THE RIPE STUFF

11 Apr ‘19

Sharpen Your Skills: 10 Digital Marketing Skills Every Good Marketer Should Know

11 Apr ‘19

In: Marketing, Web Design & Development, / By: Ripe Media

Digital marketing is quickly becoming one of the key ways for brands to get the word out online. In fact, it is the key way to market yourself on the internet.

That’s because the term “digital marketing” encompasses a lot of methods of marketing and advertisement. If you’re a digital marketer, it’s essential that you’re up to speed on what is working and what you should be working on.

We’re going to go over a few of the most important digital marketing skills for marketers to have in 2019.

Key Digital Marketing Skills

If you’re already a marketer, it’s likely that you have a number of these skills. It never hurts to have a refresher, though, and there’s going to be something in this list that you might be slacking on.

Let’s get started:

1. Search Engine Optimization

This is the most essential piece of the digital marketing equation. Social media might come out on top of SEO in some niches, but it still holds that optimizing your website for search engines is always important.

If you’ve been slacking on great optimization in favor of social media or something else, it might be time to put a little more emphasis on it.

2. Content Creation

It’s becoming an industry standard for digital marketers to provide some level of content creation for their clients. The content that you create should be suitable to the client’s website as well as their social media platforms.

In a lot of cases, blog content will do the trick. At the same time, creating good blog content entails doing keyword research, knowing where to place keywords, collecting backlinks, and writing really great copy. All of those things could have their own sections in this article, meaning that content creation is a pretty involved process.

One form of content creation that’s extremely important is video, which we’ll discuss next.

3. Video Creation

People are far more likely to receive content through video as their thumbing through their feeds. Video is currently holding users’ attention for a lot longer than the average post.

That means you have the opportunity to see huge results if you can create an optimized, relevant video for your target audience. It’s a difficult task at first because creating a great video requires that you learn something about filming, editing, rhetoric, and production.

At the same time, you can network with professionals who understand all of those elements already. The numbers that good videos can bring in are actually astounding.

4. Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click marketing is one of those areas that everyone can kind of skim through and use decently. If you have the time to do a little research, you can pick up PPC and work relatively well with it.

At the same time, seeing impressive results through carefully placed ads is another story. If you want to see huge numbers for your clients, you’ll need to do work in keyword research, demographic data, and some other forms of data analysis.

That brings us to our next skill.

5. Data Analysis

You’re going to need data analysis skills across the board as a digital marketer. There are three general applications of data analysis that come to mind.

First, you’ll need to look into the numbers of your client’s current site. Understanding where a client is currently is tantamount to helping them get to where they want to go. Further, you’ll need to look carefully at their target audience and what they’re doing online.

Second, you will be looking closely at things like Google Analytics and other supplemental tools that give you search engine data in a numerical format. Reading graphs and piecing together information from the data in order to make inferences is an extremely valuable skill.

Finally, You have to be keeping an eye on market data. This way, you’ll have a better idea of how to anticipate changes in user behavior, search engine algorithms, and changes in the market.

6. Social Media Expertise

Anyone can create a social media account. Not everyone can grasp methods of gaining huge followings and generating sales. Navigating social media from a business standpoint is an increasingly difficult thing.

There are also a number of platforms that provide access to different demographics. Understanding those different platforms is crucial if you want to provide your client with a top-level surface. Each one has different rules and regulations, tendencies, and tricks to success.

7. Back-end/Web Design Knowledge

You have to understand the systems that underpin your client’s website. That means having a little coding knowledge and understanding of the content managing systems that your clients tend to use.

You might have excellent ideas and strategies for your clients, but they mean nothing if you can’t translate them into a website. It might do you well to research common content managing systems and learn some coding.

8. Web Design

Site architecture and page layout are extremely important to the user experience. It’s not hard to tell when a site needs touching up, and you should have the skills and the eye to make improvements if need be.

Not only does a well-designed site make users happy, but it also makes search engines happy. Site architecture is one of Google’s ranking factors, meaning that you’ll be placed higher in the results. Good site architecture also makes it easy for Google’s crawlers to index your information.

9. Great Communication

You probably won’t be able to do all of the things listed in this article. To really master each one would take a lifetime. That’s why it’s important for you to have good communication skills and be comfortable working with different professionals.

You should seamlessly incorporate consultants and new team members when they’re needed. This will make it easier for you to finish the project and you’ll end up with a better final product.

10. Adaptability

The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing. The technology used online is changing just as fast as user preferences, so it’s important that you don’t get bogged down in any one way of thinking.

Make sure that you’re keeping up on industry changes and understanding what each one means.