In today’s technology-driven economy, digital marketing is the cost-effective means of creating brand awareness. Digital marketing is a result-oriented field and it is the responsibility of a digital marketer to constantly analyze the marketing strategies and campaigns and optimize them for better results. As a digital marketer, you must be an expert across a wide range of digital marketing skills to meet the objectives of businesses. You must devise marketing strategies and develop content that aligns with the business goals. It thereby helps to raise brand awareness and ultimately generates valuable leads. To be a perfect digital marketer, you must be at the top of your game, constantly equipping yourself with all the requisite skills to master the art of digital marketing. In this article, we take a look at the top 10 skills that you must ace to succeed in the field of digital marketing. 

1. Search Engine Optimization

To perfect your craft in a digital marketing role, you must have a good knowledge of implementing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies. SEO is the best means to generate constant quality (organic) traffic to a website. The good thing is you don’t need to spend a penny for implementing it. However, it does require a good amount of skill set in understanding Keywords, content optimization, and so on. Having a solid knowledge of various facets of SEO is crucial to optimize all forms of content for running a successful digital marketing campaign. Some of the key concepts of SEO include Technical SEO, link building, content marketing, and so on.

2. Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the fastest and most effective means to grow a business in a competitive market space. It involves paid advertisements to promote products or services online. Also known as Pay-per-click ads, they come in a variety of formats such as text-based ads, product listing ads, product-based advertisements. These ads appear along with search queries in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). They allow consumers to take a look at important information related to products such as price and reviews. 

3. Customer relationship management

Monitoring and understanding customer experience is the first and foremost thing to get to understand the growing needs of the target audience. If the customers are well connected with the products/services on an emotional and personal front, there are higher chances of them turning into loyal customers. Every digital marketer should have an in-depth understanding of Customer relationship management (CRM). They must constantly monitor customer experience and devise strategies for optimizing it.   

4. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

 In a digital marketing role, you may have succeeded in driving loads of website traffic. But your efforts do not come to fruition if the user/customer does not take the intended action. A conversion in simple terms refers to the desired action that must be taken by the target audience on a website.Some of the CRO skills include A/B testing, bounce rate to measure engagement, and conversion funnels. Examples of the intended user actions include signing up, subscribing to a newsletter, requesting a quote, purchasing the product/service, and so on.

5. Social media marketing

More people are present on Social media than ever before and as such businesses need to leverage this channel to reach their target audience. Companies are now paying much attention to Social media marketing to create brand awareness, generate leads and drive sales. Each social media channel requires a certain communication style and a solid marketer must be versatile enough to derive desired results from each social medium. 

While devising social media strategies, it is important to focus on quality, relevance, and audience engagement. You must have a thorough understanding of what works and what does not work for a particular social media platform.  A well-executed social cycle includes 4 stages such as social listening, direct messaging, live-streaming, and hashtagging. Successful social media marketing involves creating a solid strategy, posting content regularly to engage the audience, tracking and measuring performance using various metrics, and leveraging the available social media tools.  

6. Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics plays a central role in shaping the marketing landscape. A digital marketing campaign without proper tracking of the campaign performance cannot achieve the desired outcome. The digital marketer’s responsibility is to collect and analyze data captured by marketing analytics across every marketing endeavor and make better decisions. These analytics give a bird’s eye view to understand consumer/user behavior, The various analytics tools like Google analytics and other data analysis tools offer critical insights about a user behavior and enable them to measure the success rate. 

Some of the parameters include sources of traffic, attractive keywords, and demographics such as audience, age, gender, devices, interests, etc. After a thorough analysis of this data, a digital marketer can tweak strategies that increase user engagement and drive targeted traffic to the website. But before jumping into analytics, it is important to set/determine certain relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or metrics. They can help you shape marketing strategies or marketing campaigns to implement real-time interventions. For instance, consider some of the following essential metrics:

• Website Traffic
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Customer retention rate
•  Return on Investment (ROI)
• Social engagement
  

  7. Digital marketing tools

A digital marketer’s responsibility is to promote brand products/services online. Digital marketing tools help to work faster for better results. There are a ton of digital marketing tools available online. A digital marketer must skim through the available bunch of tools and get acquainted with a certain list of tools. He must be well aware of tools and software that help to keep track of initiatives and different projects being worked on. A large number of tools offer a free trial or free version before opting for paid subscription. By registering for trial or free versions, a digital marketer would get a chance to assess the functionalities and benefits of the tools that align with his project objectives. It gives a chance to shortlist a couple of tools that deems fit and opt for premium subscriptions. Some of the important tools across different categories include the following:

• SEO (Search engine optimization) tools
• Social media marketing tools
• Email marketing tools
• Project management tools
• Graphic creation tools
  
  

  8. Paid advertising

Online paid advertising is the fastest means to drive traffic to a website. In simple terms, paid advertising refers to the purchase of ad spots to drive traffic. As the name indicates, the marketers only pay for the ads clicked by the audience either on a search result, website, social media, or other digital platforms. The two major budding strategies include Cost per mille (CPM) and Pay-per-click or Cost-per-click (CPC). The two formats of paid ads are search ads and display ads. The most popular locations to place these ads are search engines and social media platforms. Determining the type of keywords that fits a marketing campaign is vital for paid advertising. Understanding and designing ads as per the target audience result in increased click-through rates and improved revenue. Some examples of paid advertising include:

• Social media advertising
• Search engine advertising
• Display advertising
• Video advertising
• Remarketing and retargeting

9. Storytelling 

Having excellent storytelling skills is an asset for every digital marketer. They help to effectively convey ideas clearly and also appear compelling to the targeted audience. If the delivered message is clear, concise, compelling, and relevant it leaves a long-lasting impression on the target audience. Also, it helps in establishing trust and building a relationship with the audience. Some of the important storytelling skills include editing, writing, visual storytelling, and so on. These digital stories are highly engaging and compel the audience to emotionally connect with the brand. 

10. Copywriting

A digital marketing role warrants the need to share multiple forms of content across various social media platforms such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, etc. As a digital marketer, you must certainly be good at copywriting so that you capture the customer/audience’s attention, communicate your brand effectively and inspire them to take action. Not limited to blog writing, you would be required to write content for emails, landing pages, social media posts, product descriptions, paid ads, and so on. You need to be versatile enough to write a compelling copy that aligns with the needs of a specific social media platform. 

Bonus Skill: Basic design skills

With the availability of plenty of resources online, users are always looking for ways to get the required information within minimal time. A comprehensive SEO blog post detailing the features and benefits of a product/service might be good. But do remember that anytime visual content holds an edge over written content. For Social media marketing and branding, it is even more important. Visual content such as infographics, posters, and videos have greater user engagement, user retention, and also higher SEO rankings. There is a famous adage that says “ A picture is worth a thousand words.” It implies that it is easy to convey complex and multiple ideas in a single image rather than a comprehensive verbal description. Hence a digital marketer needs to have a basic understanding of software such as Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, Indesign, After Effects, Canva, and also video editing tools.

Conclusion

These are the top 10 skills that a digital marketer must possess for a successful career in the field of digital marketing. These skills listed in this article are the most sought after by recruiters and ensure to prioritize these skills to fast pace your career.  If you are a newbie looking to pursue a digital marketing course or a working digital marketing professional looking to amp up your skills to carve a niche for yourself in digital marketing, then you are at the right place. Being recognized as the best digital marketing Institute in Hyderabad, without any doubt Ace Web Academy (AWA) is your go-to choice for digital marketing. The digital marketing trainers at AWA hold more than a decade of experience under their belt and are up-to-date with the latest trends in this field. Without any further ado, contact AWA to excel in a digital marketing role and carve a niche for yourself in the digital marketing field.