Do you want to become an expert in digital marketing? Everyone can become a digital marketer but to be successful in the field you need to have the required skill set to take on the challenges thrown your way. This is why marketers are so serious about their digital marketing skills.
The demand for digital skills in the market is high and if you want to skyrocket your digital marketing career, then this is a good time to enter the digital market world.
In this guide, you’ll learn the top skills needed to get a job in digital marketing.
Digital Marketing Skills To Learn This Year
These are the most in-demand skills needed to become an expert in digital marketing.
- SEO Skills
- Google Advertising Skills
- Facebook Advertising Skills
- Social Media Marketing Skills
- Content Marketing Skills
- Video Marketing Skills
- Email Marketing Skills
SEO forms an integral part of digital marketing campaigns. Without SEO optimization, it’s difficult to run successful online campaigns.
To become an SEO expert is not as difficult as it sounds. All you have to do is follow the right training plan to learn every aspect of SEO.
The most important SEO skills you need to master are:
Technical SEO Skills – To have the necessary knowledge to optimize the technical aspect of a website so that search engines can crawl and index a website without issues.
SEO Copywriting Skills – To know how to optimize the content of a page so that search engines can understand it better.
Link Building Skills – To have a clear understanding of how to effectively promote a website on the Internet to get backlinks from other websites and improve your search engine rankings.
Analytical Skills – To be able to use tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns.
You can follow the links below to get started with SEO.
Resources to improve your SEO Skills
- What is SEO – An introduction to SEO concepts and techniques
- The Complete SEO Course – A step-by-step course to learn everything there is to know about SEO.
- How to start an SEO Career – Explains in detail the steps to follow to start a successful career in SEO.
- SEO Certifications – A list of the best courses to follow and get certified in SEO.
Google Advertising Skills
When it comes to online advertising, one of the most commonly used platforms is Google Ads.
Through Google Ads you can show your ads to people that are searching Google, watching YouTube videos, reading their emails in Gmail or browsing websites that participate in Google AdSense.
To work with Google Ads you need to know the ins and outs of the platform. Things like:
- How Google Ads Work
- How to set up the different types of campaigns
- How to optimize your account structure and ads
- How to choose a bidding structure
- How to use tools (like SEMRUSH) to analyze what type of campaigns your competitors are running on Google Ads
The best way to build the necessary skills is to follow the official courses from Google Skillshop (link below).
Upon course competition, you can also pass the required exams and become Google Ads Certified professional.
Resources to Improve your Google Ads Skills
Facebook Advertising Skills
In today’s time, digital marketing is incomplete without Facebook. From small businesses to big companies, everyone relies on Facebook to run their digital marketing campaigns. It forms an integral part of their social media campaigns.
Facebook offers you several advertising tools and features that need special skills to handle. This is why companies are always in search of people who are qualified in Facebook marketing.
With the help of Facebook marketing, you cannot only reach worldwide consumers but it also helps you to reach your target audience. On top of that, it is also very cost-effective.
As a digital marketing manager, you need to have the necessary skills to:
- Set up a Facebook business account
- Understand the difference between the various types of Facebook paid campaigns
- Setup a Facebook campaign, ad sets, and ads
- Understand how audience targeting works on Facebook
- Create custom audiences for remarketing campaigns
- Setup conversion goals
- Create reports to monitor the performance of your FB Ads
The best way to improve your Facebook advertising skills is to learn the basics by following one of the official FB courses and of course to practice by setting up and optimizing different types of Facebook campaigns.
Facebook Blueprint – Facebook’s online training academy. It offers free courses on everything you need to know about FB advertising.
Social Media Marketing Skills
There is no doubt that social media marketing is a very powerful form of digital marketing.
Almost every company rely on their social media accounts to reach the maximum number of audience at the same time.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram help you to connect with large masses of people and spread information about your brand and products.
Nearly 90% of your audience are available on social media platforms and simply cannot overlook the need for social media marketing.
Handling social media marketing doesn’t mean just uploading information on Facebook or Instagram. It includes much more than that, that’s why companies need the help of qualified professionals.
The necessary skills needed for social media marketers are:
- Ability to create and implement a social media content calendar.
- Knowledge on how to use tools to distribute content on the various social platforms.
- Creative skills to create ads that are compelling and enticing to people.
- Know which KPIs to use to monitor the reach and performance of social media campaigns
Resources to Improve your Social Media Marketing Skills
Content Marketing Skills
All digital marketing campaigns have something in common and this is no other than content.
- In order to rank on the top positions of Google, you need high-quality content.
- To get more followers on Facebook, you need good ads.
- To encourage people to buy your products or services through email marketing, you need convincing content.
Becoming a content marketer is not easy. It’s not like Facebook or Google Ads that you have to learn a tool but writing content for online audiences is more than that.
You need to have a diverse set of skills that will include:
SEO Copywriting skills – Knowing how to write content for users in a way that search engines can also understand
Writing skills – Writing documents that are well structured, grammatically correct and free of spelling errors
Research skills – Before writing an article you need to do your research first to make sure that what you write is correct and backed up by science, studies or personal experiences.
Storytelling skills – Advertising on the various social platforms using different content formats (text, images, audio, and video) is not like writing a book but it’s closer to telling a story.
The good news is that once you have a good understanding of the basics, you can build your skills by practice. No one can tell you exactly the words to use to write great articles, this will happen with a lot of practice.
If you don’t like writing, then you can consider mastering other digital marketing skills and hiring professionals for the content part.
It’s not the ideal solution for small businesses and solo freelancers but it’s better to concentrate on areas that you can become an expert rather than trying to improve your skills on something that you don’t like doing.
Resources to Learn more about Content Marketing
Video Marketing Skills
Video marketing is on the rise. YouTube is the second popular search engine with millions of viewed hours per day and Facebook Videos are now used more frequently than other forms of content.
Video is considered to be one of the most engaging forms of content. Audiences don’t like to read long posts but they are more likely to watch a video about a subject.
Marketers prefer video marketing because it helps them to boost their ROI through multiple channels.
What is important to understand is that as a digital marketing professional, you don’t need to know how to create or edit videos.
This is the job of video makers, animators and graphics designers. Your job is to build the necessary video marketing skills.
You should be able to:
- Guide video makers on what kind of videos to make – how long to make videos, what message to pass through the video, the style of the video, duration, etc.
- Know how to promote the video on the various channels both organically and through paid campaigns.
- Optimize your video channels in all networks.
Resources to improve your Video Marketing Skills
Email Marketing Skills
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of Internet marketing but it is still one of the most effective. Brands rely on email marketing for engaging with their audiences, building a community and for increasing conversions.
To become an email marketing expert, you need the following skills:
Technical Skills – Good knowledge of how email marketing tools work. There are many tools in the market like MailChimp, Aweber, etc. You don’t have to learn all the tools but you need to know how to use one of them.
Marketing Skills – A good idea of how email funnels work and how to implement them using a tool. Email funnels can be a very effective sales tool if executed correctly. In short, an email funnel consists of a series of emails sent to a pre-defined audience for the purpose of making more sales.
Conversion Optimization Skills – Email marketing success is heavily based on conversion optimization. One of the most critical tools of conversion optimization is A/B testing. As an email marketer, you need to design and implement A/B testing scenarios to improve the results of your email campaigns.
Resources to Learn More about Email Marketing
- Email marketing tips – 25 tips to help you get started with email marketing
If you want to pursue a career in digital marketing, then the first thing to do is to learn digital marketing. By this, I mean to build the necessary skills to work with the different digital marketing disciplines.
Digital marketing is not a single process but it’s a number of processes that share a single goal: To promote a business, products or services online.
The best way to acquire the necessary skills is to follow a course or any other online resource and to practice. Theory alone does not make you a digital marketing specialist but it’s important to implement the different concepts in practice and acquire hands-on experience.
If you’re starting out now, you don’t have to become an expert in everything at the same time.
Choose the channel that you find more interesting (search engine marketing, social media, email, etc) and build the required skills. Once you feel confident that you know how it works, you can move on to the next.
Finally, have in mind that the learning process never stops. The digital marketing landscape is changing all the time and you need to follow along if you want to succeed in this field.