Since the outbreak of Covid 19, brands and businesses have started acquiring various digital platforms to connect with their target customers. Consequently, the scope and role of digital marketers has evolved over the last year.

2020-21 was a time when remote work became the new normal in the industry. We have seen new ways of buying, selling, and marketing goods and services. Besides, online eCommerce transactions have faced a rapid growth of 40% during the crisis. This had an impact on the digital marketers as well who chose to grow their career remotely while working from the comfort of their homes.

Social media, as one of the most used channels for marketing, has seen enormous growth, with 4.33 billion users worldwide on platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. For instance, Instagram is one of the most used platforms, with more than 400 million stories per day. On the other hand, there is TikTok, and it has been booming since 2019, with its consistency and uniformity being the two major reasons behind the rapid growth.

With the development of advanced tools and strategies, digital marketers tend to keep themselves updated to match the industry’s needs. While experienced digital marketers are enhancing their existing skills to be more employable, it may be a tough struggle for the novice to understand which digital marketing skills to acquire.

By the end of this post, you will know what digital marketing skills you need, what skills you already possess and which ones you may need to add to your repertoire.

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Top 9 skills for every digital marketer

As digital marketing is growing rapidly, it may become difficult for many to identify their specialization. Here are the top nine in-demand skills that will help you in your digital marketing career while ensuring fast career growth.

1. Email marketing

Ahh! Have you ever noticed that your spam folders get flooded each month with emails that you barely read? That’s the result of poor email marketing skills.

Accuracy, consistency, and high conversion rate are the three best features of email marketing. When targeted towards the specific customer base, email marketing is still the ‘king’ of digital marketing. Business updates, special offers, added perks, or even regular business happenings: let your customers know about all these through email marketing.

To ease out your job, you can also use email marketing platforms like Klaviyo. Some alternatives to Klaviyo include Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Zoho Mail. They are available in both free and paid versions to suit the needs of every digital marketer.

2. Creative writing and editing

The foundation of a good marketer lies in his or her ability to write great content.

If you are still wondering that creative writing and what you wrote in your school are the same, then you are mistaken. Creative writing has so much more to offer. Creative writing is all about how well you can convert your content and sell. You need to understand the marketplace and their needs before pitching a single sentence. Be it a headline, a title tag, the meta description, or the subject body, your pitch must be catchy and unique.

Creative writing helps in customer retention, lead generation, and site authority. At the same time, mastering the art of editing is also crucial. You must know how to edit the existing content to gain more attention from your customers and generate sales.

3. SEO and SEM

The most common terms in the digital world are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). These methods are the backbone of any digital marketing campaign, and SEO and SEM are the strongest ways to attract customers through organic search. Organic search results are more likely to be clicked than paid search results, hence SEO and SEM are game-changers for a digital marketing campaign.

Schema markups, building sitemaps, UX design, and local SEO are a few of the skills you must acquire to excel in SEO digital marketing. In addition, to excel in SEM , you need to develop your skills in keyword research and how best to display adverts on screen, amongst others. You should also consider these effective marketing strategies: building backlinks, fixing site errors, and, finally, analyzing the site performance to help in the sustainable and long-term growth of a brand.

4. Data analytics

Google Analytics is the best platform when it comes to analyzing your site data and performance. The tool enriches you with a lot of metrics and information that speaks loud about the functioning of your site. But without proper understanding and analysis, you won’t be able to rectify your past marketing mistakes.

It is the role of a digital marketer to use the analytics data to understand consumer behavior and suggest possible ways to boost traffic and conversions. Integrating cross-platform event tracking tools, the ability to study diverse data sets and proficiency with data visualization tools are some of the skills a digital marketer should acquire to make a brand more successful.

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5. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing, better known as SMM, is another in-demand skill in digital marketing. Social media has been evolving over the past few years and is one of the most effective channels to grab customer attention and scale conversions.

The creative mind of a marketer plays a big role in SMM. Apart from creating market-specific content, understanding user needs, expertise in conversion tracking and analyzing data are some of the other skills that a marketer needs to specialize in SMM. Optimized social media posts and targeted ads not only promote the brand to a precise market but also increase the chance of conversions.

Each social media platform is designed with a specific purpose. Using different platforms for individual business goals is another fundamental aspect a digital marketer must be aware of.

6. Voice-enabled searches

Whether it’s a laptop or a portable digital device, voice searches are on the rise nowadays.

Virtual assistants and voice searches are gaining popularity day by day. Mastering how to set up a strategy for voice searches will enable you to create a better user experience on every device. In addition, as voice searches are more conversational and flowing, digital marketers need to polish their keyword search and SEO skills in order to set up a better marketing strategy.

People tend to ask full questions or sentences over voice assistants. Therefore, marketers should focus more on generating long-tail keywords or a whole sentence as the targeted keyword.

7. Personal branding

As a digital marketer, you must invest in personal branding. Personal branding does not aim at bragging about your achievements, rather it elucidates who you are. A strong digital presence is the first step to personal branding. This not only gives you an identity but also allows you to build strong relationships with your customers and clients.

It also differentiates you from your competitors thereby allowing more leveraging and client prospecting.

8. Conversion Rate Optimization

While every business aims at getting more traffic both organically and inorganically, more traffic does not always mean more conversions. Therefore, it is always wise to choose limited leads but promising conversions. And here comes the concept of conversion rate optimization.

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the process of experimenting with various website pages and Calls-to-action (CTAs) to understand which works best for the brand. Understanding A/B testing, commitment measurements, and transformation pipes are some of the beneficial aspects one needs to learn as a digital marketer.

9. Content marketing

Engaging content is a key to successful content marketing. Whether it’s a blog post, social media posts, audio content, or a visual storytelling, grasping content always wins hearts. As a marketer, you have to not only master the art of creating high-quality content but also know the secret to gain more engagements.

Among others competitor search, strategic thinking, and data-driven mindset are a few of the skills that are needed to do content marketing in a better way.

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Conclusion

As digital marketers need to work with a variety of clients and industries, flexibility and self-learning capability are two major aspects that keep them going through this ever-evolving niche. Besides, with tough competition in the market, you need to learn and upgrade yourself continuously with the best skills of digital marketing. And developing the right skill set is the only way to make yourself more employable in the industry.

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