Important Digital Marketing Skills And How To Improve Them

Updated 8 September 2023

Digital marketers use various marketing techniques to reach the target audience, promote brand awareness and maintain strong customer relationships. A successful career in digital marketing requires a candidate to develop specific skills to promote services or products. If you have an interest in becoming a digital marketer, it might be beneficial to understand the digital marketing skills required for a rewarding career. In this article, we discuss what online marketing skills are, offer a list of skills required in the workplace and understand the tips to improve your skill set.

What Are Digital Marketing Skills?

Digital marketing skills are core competencies that a digital marketing expert can use to promote a product, service or brand through digital communications. It is a combination of technical, hard and soft skills. Most hard skills require knowledge of the specific type of marketing. These skills help a marketer understand a candidate's ability to implement different marketing methods. A marketer looks for these skills to create online marketing strategies to promote their brand, services or products. Using these skills, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign and understand which one was successful.

Top Digital Marketing Skills

Here are some online marketing skills to master:

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation or SEO is a process of optimising digital content to rank higher in the search results, especially when a user searches for a specific keyword or phrase. A digital marketer incorporates SEO strategies to increase website traffic. This skill allows you to conduct keyword research and market research to create strategies for developing search engine friendly content. SEO skills can include:

Performing A/B testing for improving website traffic
Using paid advertisement and searches
Analysing user data and integrating keywords or phrases in the content

Social media marketing

The ability to use digital marketing to attract a social media audience is desirable for many marketers. Companies often use social media platforms for advertising their offerings to a larger audience. Social media skills are essential for increasing brand awareness and enhancing customer relationships. Using these skills, you can create an attractive social media campaign that attracts new customers and direct them to the company's website. This skill set allows you to customise marketing campaigns to fit the target audience's emotions. Social media marketing skills can include:

Responding to followers' comments and complaints
Understanding the function of every social media platform
Knowing about the latest and current social media strategies

Research and data analysis

A digital marketer analyses data to evaluate the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns and improve their strategies. Employers prefer candidates with excellent research and data analysis skills to assess customer satisfaction. Using their analysis, a marketer can understand what strategies work with the customers and which are not yielding desired results. These skills help you create accurate interpretations and conclusions about data results. Research and data analysis skills include:

Creating user surveys for collecting feedback
Determining the requirements of the target audience
Interpreting result of data analysis

Public speaking

Employers prefer marketers who can communicate effectively and present information with team members and managers. Being good at public speaking allows you to showcase your marketing ideas and innovation to others. Also, speaking at conferences and business events can be a great way to generate leads for a business. Public speaking skills can help you with:

Grabbing the customer's or audience's attention
Expanding your brand's reach
Growing online website traffic
Educating prospects and existing customers

Email marketing

Often, digital marketers use email marketing to reach prospects and build long-term relationships with them. It helps marketers stay relevant to the existing customer base by communicating regularly through newsletters. Knowing the basics of email marketing enhances customer purchases and generates leads. You can use email marketing campaigns to promote brand recognition, provide customer satisfaction surveys and build new marketing campaigns. Email marketing skills can help you with:

Automating lead nurturing
Designing email newsletters and templates using brand elements like fonts and colours
Knowing how to use databases to store customer information

Graphic design

To create visually attractive digital marketing campaigns, marketers use graphic design. With graphic designing skills, marketers can build creative graphics and visual elements for their campaigns. This increases traffic on digital marketing channels and attracts new customers. Using graphic designing skills, you can create an attractive brand and build a marketing campaign that captures the audience's attention. Graphic designing skills can help you with:

Developing new, unique and creative designs for online marketing campaigns
Integrating visual messages within social media platforms
Communicating with clients for identifying product design guidelines

Pay-per-click advertising

To increase the effectiveness of organic search results and increase online visibility, digital marketers use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. A PPC campaign ensures a brand is visible on the top search results, but marketers pay for every click the advertisement gets. So, employers prefer marketers who know about PPC and can allocate the right budget for a campaign. The ability to identify keywords to target, the ad format and the best channel can help in enhancing a company's online visibility.

Knowing how to negotiate deals is another contributing factor for the successful implementation of PPC in your campaign. Pay-per-click advertising can help you with:

Calculating and interpreting click-through-rates, conversion rate and other marketing metrics
Understanding PPC advertising platforms
Choosing the best keyword and advertisement format for placing the bid

Conversion rate optimisation

Another essential skill for digital marketers is conversion rate optimisation (CRO). CRO refers to the action a marketer wants their desired audience to complete. The specific action can be downloading a guide, requesting a quote, subscribing to a newsletter or signing up for an email list. To ensure customers take the desired action, marketers often use the CRO technique to understand the conditions that drive maximum engagement. Understanding CRO best practices are essential for a rewarding digital marketing career. Conversion rate optimisation can help you with:

Increasing revenue and expanding customer base
Articulating precisely what is not working with the campaign and what the company can do better
Performing A/B split testing

Copywriting

Using copywriting skills, a marketing professional creates accurate, exciting and error-free writing for various online campaigns. These professionals might create online web content, produce copy for SEO, craft email and landing pages and create captions for social media platforms. This skill set is essential because it helps you promote a brand, reflect its brand language and enhance customer trust through brand association. Copywriting differs from other writing because it allows you to communicate value, capture the audience's attention and inspire actions using a few words. Copywriting skills can help you with:

Communicating the value of the brand's offering
Using appropriate keywords and SEO
Identifying languages and content that attracts customers

Creativity

Creativity is a valuable online marketing skill because it allows you to create innovative ideas for a digital marketing campaign. Creativity can help you differentiate your products and services from others in the market. It helps you reach out to customers in a way that differs from your competitors. Focus on brainstorming ideas and learning new perspectives from team members to improve your creative skills.

Tips For Improving Online Marketing Skills

Here are a few tips for improving your online marketing skills:

Test new digital marketing strategies

You can improve your online marketing skills by testing new digital marketing strategies. This can help you understand which marketing strategies are successful for a business. If a new campaign is ineffective, you can determine areas of improvement and test a new strategy. Using the internet and other sources, you can first identify new marketing techniques to ensure your marketing efforts resonate with the target audience.

Enrol in online courses

Focus on enrolling in an online course to develop your online marketing skills. You can consider taking specialised SEO, PPC, email marketing and social media marketing courses. Educational and certified courses can sharpen your skill set and expand your knowledge of digital media. It can help you create marketing campaigns that resonate with the target audience.

Learn from others

You can learn from the marketing team or a marketing professional to improve your skill set. These people can help you sharpen your soft and technical online marketing skills. You can ask them for feedback about your marketing efforts. Also, consider hiring an experienced professional as a mentor who can guide you in your digital marketing efforts. Through their mentorship, you can enhance your level of performance at work.

Conduct market research

Conducting market research can help you identify marketing techniques that resonate with your audience. Through research, you can learn about the latest digital marketing trends. This can help you understand how technology can affect sales and competitiveness in the market. You can even use the research to enhance your marketing strategies.