Top 10 Skills Required for Digital Marketing Career
Every company that provides products and services demands marketers, but today’s business have become technology-driven business that demands marketers in digital, that we called digital marketing.
Digital marketing is a career that combines traditional marketing with modern ones such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), web design, social media marketing, content writing, and much more.
Each digital marketing tools will show a different and varied result. We can be in the situation as these memes shows.
As a digital marketer, you need to be expert in at least one field. There are two types of digital marketing:
Specialized Digital Marketer
This digital marketer only have one specialized field that they master. The example is someone who only expert in SEO is only focusing on SEO.
T-Shaped Digital Marketer
This digital marketer has a broad knowledge of many digital marketing field, but master one field. The example is someone who know about SEO, content writing, and website but specialized in SEO.
Both types are good, it depends what the company needed and how far you master the field.
According to Digital Marketing Institute, 74% of marketing executives recognize that marketing organizations face a critical talent shortage due to a lack of digital skills. In other words, there’s a huge gap in what they need to know and what they actually know.
Then, how a company differentiate digital marketer and how you set yourself apart from other digital marketers? How you discover which digital marketing you excel?
That’s exactly what you will learn in this article!
But before that, are you doing startup business right now? If yes, you have to read this 5 digital marketing strategy for your startup!
Digital Marketing Job Description
As a digital marketer, your task is to plan digital marketing campaigns and make sure they run smoothly from beginning to end.
Where should I start if I don’t have any experience?
You can start by learning about the digital marketing, practice and implementing it. Also, you can find out the tasks and responsibilities as a digital marketer required by most companies.
But on top of that, you’ll also want to start build your digital marketing portfolio to demonstrate that you are capable and got the matched skills as required. Here are some ways to start building your digital marketing careers:
- Learn more about digital marketing in general.
Read up some different marketing channels, listen to podcasts, and take some free introductory courses to improve your skills. - Attend meetups and start networking with professionals in the field
You can find network everywhere, such as LinkedIn, virtual meetups, or in-person at local events. - Structure your learning with a bootcamp, course, or program
If you’re starting without any prior experience, a structured and credible qualification in digital marketing will help you learn the fundamentals in a structured way. Some programs will even help you to build your portfolio and land your first job in the field.
Digital Marketing Skills
To be able implementing digital marketing and get the best possible result. There are some essential skills that is required to have to build digital marketing career. It divided in two kinds of skills: hard skills and soft skills.
The differences is on the result, where hard skills can be seen whereas soft skills cannot.
Hard Skills of Digital Marketing
1. Data Analysis
Data analytics refers to the act of gathering and processing the data of a wide range of certain information of your business.
There are a lot of online tools available to help marketers to analyze the data and take marketing decisions. For example, it can get rid the invalid and unwanted data.
The data contains your audience’s age, gender, location, and it might be something you want to know so you know their interests and devices using to reach you, which are one of the most valuable source for us regarding audience insight.
This data will be used as your strategy to help you make a better campaign for your audience that is a direct hit.
2. Content Creation and Email Marketing
Content is the way to communicate with your audiences. It can be text, picture, video, infographic, etc.
Visual content today gives more engagement. It have a higher conversion rate and also boost SEO rankings.
It is recommended to have basic design skill to create content to gain more attention and attractive point.
Content is the core of digital marketing element and will be used in all kinds of digital marketing. One of them is email marketing.
Sending emails are easy, but writing a nice content for email marketing is not everyone can do. Make your headline and subject or email marketing as sexy as your brand.
As in an article on Hubspot, the kind of content you create depends on your audience’s needs at different stages in the buyer’s journey by creating buyer’s persona.
Also read: Best 5 Proven Digital Marketing Strategies in 2022
3. SEO
SEO is abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization that is utilized with Google Search Engine. Google’s algorithm is constantly updating, and the importance of utilizing applicable and specific keywords have skyrocketed.
In short, SEO is about making the brand to rank on Google.
Driving traffic is one of digital marketer’s task. Bringing traffic to your platform is one of vital step to connect with your audience.
So, how SEO works?
SEO works with search engines, mostly with Google, using bots to crawl pages on the web to collect information about the pages and putting them in an index.
The algorithms analyze pages in the index and taking into account of ranking factors or signals to determine the page rank according to the search query.
As been said on Search Engine Land, index is like a giant library where the librarian can pull up a book (web page) to help someone find what they’re looking for. The librarian have to read every single book to tell which book have the answers to their questions.
There are two kinds of SEO:
On page SEO
On page SEO is focuses on all of the content and keywords that exists on the page. By doing keywords research, you can answer some concern of the people and you will be rank higher if they keep visiting your page.
Off page SEO
Off page SEO is focuses on all activities that occurred off the page. Means, there are some pages that are linked to your page, called as backlink. It is called off page because the traffic is from the other brand.
“Why other brands can affect my ranking?”
If they mentioned your brand on their page, it may affect your authority and boost the keywords for your SEO. It is also a great way to start a partnership and build professional relationships or networking.
We have a list of free SEO tools that you could try.
4. CRM
Monitoring customer experience helps companies to understand the needs of their audiences.
CRM or Customer Relationship Management involving strategies to optimize CRM to make their visitor have the best customer experience.
What your audience feels is the most important, right?
Connecting with your customer have more advantages as a brand. It can increase the chance of customer loyalty. It’s all can be improved by CRM.
As stated in Salesforce, CRM is a solution to understand the sales pipeline better and making prospects process become simpler and more accurate.
A CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers and a clear visibility of every opportunity ahead.
5. Social Media
There is more than just social media. Making a trending content is the key.
Marketers need to understand the factor of social media for marketers. The quality and relevancy of the content is the basic, then engaged with the audience is the other factor.
Each social media platform has different algorithm. As a digital marketers, you have to know each algorithm so we can perform the best approach for diversity audience.
To approach each social media, it need to have a different techniques to attract the audiences, it can be from the content topic, the form (video, picture, podcast), etc.
Besides connecting to audiences, digital marketers also made use of social media as one of their branding channel for the company.
How would we like to be seen to others is matters, and that’s digital marketer to do list.
With digital marketing, we are not using only traditional method. TikTok is one of the most popular social media now, even Squid Game is using it as a digital marketing tool.
Soft Skills of Digital Marketing
1. Communication and Listening
Good communication and listening skills can building relationship and trust. It include understanding and entertaining.
When we communicate, we want our messages to be as clear and attractive as possible. When our customer talks, they do want to be heard.
2. Storytelling
Do you know what is the best material for marketers?
It is storytelling.
No matter what platform you are using, to whom you talk to, what kind of topic you write, the best approach for that is none other than storytelling.
It is important to be able to communicate our ideas and a clear messages to our audiences, but we must have something that is appealing and enticing, I mean the one that is emotionally engaged.
3. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Having a critical thinking and problem solving is a must for almost every job.
Your competitors are likely trying to achieve the same goal, including digital marketing.
Yes, it is challenging. But still, it is learnable if you keep practicing to focus on thinking on what your audience needs and solving the problem of your audience’s concerns.
So your responsibilities is to innovating and be creative, which is both is formed through critical thinking and problem solving. One of the best approach for it is to think as a user, or user-centred perspective to know the user experiences.
According to The Interaction Design Foundation, there are 5 key phases to this process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
First, you empathize on what your customer feel and needs. After you know and define it, you will come up with ideas to solve the problem or help them.
After you planning it, you would like to try to make a campaign for that problem. Then the campaign will be tested to see if it’s work.
The process will be looping everytime you want to start a campaign, which will have a different cases.
4. Sales and Persuasion
As a marketer, it is obvious to persuade and convince people. Not everyone have this talent, but you can improve and master this skill.
Nowadays, hard sell becomes more difficult because people will solely see it as a way to seek profit. But back again, it depends on what is your branding and what kind of product or services you provide.
Soft skill is also important to have because it will be more emotionally attaching. We can make it with a touch of storytelling.
You can be a great influence for them, and they will come to you unconsciously.
5. Be Tech Savvy
Digital is technology, they are like a family.
Digital is something you would want to master as the world is keep growing.
You need to be familiar with all technologies, how to use them and what the purpose is. It includes hardwares and softwares, and it’s all learnable.
Younger generation probably are digital native, they cannot be apart and even relying on them. But older generation may take some time to learn.
Digital Marketing Will Always Be Needed
Business and technology will keep depending on each other in the future.
Remember the key of digital marketing? It’s test!
Be connected to your customer is the opportunity to convert a lead or acquire a customer. Digital marketing creates a lot of opportunities through a wide variety of channels.
If you want to know more about digital marketing, feel free to contact me.
I believe these skills are learnable and can be useful on other careers too. With these skills, you can find any jobs easier.
So, what are you waiting for?
Let’s start to improve these skills to start your digital marketing career!
Also read: How to Choose the Most Suitable Digital Marketing Agency
