Top Skills That Will Kickstart Your Digital Marketing Career
Everyone uses digital marketing these days, but the growth in demand far exceeds the growth in the supply of digital marketing specialists and experts. Yes, there are many who are pursuing a career in this field, but there are still so many opportunities waiting to be explored.
Digital marketing has always been a mix of science and art. It is a field that has low entry barriers, but it is tricky to enter nonetheless. In order to become an effective digital marketer, there are a few crucial skills you need to master first. We are going to review the top skills that will kickstart your digital marketing career in this article.
Data Analysis
Digital marketing may seem like a field that relies on creativity and instinct from the outside, but it is actually a data-driven field to the last detail. Everything you do as a digital marketer can be measured through analytics. Every decision you make must be based on data as well.
Google Analytics is the most popular tool used by digital marketers to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics. It is the first tool you need to master if you are serious about starting a career in this field.
Fortunately, there are plenty of Google Analytics training programs and courses you can take to get started. These programmes cover every subject about the analytics tool, from the basics of setting up metrics to tracking detailed campaigns and user behaviour.
There are certifications too, and they are certainly worth pursuing. Being a certified Google Analytics expert will give you that boost you need to get your digital marketing career going.
Social Media Ads
Forget about influencer marketing, campaign formulations, and organic reach for a second. While those instruments are commonly used in online marketing campaigns, the next instrument you want to master is actually social media advertising.
Social media advertising lets you target specific user groups and market segments with every campaign. You can use text, display, and video ads to attract different types of users too. On top of that, you also have complete control over your budget.
The better you are at maximizing the return on investment for paid social media ads – meaning you know how to craft the right call to action, target a suitable audience, and amplify the right content – the more valuable you are as a digital marketer.
Mastering paid social media ads opens the door to other advertising networks. This is because most advertising networks are operated similarly, so knowing how to place effective CPM bids for social media advertising network will help you master Google Ads and other ad networks too.
Email Marketing and Automation
Next, we have email marketing. Email marketing may be an old trick in the digital marketing book, but it is a trick that produces high conversion – it is one of the most effective digital marketing instruments on the market right now.
You can use resources like the aforementioned Find Courses website to also find training programmes on email marketing. This instrument is far more sophisticated than it used to be, especially now that you can integrate email marketing with the rest of your digital marketing activities.
ActiveCampaign, for instance, lets you use emails to reinforce your call to action. When integrated with your shopping cart, email marketing becomes an automated tool for reminding customers about abandoned carts, upselling products they may be interested in, and doing so much more.
Email marketing is also closely tied to the sales funnel. Automation tools let you monitor potential customers as they move through your sales funnel, which means you can send the right emails (with the right messages) at the right moments along that funnel.
Search Engine Optimisation
No good digital marketer will neglect doing sufficient search engine optimization (SEO), especially now that more than 60% of traffic going to websites and eCommerce platforms comes from search engines. Optimizing pages for search engines is actually the easy part.
By learning about SEO, you are learning about onsite and offsite optimizations. Knowing how to measure the quality of backlinks will help you become more effective as a digital marketer. Mastering the art of tracking relevance will push you a step further.
Most SEO training programmes also include training on Search Engine Marketing or SEM. As the name suggests, SEM lets you pay for clicks through Google Ads. Paid placements are a great way to gain traction when starting a new digital marketing campaign.
To complete the set, you need to know how to keep track of algorithm changes, since those changes will affect how well your digital assets perform SEO-wise. That brings us back to the first skill we covered, which is data analysis and monitoring.
There are other skills to master too, including social media marketing, content production and content marketing, and project management. To kickstart your digital marketing career, however, the top four skills we discussed in this article are the ones you need to acquire first. Start with a tailored training programme and be a digital marketing expert in no time.