What Skills do you need for Digital Marketing?

Today, most people dream of being digital marketers. Thanks to the onset of thousands of tech company perks and telecommuting jobs.

Digital marketers today make six-figure salaries, enjoy unlimited vacations and flexible schedules that allow them to work from anywhere, even as digital nomads.

If you want to start digital marketing this year, change your career, quit a desk job for flexibility, or do it as a side job, there are some skills you need to have to maximize the potential of getting brands to work for.

You must be excellent in writing and editing, SEO, designing, social paid advertising, social media marketing, and WordPress, among others.

Today, I will list most of the skills in no particular order to allow you to prep well before fully committing to your new venture.

Some are necessary for all starters, while you can learn some as you progress in the industry.

Writing and Editing

These are perhaps the vital skillsets any digital marketer should have.

I doubt there are any jobs in this industry where you don’t have to write or edit anything.

Because of how crucial content marketing is, you can soar higher in your career if you know how to write great content and flip a bad or boring piece of content into a captivating one.

Also, you should know how to use some basic and advanced copywriting tools.

Search Engine Optimization

Organic search results often get more clicks than paid ones, so it is vital to use SEO as a digital marketer effectively.

Nowadays, white hat SEO strategies include guest blogging, link building, and content marketing through high-quality content and social marketing.

Understand technical SEO techniques like updating H1, H2, and title tags and incorporating the right keywords.

Know how to search for relevant keywords to use in your PPC, blogs, or website copies to drive results for businesses you work for.

There is no better way of learning SEO than enrolling in recommended online classes.

You will learn the tips, tricks, and techniques to make the art easier.

Design Skills

Good visuals power most digital marketing regardless of the platform.

Content on any social media platform will perform well if it has images.

You need to know how to pick the right visuals, modify them, and use them effectively in your content.

If you can create a good banner ad, whip an email banner, or a social media graphic or image in GIMP or Photoshop, you are closer to launching your digital campaign.

You can experiment with more tools like Canva if you need a variety of styles to choose from.

Social Media Marketing

Social paid advertising ensures that your content is distributed across social media sites to as many people as possible.

Almost a third of the world’s population is on one or two social media networks, and over 97% of the world’s share of brands use social media for marketing.

There is more to social media advertising than posting on Facebook and Instagram.

You must know how to engage users across all the platforms you use, write social media marketing copies, create good visuals and analyze engagement and reach.

Email Marketing and Newsletters

Do you think email marketing is dead?

Some people think this is true, but it isn’t because most people still read emails.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of reaching customers.

Brands you work with will have email content they need to distribute, and email newsletters are excellent to tap into any email user base and extend content reach.

Customer Relationship Management

You need to know how to monitor customer experience to help companies you work for to understand the growing needs and their market and target audience.

Know the strategies you can use to access and maximize customer experiences.

It would help if you connected with them more personally and emotionally to increase customer loyalty.

Install skills like communication and empathy too.

Data Analysis

Data analysis will involve using practical steps and current software to collect and process different information from various online interactions of your target audience and market.

The interactions can be an online transaction, consumed content, search queries, or relevant info to your business.

Online tools help measure data on different platforms to allow more straightforward analysis and relevant decision-making regarding the business.

Know what data cleansing is, how it works, and its importance in final business and marketing decisions.

Creative Abilities

While digital marketing is analytical, there is a creative part that you need to embrace and build on.

You need to know how to pull art and science and combine them in your work.

It will be useless to keep copy-pasting what fellow marketers are doing – you don’t want to be called out for any plagiarism.

Google AdWords and PPC

Some businesses have expanded their reach with higher margins, thus generating high revenues and brand awareness from pay-per-click advertising.

If you can do the above for any business, you will snag decent deals in your digital marketing career.

To ace in the PPC space, you must think scientifically, strategically, and effectively.

Know how to create, optimize, and report all your campaigns with the help of Google AdWords and Google Analytics.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Digital marketing intends to drive traffic to a site or page and convert the same traffic into customers.

CRO allows you to test various site pages, calls-to-action, and copies to determine what offers the best conversion.

This combines copywriting, web design, and user experience.

As a digital marketer, you should know how to do A/B tests and be proficient in programs that help your research.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the ability to create automated tasks for site visitors to save time.

Here, you must understand how to set up forms and create good landing pages.

Know how to trigger your drip campaigns that nurture site visitors and convert them into customers.

It is a vital aid in helping a sales team get sales-qualified leads from website traffic.

It is essential to know how to get site visitors to understand their importance to marketing or sales teams on sales-qualified leads.

PowerPoint Design

To date, no one has built an application or software that has replaced PowerPoint ubiquitously.

Presentations to clients are becoming increasingly crucial.

As a digital marketer, you must create PowerPoints that aren’t just basic text on slides.

You must know how to thread together stories and clearly state your strategies before socializing the project and results across important players, whether they are junior or senior members.

Influence Marketing

Businesses and brands can reap massively by linking with online influences to increase brand awareness, distribute, or co-create content.

You should know how to connect with these influencers and shift them from unawares to advocate.

Tools like Traackr are great for finding and tracking online influencers.

If you can be brilliant at influence marketing, your digital marketing career will blossom in a short time.

Excellent Personal Brand

As an established digital marketer, you will most likely be considered the face of the brand you are working with, whether through content marketing, conference presence, or social media.

It is essential to have an excellent online digital presence to show you are present and professional.

Knowing how to use highly recommended content sites such as Medium will help build your brand.

Also, understanding how they work means you can leverage the sites for companies you work for.

WordPress

WordPress powers over 40% of sites across the internet and half or so of the share of the world’s content management system market; hence it is the most popular and recommended CMS.

Top sites like NBC, CBS Local, TechCrunch, Spotify, TIME, Fortune, CNN, USA Today, Thought Catalog, TED, and The New York Post use this CMS.

It means WordPress isn’t a tool for small businesses to patch a site since they have no developer.

Brands you work for might use WordPress or might plan to switch from their current user to it.

Understanding WordPress, its interface, features, and plugins will be great.

Also, you can use the knowledge to build your website and blog about your business.

Excel Whiz

The last decade or more has seen so many resumes with the Word application on them.

But, the need for data and the necessity for analytics is rapidly increasing.

Being proficient at this program and understanding how you can manipulate data on it with ease is vital.

It would be best to be good at creating graphs, charts, and tables from the data you are working with.

It is not only about listing Excel but being a whiz!

Conclusion

Seems a lot, right?

This isn’t everything yet, but you can agree that most of them are easy to work around, and some need a little more practice.

You can learn most of the skills from online courses as most if not all of them have tutorials curated to take you from a rookie to pro in minutes and others in a few hours.