Digital marketing takes a lifetime to master.
It’s a space that encompasses many channels, tools, and tactics.
While the basics of marketing remain the same, the digital marketing skills you need to create and implement campaigns continue to evolve at breakneck speed.
It’s also an incredibly popular field, and those who take the time to master the right skill are the ones who will rise to the top.
To help you keep up with the pace, we’re highlighting some of the top skills you should start adding to your resume to ensure your success in the field.
Let’s get started!
Digital Marketing Skills We’ll Cover:
- Content Creation and Strategy
- Video Marketing
- Email Marketing Strategy
- SEO
- Social Media Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Data Analysis
- Funnels
- UX Design
1. Content Creation and Strategy
It’s no surprise that content development and strategy tops the list of digital marketing skills you should be mastering.
The best marketers need to be skilled communicators who are well-versed in the art of using language to persuade their audience to take action. Whether it’s a headline, social media post, or email, your words should generate desire for your product or service.
Currently, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 42% say their content efforts are effective.
This is because great content is no longer a guarantee that you’ll get traffic. So how do you break through the clutter and stand out among your competitors?
A good place to start is determining how, where, and when you’re going to promote your content.
To do that, you need to create buyer personas to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience—where they’re located, what their interests are, which platforms they’re on, etc.
Once you know who you’re trying to reach, it’s time to develop content topics using keyword research and competitor analyses as your primary strategies.
Continue to test and track what your customers are responding to and refine your content accordingly.
2. Video Marketing
Video is one of the most engaging forms of content, with more than 85% of internet users in the U.S. watching online videos on their mobile devices.
Yet, 23% of marketers and 30% of small business owners feel they’re falling behind their competition when it comes to their video marketing strategy.
The issue is that we’ve reached a saturation point. The videos we watch today aren’t the unpolished, uninspiring videos we were willing to watch yesterday.
So if you want to capture the attention of your target audience, stand out.
To sharpen your skills in this area, you need to understand your buyer, determine the appropriate video style, choose the right platform or app, and optimize for search.
No excessive storyboarding or expensive video equipment is necessary.
3. Email Marketing Strategy
Email is not new to the world of digital marketing. But understanding how to leverage email marketing for brand outreach is one of the most important digital marketing skills you could learn.
This involves more than writing high-quality emails. To connect with subscribers, you need to generate value.
For example, let’s say one of your customers left a few items in their cart and never completed their purchase. You can send a cart abandonment email that showcases that specific product as a reminder to checkout.
You can even conduct some A/B testing on the content and images and compare your interactions and visualization rates.
4. Digital Marketing Skills: SEO
This is one of the more complicated tasks in digital marketing. Just like social media, search engine optimization, or SEO, is constantly changing algorithms and adapting them to online buying habits.
That’s why companies are always looking for digital marketers who can keep up with these updates and get their web pages in the top-ranked results on search engines.
Remember—you not only want to focus on streamlining the user experience but also have a solid understanding of the technical side of things as well.
Investing in tools like SEMRush and Screaming Frog can help keep you on top of your SEO game.
5. Social Media Marketing
According to Backlinko, there are nearly 4 billion people actively using social media in the world—an overall increase in users of over 92% in just 5 years.
Social media has completely transformed the way users interact with brands online. With more platforms than ever, it’s also transformed how marketers engage with their target audience.
With that being said, knowing how to effectively use channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn is among the best skills for digital marketing professionals to learn and cultivate.
Without the right social media strategy, your business won’t get the traction it deserves. To maximize results, you’ll need to gain a deeper understanding of a variety of areas, including visual marketing, content creation, analytics, and more.
6. Mobile Marketing
On the surface, it may seem like there’s a ton of overlap between desktop and mobile marketing. However, there are enough differences to make the latter a standalone skill.
Typically, the attention span of mobile users is significantly shorter since they’re consuming more information on the go and expecting instant results.
The best mobile marketers will say more with less, conveying stronger messages in fewer words or in a shorter video.
7. Data Analysis
Knowledge of data and analytics provide a strong backbone for all the digital marketing skills you can gain. In any campaign, it’s critical to run tests, track data, and analyze your findings to identify areas of improvement.
While traditional marketing once depended on guesswork, luckily, actionable data is much more powerful and readily available today than ever before.
If you want to put your analysis skills in the fast lane and find new growth opportunities for your business, be sure to take advantage of tools like Google Analytics and Optimizely.
8. Digital Marketing Skills: Building Funnels
If you want your business to run as efficiently as possible, you need to get your marketing funnel right.
This is the process of converting visitors into paying customers and is often divided into 5 main stages—awareness, interest, evaluation, commitment, and sale.
To build a successful funnel (or optimize an existing one), you need to identify your target audience, create a buyer persona, and develop a strategy to engage your audience.
As leads progress through your funnel, your outreach methods will become more personalized until the sale occurs in the final phase.
9. UX Design
A shorthand for user experience, UX is an invaluable asset for improving the customer experience. UX affects everything from how a user navigates your website to their decision-making process.
It doesn’t matter how incredible you are at SEO and social media marketing. With little or no attention to UX design, a prospect won’t hang around your site long enough if it’s not aesthetically appealing and all that effort will be in vain.
In fact, around 75% of customers will base the credibility of an entire brand solely on the design of its website.
Since UX has a direct impact on conversion, investing in this skill set is more crucial now than it has ever been.
Wrapping Up Digital Marketing Skills
With more and more businesses moving online, the competition for customer attention and engagement is at an all-time high.
The techniques you deploy today may not work tomorrow.
But by developing your knowledge of the above-mentioned in-demand digital marketing skills, we’re confident that you’ll reach career heights beyond your wildest dreams.
