasks. The idea behind this is to hire talent that does smart work instead of hard work.
5. Social Media Marketing (Organic & Paid)
It’s no secret that over 50% of the earth’s population is on some type of social media. And that means your potential customers are on social media. Social media platforms have allowed businesses to connect with their target audience, create brand awareness and generate revenue through paid ads.
Social media marketing gives you the ability to target your consumers and push relevant ads on their social media feed. It is by far the most cost-efficient method of advertising. Businesses have begun to realise the importance of social media marketing because of the lower costs and ROI it produces. Hence, if you wish to enter the digital space, you need to master this digital marketing skill.
As a digital marketer, you should know which social media platforms your consumers are on and become proficient in building a favourable relationship there.
6. Basic Design Understanding
Visual aid plays a significant role in digital marketing. Hence, to enter the digital space, you need to gain a basic understanding of design and design thinking. With that being said, you don’t need the hardcore graphic designing skills, you just need to understand the fundamentals.
Let’s talk about design thinking for a minute. What is design thinking? In simple words, design thinking is the process of designing a product or service by primarily keeping the user in mind. It helps you understand your consumers better and gain a solution-based approach to solving problems. How will this help you as a digital marketer? Just like design, digital marketing activities also revolve around the consumer’s experience. Thus, gaining some basic designing skills will help you become an adept digital marketer.
7. Mobile marketing
According to a report by WARC, around 2 billion people access the internet via their smartphones. With every consumer glued to their smartphones, this presents tremendous opportunities for businesses to sell their products or services. It has become imperative to create mobile-friendly content and mobile-friendly websites.
Every person keeps their phones at an arm’s length, and as a digital marketer, you need to know how to leverage your consumer’s time spent on his smartphone to generate revenue for your company.
8. Coding or Understanding Code
While most employers don’t expect you to be hardcore coder, basic understanding in programming languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript will certainly help you become a more well-rounded digital marketer.
As a digital marketer, you will deal with many departments in an organization. One of them being, the technical team. By learning a few programming languages, you can coordinate with your technical team better and gain a better insight into their complex development cycle. In addition to that, it will help you boost the effectiveness of your efforts without having to rely on the developing team.
Therefore, digital marketers can compound their abilities by understanding the technologies that permit digital marketing to function.
Final Thoughts
I know it’s a lot to learn and you can’t become a jack of all trades in just one day. But as I said earlier, with the right determination and lots of practice, you can surely master all the aforementioned digital marketing skills.
Are you ready to start your digital marketing career? If you are, I’d check out IIDE’s Digital Marketing Courses. You’ll surely walk out of their course as an industry ready digital marketing professional and not just a digital marketing graduate.
There you have it, folks! Hopefully, this list of digital marketing skills will help you launch a kick-ass career in the digital space. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below, I’ll be happy to assist you further.