Basic skills every new digital marketer needs to be successful
Digital marketing is a complex field that requires a great deal of study, training and experience in order to be successful in. Because this discipline is intrinsically tied to technology, commonly accepted and widely used strategies employed by digital marketers are liable to change seemingly overnight with little to no warning.
This forces practitioners who want to be successful to be flexible in how they approach digital marketing and discourages them from relying on the same old techniques over and over again. With that said, there are several core skills that new digital marketers should try to master in order to have the best chance at making headway in this highly competitive field.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important skills that every up and coming digital marketer needs to have in their arsenal in order to achieve success on behalf of their clients:
Experience with CMS (Content Management Systems)
A CMS (Content Management System) is a platform from which a business can easily publish content, edit it and manage its effectiveness in driving digital marketing goals. The biggest CMS, WordPress, is used by countless organisations as a means of managing content marketing campaigns which are essential in almost all contemporary digital marketing efforts.
Having experience with these platforms looks great on the resume of any budding digital marketer as it will mean they will be able to participate in the core of required work much faster and with less training. Because the rudimentary features of these platforms are easily accessible, there’s no excuse for new digital marketers not to familiarise themselves with the basics.
Understanding how to record and interpret data analytics
A core feature of digital marketing is the fact that, because it’s tied to technology, recording metrics of success is not only easy but incredibly insightful in informing future strategy. Data such as bounce rates, dwell times, click through rates, GPS activity and other insights into user behaviour can tell you what strategies are working and what strategies should be altered or discontinued altogether.
Understandably, these insights are also incredibly useful for demonstrating success to clients, many of whom can be sceptical of how what you’re doing for them generating a return. Often times, drawing a direct parallel between digital marketing tactics and a boost in customer engagement and sales can be difficult without a deep understanding of the data and how to communicate it to non-experts.
In the early days of social media, there was a lot of confusion about how to effectively use it as a marketing platform, with many brands sinking large amounts of money into Facebook and Twitter campaigns that yielded little meaningful engagement. Nowadays, social media is well understood and has found its place in the digital marketing mix.
Most if not all brands will have a rudimentary presence on social media that needs the expert touch of a digital marketer to ensure it actually drives customer engagement positively influences purchasing behaviour. Many businesses will have plenty of ‘fans’ supporting them via social media platforms, but actually converting this audience into paying customers is something that all good digital marketers will specialise in.
This means that new practitioners need to study the different social media platforms so they can get an understanding of what kind of content is most appropriate for each and what kind of frequency said content should be distributed at. Having experience with social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite gives digital marketers an extra edge when it comes to organising effective social media campaigns for their clients.
While there are plenty more skills that a digital marketer should try to master, these 3 will give new practitioners an excellent starting point from which they can leverage their expertise and achieve tangible results for their clients.
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