Top Five Skills to Advance your Digital Marketing Career

Beyond the multitude of soft skills applicable in a wide swath of careers, from adaptability and critical thinking to active listening, mediation, mentoring, time management, and so on, there are a number of critical hard skills every digital marketer must master, regardless of industry and budget, to advance their career.

These are the five most critical.

1. Metrics and Predictive Analytics

The overwhelming majority of marketing decisions are predicated by the collection of qualitative data, the analysis of this data, then the use of the data to both develop initial strategic direction and alter and fine-tune efforts mid-campaign.

Primarily, from a digital marketing perspective, there are three key types of data you will collect and use:

1.???? Historical: such as conversion rates from past campaigns

2.???? Current: such as paid engagement rate

3.???? Competitive: such as keywords used by your competitors

There are a multitude of tools, such as Google Analytics, to aid you in gathering key data ranging from traffic patterns to page views, bounce rates, session duration, and so on. Not only is it critical to gain a working knowledge of these tools, but it is equally important to building the knowledge base needed to accurately weigh the collected data for both institutional value and relevance, then to use this data to build targeted digital plans.

2. Strategic Plan Creation

The foundation of all marketing efforts is the strategic plan. Typically, consisting of three types - annual, in support of annual and multi-annual corporate initiatives; campaign or project in support of a time- or objective-limited goal such as a new product launch; and situational, such as during an emerging crisis - all three draw from six key factors:

1.???? Historical experience

2.???? Industry insight

3.???? Marketing insight, both insight into marketing best practices as a whole, and insight into marketing streams adjacent to your digital and social stream, such as public relations and corporate investing

4.???? Digital and social knowledge, specifically, what tools are available, pros and cons of each, budgetary requirements for each, skillsets required for each, and so on

5.???? Best practices both from a digital marketing point-of-view and industry point-of-view, easiest gained from industry and competitive monitoring

6.???? Budget as this impacts what can and cannot be achieved

Depending on the nature of your plan, as well as its scope, key elements in your plan typically consist of your objective, metrics for measuring your success of attainment, deliverables for all plans and milestones for larger plans with multiple phases, key stakeholders, budget, and timeline.

Knowing how to build plans, a key function for more senior roles, is key for advancing beyond junior positions.

3. Project Management

This is the execution phase. For the most restricted campaigns or budgets, this may consist of a limited team - for the smallest of operations, simply yourself - but for larger or more encompassing campaigns, such as annual campaigns, campaigns greater in scope such as international versus merely local campaigns, compressed campaigns with greater urgency such as product launches, and campaigns with larger budgets often exceeding $1M/annum, it is not unusual to manage or coordinate with multiple teams including:

-?????? Departmental teams, both immediate, such as digital content creators, and adjacent including public relations

-?????? External teams, including marketing and digital agencies, and individual creators such as writers and video editors and talent such as influencers

-?????? Cross-departmental teams such as legal, acquisitions, R&D, product, and HR

Project management requires a careful and detailed mix of fostering collaboration and teamwork, time management and organization, goal- and objective-setting and achievement, budgetary management, critical thinking and problem solving, and adaptability.

It can be a detailed, strategic, and logistical challenge, if you master the skills need to manage projects from the outset through implementation, you will have the skills you need to draw from far greater resources, coordinate far more diverse and critical skills, and achieve far greater and far more senior objectives.

4. Marketing Skills

At the heart of all marketing efforts, digital and otherwise, is the creation of content. Knowing how to write - posts, emails, display ads, website copy, podcasts, video scripts, etc. - and how to do so for multiple digital applications, is critically important. Then there is the multitude of additional content channels, most pervasively these days, video, from short burst of TikTok to longer, education content often found on more technical sites.

Additionally, a digital marketers must have a strong understanding of design ethos. Obviously, for more complex designs, as for more complex content, a specialist can be engaged. But a digital marketer must have sufficient knowledge to judge if they work they are producing, or the work a content creator is producing on their behalf, is designed with efficacy.

And, as important as the skills needed to create content is the related content marketing knowledge, from SEO, SEM, and CRM to how to craft optimal user experience, how to engage customers, and so on.

All digital marketers must have all of the above skills, from those who wish to obtain an entry-level position to those who wish to advance to senior levels.

5. Digital tools

There is a host of digital tools every digital marketer should have a strong working knowledge of ranging from analytics and metrics including Facebook Insights to productivity software including Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, to Web development tools such as HTML and CSS and social publishing and listening tools including Sprinklr and Hootsuite.

But, these days, AI is the next tool all digital marketers must learn. To start, I recommend gaining working familiarity with ChatGPT, Bard, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney.

Working familiarity with the above will help you to advance from the more junior positions while in-depth familiarity will position you take on greater responsibilities, both in terms of budget and scope, allowing you to advance to more senior positions.

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