14 Basic Skills For Digital Marketing Excellence

Digital Marketers need a large and diverse range of digital marketing skills to understand how to create marketing strategies and content that will resonate with an audience and help to generate leads, raise brand awareness, and ultimately generate leads.

Given the wide range of specialties and job roles you could encounter over the course of a digital marketing career, you won’t necessarily need to excel in all of the following areas — but there are some key skills needed across most digital marketing jobs.

Digital marketing professionals need a combination of must-have technical digital marketing skills and soft skills, including:

None of the work you do as a Digital Marketer matters unless people see it. Using search engines to drive traffic to your online properties, particularly your landing pages, is the first and arguably most vital step in connecting with your audience.

To succeed as a Digital Marketer, you’ll need to be an expert at using SEO and SEM to their utmost.

The strategies can be enhancing the UX and UI, improving the page loading speed or mobile usability, incorporating important keywords into your content, etc. This will, eventually, result in attracting large organic traffic.

All your work will be in vain if the right users cannot find you in the search engine. So optimizing your content on the website makes all the difference same as SEM. There are differences between SEO vs. SEM in terms of their objectives in digital marketing.

Knowing how SEO works is a crucial skill required for digital marketing. This skill will let you know the search engine algorithms and the changes or updates in them.

SEO is the one aspect of digital marketing that decides the initial and future success of a business. Some companies are successful initially and capture a lot of attention, but face a slow failure. Efficiently implemented SEO strategies will prevent such gradual vanishing of companies.

Because SEO is such a broad topic with both technical and artistic features, it demands a diverse range of sub-skills including creative thinking.

You must understand how to create and distribute relevant content, how to create successful directory listings, and how to organize and encrypt your website for a better user experience.

So, you can always be an SEO expert with the help of tools such as Ubersuggest, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and AnswerThePublic. Spending time learning SEO is always worth it.

While they don’t typically need to be able to work with data analytics at the same level as, say, a Data Scientist, Digital Marketers do need to know how to use Google Analytics and other data analysis tools.

Their detailed information about where your traffic comes from—the most attractive keywords, the most popular times of day, and invaluable data on your audience’s age, gender, and location breakdown, as well as their interests and the devices they’re using to reach you—is perhaps the Digital Marketer’s most valuable source of audience insight.

It should go without saying that Digital Marketers need to have a good feel for all the It should go without saying that digital marketing experts need to have a good feel for all the social media platforms they use to post content and reach out to an audience.

And each platform has its own quirks; you’ll need to know what works and what doesn’t, when and what to post, and how to adjust the tone of your posts to resonate with the different segments of your audience that use different platforms.

Even within the realm of social media marketing, there are different techniques Digital Marketers can prioritize, including social listening, live-streaming, direct messaging, and hashtagging.

If a Digital Marketer’s budget includes money for advertising, they’ll need to know If a Digital Marketer’s budget includes money for advertising, they’ll need to know what and where to spend it for maximum impact.

This includes both ad placement in various sites around the web — through direct advertising or platforms like Google Ads — as well as social media ads and sponsored posts.

Sending out email campaigns is easy; sending out effective email campaigns is much, much harder, and that makes email marketing an important digital marketing skill.

And while newsletters aren’t the sexiest tool at Digital Marketers’ disposal, nearly 80 percent of them report seeing an increase in email engagement over the previous 12 months, according to HubSpot.

So, what are the few things that you have to keep in mind while developing an email marketing strategy?

Avoid clickbait headlines

It is crucial to eliminate titles that will disappoint the reader and prompt them to withdraw from the list.

Ask questions in the subject line

Asking questions in the subject line piques the readers’ attention, and they will be curious to see whether you have a response to the question you posed. This piqued interest and contributes significantly to the click-through rate.

Offers with a deadline or feeling of urgency

Make sure you provide deals with a deadline or sense of urgency in emails. Deals that provide a significant discount if a customer picks up the merchandise within a day or two are an excellent example.

Include an element of personalization

Adding an element of personalization while sending emails has great potential to win the hearts of customers.

Whether you’re captioning an Instagram post or writing a thousand-word thought leadership article for your company blog, excellent storytelling skills (including writing, editing, and visual storytelling) are always an asset for a Digital Marketer.

Whether you’re captioning an Instagram post or writing a thousand-word thought leadership article for your company blog, excellent storytelling skills (including writing, editing, and visual storytelling) are always an asset for a Digital Marketer.

Especially when it comes to content marketing — longer articles on topics relevant to your audience, which are a key tool in SEO — you need good communication skills to be able to convey your ideas not just clearly, but also in a way that feels compelling to the people you want to attract.

Related: the odds are very high you’ll need to be able to navigate the backend of WordPress or a similar CMS.

7. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

So, you have mastered copywriting, SEO, PPC, and email marketing, and you are utilizing them to drive a lot of visitors to your website. Keep up the good job! However, you are not yet a digital marketing guru.

What good are website visits if the users do not take action on your website? This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) enters the scene to round out the picture and is one of the key skills needed for digital marketing.

On any particular page of your website, conversion refers to the precise action you want a visitor to take. It can be a request for a quote, download a free guide, subscribe to your mailing list, etc.

Visitors’ willingness to take these desired activities is influenced by a variety of circumstances, and CRO aims to find the conditions that lead to the highest engagement.

While larger teams often have a dedicated art department staffed with Graphic Designers or even UI/UX Designers, it often falls to the Digital Marketer to perform everyday tasks like selecting and manipulating the images that will appear on the company social media feeds, or putting together the layout for an email newsletter.

Here, a grasp of basic design skills—including how to organize information for legibility—is a huge asset. This often begins with an intuitive understanding of the customer’s experience.

Whatever you’re trying to accomplish as a Digital Marketer, your competitors are likely trying to achieve the same thing.

Your edge lies in your ability to innovate and out-think them—not to mention find creative solutions to all the other challenges that come up over the course of a day, from discovering novel pathways to your users to devising new ways to grab and hold their attention.

As a Marketer, your job is to change people’s minds. Obviously, mastering the art of selling is to your advantage!

But this isn’t limited to the hard sell; arguably, the power of persuasion is just as important when constructing a strong brand image slowly over time, or even trying to bring your colleagues on-side for a new campaign idea.

Learning the discipline of selling will benefit you, but the potential of persuasion is not restricted to the hard sale. It is also crucial when building a strong brand image over time or trying to persuade your colleagues to support a new campaign concept.

The language and tone of speaking or writing in digital marketing, choice of words and elements that aid the visualization of the audience, etc., play a significant role in the art of persuasion in digital marketing.

Given their involvement in multifaceted digital campaigns, Digital Marketers need to know how to shepherd these projects through multiple phases, across various channels with diverse deliverables, involving the contributions of many other people.

This takes both leadership skills and a high level of organization.

At least when it comes to efficiency and organizing, there are tools to help automate different tasks and keep you on top of things; in a recent survey by HubSpot, 68 percent of Digital Marketers said they rely on automation in some way.

12. Project management skills

Leading and directing internal and external teams to manage projects and deliverables are examples of project management skills. Technical strengths are required for project managers, but they must also be able to break down complex tasks into manageable segments.

They must be able to express objections effectively and then inspire teams to deliver a stable system. This digital marketing skill would enable you to foster better management of all the tasks involved in digital marketing.

You might need to manage software, social media accounts, finance or budget, SEO, and workflow process along with your personal life.

At times, digital marketing demands the role of a leader as well. So, project management skills or management skills, in general, are simply inevitable.

Digital Marketers always have many irons in the fire; knowing how to prioritize them while also responding to urgent matters as they pop up — and they will — requires the agility of an acrobat. But this ability to be responsive isn’t only tested hour-to-hour.

Long-term changes to the digital landscape and emerging technologies like marketing automation also mean that a Digital Marketer needs to be able to adapt to new and unexpected developments, always think in terms of contingencies, and be prepared for anything.

Marketing is a field of uncertainty because anything can happen at any time such as immediate policy change, change in the attitude of the society, or changing trends in the market. All these minor points can have a great impact on the marketing journey.

Digital marketers always have a lot on their plates, and understanding how to prioritize while simultaneously responding to critical issues as and when they come up requires extreme agility and adaptability.

It is important to evolve along with the changes to survive. No matter what, it is always the survival of the fittest.

All of these skills come together when a Digital Marketer lays out a multi-phase plan to be deployed over weeks or even months. Knowing how to create marketing strategies that work requires intense planning and a forward-looking attitude, as well as an eye for emerging trends.

Successful Digital Marketers have an insatiable curiosity for the way things work, and the way things are changing—both within their own industry and globally. To stay abreast of these trends calls for perpetual learning.

Side notes

Digital marketing skills have to be given prime importance because even though the basics remain the same, the education structure changes.

No classroom can completely equip you with the skills that you need to survive in the industry. In addition to that, recruiters have reported a lack of digital skills among freshers.

There is a huge gap between what people know and what they need to know in the field of digital marketing.

We cannot ignore the gap between industry and academia and the increasing demand for digital marketing skills. This gap can be bridged only through practicing the necessary industry-relevant skills.