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Stepping into the field of digital marketing but overwhelmed with the skills required? Moving from the academic space to the workplace is never easy. It will require you to develop certain digital marketing skills to help become a successful marketing professional. Digital marketing is a sought-after career path with many companies choosing to go digital. Creating an online footprint has become more important than ever. But in addition to understanding the field itself, it is crucial to learn digital marketing skills.
Launching a career in digital marketing requires a range of digital marketing skills. These can include marketing hard skills and marketing soft skills. While you may decide to specialize in a specific marketing domain in the future, it is best to have a solid base with hard and soft skills. This will allow you to experience different aspects as a generalist digital marketer.
Digital marketers earn an average compensation of $62,836 & entry-level positions earn about $45,000 per year making it a great career choice with growth and advancement.
Recommended Reading: Unsure about digital marketing? Here are 7 reasons to start a career in digital marketing!
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Digital Marketing Hard Skills
What Hard-Skills do you need to kickstart your career in Digital Marketing? To kickstart your career in digital marketing, the most important hard skills are content marketing, SEO, research & analysis, campaign management, and social media! Here is a deeper explanation of each hard-skill and its relevance to the industry:
[fs-toc-omit]1. Content marketing for conversions
The ability to create content to educate, inspire, nurture and convert strangers into customers is one of the valuable skills for digital marketing. It could be from website content, video scripts, podcasts, advertisements, email copy, or anything else. That will engage the target audience to complete a desired action. According to Demand Metric, Content marketing strategies cost 62% less than traditional marketing. It generates about 3 times as many leads when compared with traditional channels. Having a general idea of how to design content and testing different methods to communicate will ensure that you reach your marketing goals.
[fs-toc-omit]2. Knowledge of SEO
SEO is one of the most sought after online marketing skills within the field of digital marketing and it goes beyond being able to write effectively. Optimizing content with relevant keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, etc is extremely important to help your target audience discover your website and brand. SEO skills include on page and off page SEO, technical SEO site setup, backlink creation, domain score optimization, etc.
A study from SEMRush showed that 67% of marketers highlighted that SEO was the most effective marketing tactic for 2021.
[fs-toc-omit]3. Gathering data for research & analysis
As a marketer, you may be involved in many situations where you would have to conduct research. For example competitor analysis, marketing sizing, social media audit, survey collection, target audience and buyer persona analysis, etc. According to Invesp, businesses that employ data driven strategies deliver 5-8x higher ROI on their marketing spend. Solid preliminary research can guide, educate and empower to design the right strategies. Moving forward which makes it an integral part of the marketing role.
[fs-toc-omit]4. Understanding analytics & effectiveness of campaigns
Having hands on experience with different data tools like Google analytics, Google search console, Adjust, Crazyegg, Optimizely is important. It will help measure the results from campaigns and test your hypotheses. A recent report has shown that 70% of companies were able to increase their sales revenue simply by A/B testing landing pages before launching it.
[fs-toc-omit]5. Overview of various social media platforms
A firm grasp of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, etc is a beneficial skill. Other digital marketing skills include having an in-depth understanding of how each platform works. Social media has been growing exponentially with over 3.78 billion social media users worldwide and equating to 49% of the global population in 2020. Working with tools like Hootsuite, Later, Facebook Business Manager is essential to grow and nurture social media audiences.
Related Article: Want to launch a career in social media marketing and don’t know where to start? Here are 6 steps to help you get started!
Digital Marketing Soft-Skills
What Soft-Skills do you need to kickstart your career in Digital Marketing? The most sought-after soft skills in the digital marketing industry include creativity, empathy, teamwork, communication, and the courage to think outside the box. Here's a breakdown of each soft skill and why it is important:
[fs-toc-omit]1. Creativity
Marketers need to constantly think up creative ways to design solutions. These solutions make an impact through communication and collate winning experiences for customers and clients. With an attention span of 8 seconds, it’s difficult to get the message across to target audiences. This is where creativity plays a massive role to educate, entertain, nurture your potential customers. Having an excellent command on digital marketing skills, a marketer can improve conversion rates to ensure that their content is being clicked on.
[fs-toc-omit]2. Willingness to Listen and Learn
With constant changes and new trends emerging within the digital space, a marketer should be keen to listen and adapt easily. It’s important to keep an eye on potential changes. By taking part in webinars, reading industry news and following thought leaders, you can be on top of the trends. Your role as a marketer will involve un-learning, upskilling and re-learning many new tactics as they emerge.
[fs-toc-omit]3. Ability to Multitask and work with Teams
Digital marketers work on multiple projects with different deadlines and often have to coordinate with many teams. If it’s a smaller organization, the marketer will need to wear many hats as the strategist, copywriter, designer, performance specialist, etc. That’s why you need to keep enhancing your digital marketing skills. You will also need to find time to keep learning, read about changes in the market and collaborate with team members. Multi tasking is a brilliant skill to have coupled with the ability to prioritize and work towards providing the most amount of value.
[fs-toc-omit]5. Testing ideas & solutions
As the market keeps changing, your methods and tactics to excel in digital marketing skills should also evolve. This will include tapping into new platforms, collaborating with influencers, making changes to the product, mapping out the customer journey differently, etc. It’s important to test each experiment closely and map out the results with KPIs to examine if it is an effective method. New ideas will constantly need to be tested to innovate and create superior results.
[fs-toc-omit]6. Communication
Whether you’re writing copy or collaborating with teams, effective communication is imperative to becoming a successful marketer. A study by CMS Wire showed that 97% of employees believe that communication impacts their task efficacy on a daily basis. With team members working remotely from diverse parts of the world, ideas and requirements must be communicated clearly. This will help minimize the back and forth and set expectations.
Also Read: Top 5 Newsletters for Young Graduates
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