5 Skills Every Digital Marketing Manager Should Learn

Being a digital marketing manager might have been on your bucket list for a long time, and you feel it is time to tick it.

Sure, it is the right time!

Before earning the title, you need to know what a digital marketing manager does and the primary skills for this role.

This post covers the vitals you need to know before becoming a successful one.

Majorly dwelling on the skills, you will learn why it is crucial to have deeper knowledge and experience in data analysis, organization and project management, and in-depth social media skills.

Before diving into the relevant skills for a digital marketing manager, allow me to let you into the post’s job description and roles.

Who is a Digital Marketing Manager, and what do they do?

A digital marketing manager heads the digital marketing department and is responsible for planning digital marketing campaigns and ensuring they run effectively to the end.

These managers are team leaders, and in some B2B companies, they are a focal point for contact for all clients.

Hence, people and leadership skills are essential for any digital marketing manager.

Depending on the company’s size, a digital marketing manager might have to accomplish all the tasks by themselves or plan and strategize them delegate most of the execution part to their team.

For instance, as a DMM, you can create a general marketing strategy accompanied by an editorial calendar and assign the content creation task to a devoted editor.

More focus areas are managing the company’s site and social media pages, data analysis, working on how to increase traffic to the site, and planning new and effective marketing campaigns.

While these are some typical duties of digital marketing managers, the focus could vary from one company to another.

5 Essential Skills Any Digital Marketing Manager needs to master

Below are some emerging skills any aspiring digital marketing manager needs to master in readiness for their role.

1) Data Analysis

Digital marketing is rapidly growing, and the amount of data it is creating is endless.

Now, digital marketing managers have better access to campaign performance and customers’ behavior.

Mastering data analysis will be beneficial to make more sense out of such a massive amount of information.

Data analysis goes beyond website performance and web analytics for a digital marketing manager.

They need to be well-informed on how data drives customer experiences across all channels and platforms.

Some tools to master are Google Ads, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads Managers, among other ad exchanges.

If the company collects extra customer data, there isn’t any better option than to master SQL and Excel to run most queries against data to uncover insights.

Digital marketing managers can use the data to track customers’ journeys and provide clear insights into what works and leads to high conversions.

They can quickly determine campaigns that drive valuable customers and efforts under-delivering an ROI.

It takes a keen eye for excellent data wrangling, and if you can take raw structured and unstructured data and turn it into a business strategy, you are fit for the role.

2) Organization and Project Management

Running several digital marketing campaigns simultaneously can get complicated pretty fast.

If you were to build an Omni-channel marketing schedule, it should include different technologies and measurements leading to numerous moving parts you will need to coordinate.

You need to have project management skills to assemble desperate teams and move your marketing ideas from their concept to completion.

As part of project management skills, you need to lead and direct internal and external teams to manage projects and any other deliverables.

You must have technical skills and break down any complex projects into easily actionable steps.

Besides, you must communicate objectives and motivate your team to create seamless experiences.

Still, under project management, you should manage workflow processes proficiently with various tools like Wrike, Basecamp, and Trello.

You must have experience with more agile development methods and be well-versed with content management systems.

3) Knowledge in Automation

Digital marketing automation is necessary for streamlining, automating, and optimizing the company’s marketing efforts.

As the head of your department, you should help the business target more customers with sales and marketing messages using effective workflows.

A digital marketing manager can customize online marketing efforts on the fly and send various messages to prospective clients at multiple points in the customers’ buying journeys.

Once you implement automation, you are helping the team to get a lot done and create better experiences for your customers.

Marketing automation allows for more precise messaging, and most companies are adopting it.

Almost 70% of marketing leaders are at least using automation.

You need these skills to develop better automation and effective content marketing strategies across customers’ lifecycles.

4) Understanding Customers’ Experiences and other UX Skills

If you still think that marketing is all about getting the customer to buy from you, you are wrong and need to re-learn digital marketing.

Today, it goes beyond the purchase to the buyer’s experiences after the sale, including communications, onboarding, and upsells.

Since there is a continued effort to retain and upsell existing customers, a marketing manager needs to fully understand the customer’s experience and offer thoughts around the perfect CX and UX.

The DMM needs to understand the customers’ pain points, needs, and wants.

Then, they can build complete customers’ experiences, from increasing the awareness of the service or product through the whole customers’ lifespan.

Finally, a digital marketing manager must keep getting feedback from previous and existing customers on why the product or service is not meeting their needs.

This is valuable information that the manager can use in marketing material to improve new customers’ digital experiences.

5) In-depth Social Media Knowledge

For most organizations, companies, and businesses, social media is among the most effective ways of boosting website traffic and increasing sales.

From the most recent statistics, over 4 billion people use social media, whether for entertainment, education, information, networking, or marketing.

A third of those on these platforms for news get them from Facebook; this means that your audience at least spends time on social media platforms.

Today’s digital marketing managers need to go beyond posting on socials occasionally; instead, understand the importance of paid advertising on different social media platforms, social chatbots, and ways of building engaging communities on the company’s socials.

Social paid advertising keeps growing with numerous avenues for placements.

Digital marketing managers need to find out platforms their audiences use and the types of creatives that are more appealing to them.

You might need to create different forms of content, from images to videos and cut the creativity into various sizes that fit other social feeds.

Also, you must rely on stronger analytic capabilities and ensure social ads deliver stronger returns on investments.

A digital marketing manager must stay ahead of the competition and know emerging potential platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and the likes.

Social is a rapidly evolving space that needs a greater understanding of the best practices while experimenting with new ways of sharing information.

Such works need both analytics and creativity strategy to measure social campaigns that drive orders and traffic.

From the five skills described above, you can agree that prepping for a digital marketing manager position in the future will be totally different from today.

Before marketing went digital, we only had marketing managers and executives.

But see how advancements in technology have revolutionized the marketing space.

Yes, the principles of digital marketing might remain the same, but the digital marketing tools and skills a manager needs to have to create, analyse, and implement their marketing campaigns will still evolve at a neck-breaking speed.

70% of marketing executives recognize the critical challenge most marketing organizations face – a managerial talent shortage because of a lack of the right digital skills.

To simplify this, there is a big gap between things they must know and those they already know.

If you are a savvy executive, focus more on recruiting and reskilling the existing workforce.

Doing this represents a great opportunity, and mastering the right skills prepares a digital marketing manager for the future.

Conclusion on 5 Skills Every Digital Manager Should Learn

The future of any digital marketing managerial skills development continues to be very competitive and data-driven.

Managers will need to improve their creativity in the content they create and have the relevant tools and skills to measure their success and that of the business.

As digital marketing keeps expanding, the best managers will be continuous learners thirsty to develop and invest in any new skills that will be effective in their careers and for businesses they work for or with at large.

As a digital marketing manager, building your skills is crucial in determining your success in the business and industry.

Knowing how to create effective marketing strategies, integrating each part of the funnel, and reporting your results, among plenty of things, ensure you get the best results out of your efforts.

Meanwhile, if you are a beginner or budding digital marketer with hopes to scale to a managerial position in the future, check out some digital marketing courses to know what is expected of you in your career.