5 Skills you Need to be a Digital Marketer
Now that most of us are under some sort of lockdown, this is a good time to be thinking about developing and expanding the skills needed to be a successful digital marketer.
In my previous career in training and education, I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the future of work, and trying to predict what sort of skills to invest in. This is how I became interested in technology, and in the last few years I have taught myself the digital marketing skill base which I now use every day.
The Future of Marketing
Marketing generally is moving towards placing user experience (UX) at its centre. Old style sales funnels which suddenly drop off the minute our customer has made their purchase are starting to look dated. Post Google’s 2011 Pandas update, which started to penalise low value sites, there was and still is a renewed emphasis on producing quality content which sticks around (aka ‘long term discoverable content’). This has also led to the resurgence of the old-school blog which I am seeing more and more after years of being told the future was video, and only video. While Facebook and Instagram do indeed love video, audiences are more selective. Not everyone has the time or inclination to watch a video while scrolling on their phone at a bus stop or in their lunch break. This shows us that while our industry constantly evolves, some skills such as writing will always be valuable. More widely though, we still need to keep learning and upskilling ourselves.
These are the skills which I would recommend investing some of your ‘lockdown’ time into learning and developing if you don’t already have them. (Note: I have not been paid for any of the resources I recommend — they are purely personal recommendations on the basis they’ve worked for me.)
Content Creation and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
I was temped to put these two under separate headings but decided not to as, to my mind, you cannot have one without the other. Content is the core of digital marketing. It helps your visitors get to know you, educates them, and builds deeper relationships via social media posts.
SEO revolves around keyword placement, URL titles, headings, image titles, and backlinks. Your content is the thing that enables you to create the UX which drives each of these components, but without effective SEO no one will see it.
The SEO will lead the visitor to your page, and the content will keep them there — hence they are the yin and yang of digital marketing (or the gin and tonic, if you prefer!)
If your SEO could with a brush up, take a look at Yoast who are currently, very generously, offering their fantastic “All around SEO” course for free. Mike Pearson’s “Stupid Simple SEO” is worth a look too.
Persuasion Skills
I said earlier that there will always be a place for some old-school skills and here is another one — sales and marketing psychology.
At a very basic level, marketing is a big piece of the sales jigsaw. Without good marketing there can be no sale. Stephen Larson defines marketing as, ‘pre-empting and eliminating any reason for your prospect to say ‘no’’. It’s a good definition as I think great marketing does exactly that. We know that visitors need to see our adverts approximately seven times before they buy, but we need to have created enough resonance for them to remain interested enough to keep clicking. We do this with using persuasive language which triggers the response we want.
There are tons of resources online if you’d like to explore this more (and I recommend that you do). I personally like, Nick Kolenda, and Jordan ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Belfort’s, “Straight Line Selling” is worth a look too.
Supercharging your Tech Skills
Learning basic front end web development skills, if you don’t already have them can make so so much more valuable and effective as a digital marketer.
Specifically, you could work towards becoming comfortable using HTML & CSS. HTML is Hypertext Markup Language, the foundation coding language that tells web browsers such as Google Chrome how web pages are structured. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is what creates the colours, page layouts, and fonts. So if HTML is the foundation of the house, CSS is the interior decor which turns it into somewhere liveable.
Why does a Marketer need Tech Skills?
Tech skills are even more important if you work as part of a small team, or remotely, as more of us are doing these days. If you’re sitting there reading this thinking, ‘why do I need to learn to code? I have access to an IT department OR it’s all drag and drop these days’ — well yes … but it’s a bit like going on holiday to France without being able to speak French. You can of course rely on their being able to speak English and your trusty Google Translate, but it’s so much easier if you have a rudimentary grasp of the language yourself. Just knowing a little basic coding means you can change a web page to the client’s branding colours by yourself, move things around, or go in to someone else’s webpage and take a cheeky look at the key words they’re using (see above about SEO!)
It takes far less time to learn basic HTML and CSS than you might think. A good starting place is The Coding Academy which has free courses. I personally LOVE Colt Steele’s The Web Developer’s Bootcamp. It’s available on Udemy for between £10 and £16 and is a great course to take you from zero to a reasonably competent front and back end developer in a relatively short space of time (this is the one I used to learn to code).
You could also think about brushing up on your knowledge of some design apps. You don’t need to become a design expert (and I’m certainly not!) but knowing your way around free apps like Canva, Screenflow, and Lightroom can help enormously too and really give your final edits the ‘wow’ factor. These apps all come with free tutorials.
Learn Data Analysis
Traditionally, marketing was a career choice for those of us who were good with words but perhaps less so with numbers. Not any more! Marketing these days is all about data, to the point where we specifically talk about ‘data driven marketing’ fueled by ‘data driven growth’. There’s no getting away from it, I’m afraid.
Data is essential to understanding how your target audience think, behave, and buy. Analytics from digital marketing can help build the demographics and psychographics of the customer. The data we get from apps like Facebook in particular can tell us our visitor’s, age and location as well as likes and dislikes.
Why does a Marketer need Data Analysis skills?
As a marketer, being able to read and understand this data is hugely beneficial. We can use it to decide what we should be marketing to each demographic, and target right in on our audience. Once the data has been analysed it can be used to help refine and improve our campaigns. In summary, data and how you use it is how you justify your worth to your client.
To be a good digital marketer, you will need to understand Google Analytics as it’s crucial to learning how your site’s visitors are behaving. You will also need to be able to read and explain social media metrics such as Facebook and Instagram.
To track and organise data, spreadsheets can be your best friend. You can use them to keep track of projects and check off your to-do list, set up targets and KPIs, and manage content and social media calendars.
Learning advanced spreadsheet skills such as data validation and pivot tables can help you communicate with your client better, and give them a good visual representation of how effective your marketing is.
Happily there are lots of really good free resources to help you here.
Google Analytics has its own academy. Facebook Blueprint is Facebook’s own training package which is mostly free. Udemy offer some great free basic Excel and Google Sheets training packages too.
People Skills
It might seem a little odd to be referencing people skills at a time when we are moving away from working in offices, but, with my HR hat on, I believe that good communication is becoming more and more essential for that very reason.
Although important in any situation, good communication is a key factor when it comes to working as part of a remote team. Quite simply, remote teams run on effective communication and without it you lose efficiency and collaboration.
It’s not just verbal either. A good communicator is someone who can get their message across in a friendly and persuasive manner over email, text, and old-school phone calls (we still use them now and again!)
If you are managing a remote team, you need to be able to motivate and occasionally discipline your team and you need great communication skills to do this.
If you would like to explore this more, Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ is a classic. Dan O’Connor has a great free YouTube channel with lots of helpful information too.
Summary
Digital marketing is a competitive field, and there a lots of things we need to do in order to be successful. It’s important not to forget about working on and leveraging our existing skills both hard and soft. Having a good solid base skill such as writing, topped up with skills in other areas such as tech and data will help you become what Rand Fishkin calls a T-Shaped Marketer. Long term this will take you further than relying on just one skill, or being a Jack or Jill of all trades and master of none.
Why not try and use the lockdown to develop some of these skills? Let me know how you get on!
