Essential Digital Marketing Skills for Every Business

Promotion is a vital part of running a business, and these days the biggest, most relevant arena for promotion is the online world. However, there are plenty of reasons that digital marketing skills might represent a gap in a business’s infrastructure. You might be a new business, with a team passionate and informed about your industry and not much else. Some companies can’t afford to purpose-build an in-house marketing team. Others might be stuck in the past with their perception of what marketing should be. 

Whatever the case, there are a handful of skills required for digital marketing, so you can feel more confident hiring in-house staff, enacting your own processes or even outsourcing work to an agency. 

Essential analytical & strategic skills

Some people think that marketing is all about putting stuff out there, but it requires a baseline of analysis and strategy before materials ever see the public. You need a reasonable amount of data literacy for platforms and metrics, such as: 

• Google Analytics
• Cost Per Acquisition CPA
• Click Through Rate CTR
• Return on Ad Spend

And it’s not just about knowing what these things are. It’s equally important to interpret the results of them and how to leverage that information to optimise said results. Similarly, it’s important to have some user behaviour tools in place, so you can A/B test elements to increase engagement.

Creativity & human impact

You can have all the essential digital marketing tools on hand, but it’s not going to be a replacement for some old-fashioned human ingenuity. There’s no amount of technical knowledge you can substitute for a creative impulse. If these digital marketing skills and compulsions aren’t in you naturally, it’s important to work with people who have a passion for: 

• Storytelling (text, audio, visual)
• Problem solving
• Communicating with others
• Competitive research
• Adapting to changing circumstances

These might sound like “soft skills” but they’re essential for tasks like content writing, graphic design and video production. Remember, people can smell inauthenticity, so make sure you position things human-first to make a real impact on your target clientele. 

Essential technical pillars

You essentially need to think of yourself and your team as a performance digital marketing agency, which means channelling your skills through a range of technical channels. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You need to understand the basics of content writing, technical SEO and metadata management to be visible on search engines. 

Website design & development. Landing pages are one of your most valuable marketing tools, so they need to be well-structured, attractive and highly functional. 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Paid advertising is another essential part of marketing for search engines, with headlines and descriptions promoted to inspire click-throughs. 

Email marketing. To this day, there’s value to email marketing with customers new and old, so it needs to be an arrow in your quiver. 

Social media. Analysing social channels, creating paid advertising and developing content are all essential digital marketing skills for the smartphone generation. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It’s vital to use tools that offer proper information about customer behaviour and preferences, and use the information wisely. 

AI & Automation. Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more essential, for both automating routine tasks and ranking on chatbot breakdowns. 

Consider outsourcing? 

If you’re not sure that you can leverage all of these essential digital marketing skills, it’s worth considering outsourcing your digital marketing to an experienced team. This can be a lot more cost-effective than building your own in-house team, while also offering faster results than the slow-burning process of starting from scratch. 

Contacting Digital Next might be the perfect place to start. We’ve got a full range of digital marketing solutions available to our clients, along with a bank of resources just like this one for people who want to increase their knowledge for free. Check us out today and level your digital marketing skills for the better!