Do you know what it takes to make it as a digital marketer today? This includes hard skills (in digital tools and best practices) and soft skills (like teamwork and communication).
1. Know How Digital Marketing Fits Together
When you have a job in digital marketing, you’re rarely a silo. You’re usually working on a team, so you need to know how to interact with other people in the company and how your role affects and blends with everyone else’s functions.
When you look at an overall digital marketing funnel, it starts with traffic drivers. These include paid and organic search, organic, social media, emails. Each one of these is a separate discipline, working to funnel visitors to your site.
The goal is to convert users. That’s where conversion optimization comes into place. Visitors then go into your Customer Relations Management (CRM) system, and from there, Analytics comes into play, measuring and showing how things actually went. Finally comes fine-tuning everything for conversion rate optimization (CRO).
So it’s a big circle. In large companies, each part of this funnel may be handled by a completely different person.
In small companies, one person may be doing everything. While these are often multiple disciplines with their own specializations, there are always interactions that occur between the groups.
2. Learn the Basics of Complementary Roles
Knowing your own role is not enough. As mentioned before, interactions between groups parts of the sales funnel are not only common but essential.
That’s why it’s important to familiarize yourself with the basic “101-level” skills that will be used by the other specialties on your team, so you know how to communicate with them.
Everyone should be talking with each other. This makes collaboration better and the whole digital marketing effort better.
3. Video Marketing
Video continues to take the internet by storm and this isn’t about to stop. Customers love videos, particularly on social media, and 8 out of 10 people have purchased after watching a brand’s video.
For marketers, 93% who use video say it’s an important part of their strategy and 87% report it gives them a positive Return on Investment (ROI) according to The State of Video Marketing research.
Bear in mind that these are loose statistics that will vary depending on who you ask, but the point is that most statistics point to much higher conversion, engagement and higher SEO rankings when it comes to video.
What makes it so engaging? Because it’s personal and relevant.
When people can see your face (or the face of the person promoting the brand), they are more likely to trust your business. It’s also wonderfully versatile content to use across different platforms. Just think about the success of Instagram and the rapid rise of TikTok!
Digital marketing professionals don’t have to know everything about video production. But knowing how to make videos without hiring a professional is a good place to start.
There are some great tools to help you do that such as Promo and Camtasia. And if you have some training in this area and love it, your skills will never be wasted as video will always be in demand.
If you want to learn more on your own, you can try out video editing tools like Apple Final Cut Pro X or Adobe Premiere Pro.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to all levels of digital marketing and anyone going into the field must have a basic handle on it.
You can certainly leave the highly technical, back-end stuff to the more technical people on the team, but knowing how SEO really works and a solid understanding of best practices and content optimization are crucial for running a successful digital marketing campaign.
Both SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) inform your entire digital strategy on a data and content level.
So you need to be able to communicate to other teammates about this and won’t get far without learning the basics and understanding how SEO and SEM can work together.
5. Content Marketing
Content is at the core of digital marketing and content marketing will continue to be a crucial part of the game no matter what happens. But content marketing is a huge job in itself.
You have to be able to create high quality, SEO-friendly content for many channels and understand how to create an effective content strategy to engage and convert audiences.
And to make things a little more challenging, it’s important to note that content can take many forms, from video to social, emails, web content, blogs, e-books, videos, whitepapers…the list goes on.
You also have to have a firm grasp of social media marketing as content is crucial on social platforms. Get some inspiration from six global brands that know how to do content marketing successfully.
6. Data / Analytics
No matter what facet of digital marketing you go into, analytics will be central to your strategy and help you make better data-driven decisions for campaigns.
Monitoring and reporting via tools such as Google Analytics is pretty straightforward, but the tricky part is how to gather and use that information to learn more about consumer behavior and apply it to solutions that boost traffic and conversions.
Most businesses (even small ones) have huge amounts of data to track, and great digital marketers need to understand how to gather and use this to their advantage.
Companies will always be on the lookout for people who not only know how to “read” data using their marketing technical skills but to extract value from customer data to improve future strategies.
If you can show that you can do this in innovative ways that result in campaign success, you will be a valuable asset in the industry.
Bear in mind that you don’t have to stick to one platform for your analytics, check out some alternatives to Google Analytics to see if they would work better for you.
7. Understand Design Thinking and Planning
Design Thinking is a term that refers to a way of approaching problems from a user-centered perspective. The approach essentially encourages us to think in a human-centered way when solving large-scale complex problems.
According to The Interaction Design Foundation, there are 5 key phases to this process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The reason why this works well is that so much of it is (or should be) centered on the user experience which is key to digital marketing success.
Another interesting thing about this approach is that it can be used in a non-linear way – so that in some instances you may get to the testing phase and then come back to the middle phase, for instance, to reconsider ideas.
Designers and developers are likely to use this type of approach, so it’s a good idea to at least have a solid understanding of it to pump up your marketing resume and apply it when feasible.
8. Excel at Using Excel
It doesn’t matter what you do—you will use this program called Excel. Everybody in marketing needs to know basic sorting, filtering, conditional formatting, and how to make a pivot table. Everybody’s going to use those skills.
If your position uses a lot of math, like PPC, then you also need to know pivot charts, regular charts, VLOOKUP, nested arguments and advanced formulas. If your job is CRO or analytics, then knowing data visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau is also useful.
9. Get Solid on Soft Skills
There are some skills that you are going to use regardless of your job type. Here are the key softs skills everyone in digital marketing needs.
Organization. You don’t need to be an OMCP-certified project manager, but you should have an idea of how project management works.
Gain familiarity with the project management systems commonly used in digital marketing, whether it’s Basecamp, Trello or JIRA. They know how to stay organized from an asset standpoint. Know where to find the assets needed by you and everyone on your team.
Logical Thinking. If you can’t flowchart it, you can’t repeat the process. Have an ability to think through things logically about how users flow through your department and then how decisions are made.
This is essential for keeping your processes consistent, manageable and repeatable. Knowing how to flowchart is also essential if you want to explain to your development team how to build a program to automate some the boring and repetitive digital functions you don’t want to do every day.
Data Visualization. If you’re in analytics, CRO or PPC, the ability to visualize and graphically represent data is really important. However, in any digital marketing job, you’re going to have to understand how to create visual charts, and also how to interpret them.
This is also why it’s also useful to understand the basics of Excel and Excel charts, so if you don’t understand a chart, you can reverse-engineer it.
Empathy. This is a human emotion that artificial intelligence (AI) cannot duplicate.
Empathy is necessary across several aspects of any digital marketing job, from ads to landing pages to client communication to interpersonal relations.
When you think about talking with customers, getting stuff done in different teams, explaining to your boss why you need more funding for a new project or thinking about what people want or what they want to avoid, human empathy is going to be incredibly important.
As time goes on, soft skills are going to be increasingly important because a lot of basic things like math are going to become increasingly automated.
You still have to understand the math in order to change the automation, but when it comes to storytelling and team communication, that’s where humans have the edge.
10. Be Persuasive
A great digital marketing leader will not only possess great people skills, they’ll also be able to combine analytical thinking with creative problem solving. This will help their teams come up with innovative marketing campaign ideas to drive businesses forward.
A big part of this is having great persuading and influencing skills. Can you convince someone to purchase a product? What about persuading other team leaders that your idea is the best?
This isn’t about arguing, it’s having the confidence that you know what you’re doing and demonstrating it.
11. Stay Adaptable to Change
Platforms change all the time. Google AdWords has a brand new interface which wasn’t there a year and a half ago and is still changing. Google Analytics updates its UI every six months.
If you just learn how to push buttons you’re not going to have a job when the buttons change. Instead, you want to know the concepts of why we push the buttons.
If you understand those nuances, no matter what changes, you can either decide which new button to push or explain to someone else in the company. Understanding the concept and the context behind them is necessary to adapt as platforms change.
12. Improve Communication
During business hours we spend 70 to 80 percent of our day communicating with other people. The vast majority is listening. Communication is going to be one of the top skills going forward. The average office worker receives 121 business emails and sends 40 business emails per day.
A subset of communication is persuasion. Persuasion is how we how we get someone to take some sort of action, and positioning is how do we show our product against a different product or a competitor.
These are involved in every part of the digital marketing ecosystem. Many experts believe the top three skills in digital marketing will be storytelling, creativity, and persuasion. Studies by LinkedIn and McKinsey boiled all these skills down into one thing: communication.
Side notes
To succeed in digital marketing a requires a broad range of skills, both hard and soft.
Brad Geddes recommends that the best approach comes in three phases: pick a specialty (what are you passionate about), enhance your skills (in technology, organization, and communication) and finally, grow to learn complementary basics of specialties outside of—but related to—your own.
Digital marketing is one of the most integrated and fastest-changing fields in business. It’s also an early adopter and testbed of many new and emerging technologies, from augmented reality (AR) to AI and machine learning.
Every skill you gain or certification you earn is really just a license to learn.
That’s why continuous learning (by taking additional courses and staying current with the latest research, news and best practices (through blogs and other expert resources) can inspire, refresh and even future-proof your digital marketing career.
