10 Must-Have Digital Marketing Skills
Publié le 19 April 2023
Use your creative abilities to build a strong career by learning and developing 10 must-have digital marketing skills.
The tech and IT industries remain popular with professionals looking to build successful careers. Job roles in these sectors are known for offering good salaries and benefits and have historically had a strong chance of growth.
Even the news about PayPal, Spotify, Google, and Microsoft laying off 77,000 workers in 2023 doesn’t stop people from dreaming about getting into big tech. But what if writing code is not your dream, and you want a job that allows us to express your creativity?
There are several non-tech areas within IT – HR, design, sales and delivery branches, and, of course, marketing. To attract customers and promote businesses, IT companies must have a solid digital presence that meets the needs and expectations of employees and clients.
For instance, per the Statista report, the worldwide total spending by companies on digital advertising is forecasted to be almost $630 billion this year:
Source: Statista
Despite current economic challenges, it’s clear that this industry is still popular with consumers, jobseekers, and investors alike.
For people looking to break into the sector, let’s look at 10 must-have digital marketing skills you need to stay on top in IT.
5 Needed Marketing Hard Skills in IT
Hard skills are specific abilities obtained through courses, schooling, and other learning avenues. They normally result in a certification or diploma that signifies that you have put into the work to learn these specific skills.
There are a number of specific tech skills that recruiters are searching for from applicants. While these skills will certainly boost your application, all of these hard tech skills are not completely necessary for a job role in digital marketing.
Marketing Tech Usage
Information technology marketing depends on different tools – from simple documentation to advanced marketing analytics solutions. The first must-have digital marketing skill is a strong understanding of the specific tech used in marketing.
While using tools to automate your efforts may look like a complex digital marketing specialist skill, it’s very important. When used correctly, it gives you flexibility and accuracy and boosts productivity.
Some standard tech solutions of a marketing tech stack include:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Email marketing software
- Social media management tools
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising platforms
- Content Management Systems (CMS)
- Analytics and reporting tools
Of course, you don’t need to use each of these tools on an advanced level, but basic knowledge about these technologies is helpful. Simultaneously, if you choose a particular area in marketing, the ability to operate the required tools is necessary.
Marketing metrics and analytics
Marketing metrics are the backbone of any digital campaign and marketing hard skills in general. That’s why understanding core marketing metrics is essential for digital marketing specialist skills.
Some of the most common marketing metrics include:
- Conversion rate (CR)
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Analyzing these numbers allows companies to see actual outcomes about their products and how customers interact with them.
Data analytics in marketing is not only about crunching numbers but about extracting meaningful insights. This will help drive successful digital marketing campaigns and save valuable company resources.
When dealing with all those numbers, it’s essential to remember data visualization. Data visualization for marketing adds meaning to raw numbers and data sets, making them easier to understand.
Here’s an example of a marketing dashboard:
Competitor research
As you see above, being a digital marketing specialist implies using estimation and evaluations. In addition, it requires specific digital marketing specialist skills: assessing markets, analyzing competitors’ results, and identifying market trends.
Competitor research is a crucial aspect of online marketing expertise. You analyze your competitors’ strategies to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This involves researching their products or services, pricing, advertising, and branding strategies.
The main objective of competitor research is to gain insights that can inform your information technology marketing strategy and help you gain a competitive edge in your industry. Any digital marketing specialist must know how to analyze the niche market and competitors, at least on the basic level. This also allows you to understand your own organization’s position in the marketplace.
Content Creation
Creating various types of content, such as videos and blog posts, is a critical hard skill in digital marketing.
To create a compelling piece of content, be it a landing page, ad copy, or video, you need to know your audience and understand their preferences. You also need to know the difference between content types and content intention.
For example, if you’re creating a blog post for awareness, the topic, style and tone should be more high-level and easy to understand. Another approach is applicable for an ad copy: you don’t have a lot of word count to use, and the intention would be different.
Understanding content types and how to create particular pieces of content will help any marketer substantially.
SEO
When did you last go beyond the first page of Google search results when looking for something? Well, the chance is pretty high that you don’t usually go to those unknown lands behind the ‘G’ in Google.
That’s why an understanding of SEO (both theoretical and practical) should be in every marketing resume. If your website and content have strong SEO, it will dramatically increase your chances of ranking highly by search engines and make it easier for people to find your business
Search Engine Optimization involves:
- Optimizing your website’s content and metadata with the right keywords.
- Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly with fast loading times.
- Building high-quality backlinks from other reputable websites.
It sounds complicated, but as soon as your on-page SEO and off-page SEO work for you, your website gets more traffic, leads, sales, and, eventually, revenue. Hiringing managers look for professionals with a strong understanding of the latest SEO techniques and trends.
5 Digital Marketing Soft Skills in IT
To be a successful digital marketer, you must balance hard and soft skills in your marketing resume.
While hard skills in digital marketing help you manage the technical aspects, soft skills help you create and collaborate with your team and partner with external marketers. These skills can be both intangible and transferable and will remain part of your professional skill set for your entire career.
Here are five crucial digital marketing soft skills to help you become an exceptional digital marketer.
Communication and collaboration
The ability to communicate and collaborate effectively with others is among vital digital marketing skills.
It’s a field where communication is critical, whether with sales, design, or product teams. Effective communication ensures everyone is on the same page, clearly understanding goals and objectives.
It might be complicated to train and develop networking and collaboration skills in digital marketing without face-to-face meetings with the prevalence of remote work positions due to post-COVID times. But these skills also apply to the online field.
Here are the essential pieces of advice on how to build communication skills as a marketing specialist in IT:
- Practice active listening — give your full attention to the speaker, take notes, ask questions, and provide feedback.
- Create a safe space — everyone should freely share their ideas and opinions.
- Streamline your collaboration — there are various tools and software for project management, video conferencing platforms, and team boards.
Overall, the chance that someone notices you as a great specialist if you cannot communicate and present yourself properly isn’t high. That’s why developing communication is one of the must-have digital marketing skills to stay on top in IT.
Adaptability
In a digital environment, things change faster than you could imagine. Remember the recent boom of ChatGPT, a technology that began as an experiment and then became a valid solution for IT professionals. Openness and adaptability to new approaches and experimentation is an underrated yet essential skill for modern marketers.
If you’re unwilling to take risks and try new things, you’ll be as extinct as a T-Rex stuck in tar. To be a successful marketer in information technology, embrace and explore the unknown. Try something new. Experiment with your campaigns, copy, and tactics. Do A/B testing. Even if it does not go as well as you hope, you will still gain valuable information and insights that you can bring to your next project.
Don’t just follow the known strategies since they become outdated due to the high dynamics of the information technology industry.
Creativity
It’s not surprising that creative thinking is one of the must-have digital marketing skills. You may wonder how to develop creativity. Here are a few tips to boost creative skills in digital marketing:
- Learn from others — it’s never too late to attend courses, marketing conferences, and workshops, connect with great specialists within your field, and get a fresh perspective on your work.
- Brainstorm ideas — devote time to jotting down even the craziest ideas because you never know which one could be a game-changer.
- Stay up-to-date with industry trends — sign up for newsletters, read blogs, follow marketers on social media, listen to niche podcasts. Choose the time to get information about trends, fresh approaches, and the success of others.
You can boost your creativity with eagerness to learn and proactive actions. Investing time in learning about tactics in different marketing channels and being curious about IT is the way to stay motivated and creative.
Analytical thinking
Data is the lifeblood of marketing. And if understanding the data is more of a hard skill, the ability to think analytically is a soft one.
Such thinking is about transforming complex problems into bite-sized chunks and then analyzing the data. This will allow you to understand the source of certain problems and brainstorm possible solutions to address them correctly.
Besides, critically evaluating what your contribution is and what the next steps will provide you with a space for professional and personal growth. Thanks to analytical and critical skills in digital marketing, you can refine ownership and decision-making skills as well.
Adaptability
We mentioned that information technology marketing is dynamic, changing, and filled with trends. Overall, the IT business environment is also constantly changing.
As a digital marketer, you should understand how to use a new solution or approach. You adapt, but a new trend emerges, and everything returns to step one.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that marketers must follow all the trends. However, you must be flexible and willing to implement new things to stay ahead of thousands of other specialists.
In parallel, you must be open to changes and quickly adapt to scaling, strategy adjustments, and market fluctuations. If your current approach is proving ineffective, you have to be willing to adapt quickly instead of clinging to a plan that is no longer meeting the needs of your organization or its audience.
Summary
While digital marketing job requirements are not so frightening, this field is creative and analytical. You should pay close attention to developing both hard and soft digital marketing skills for a resume or further advances at your work.
By mastering the technical and human aspects of the craft, you can become a well-rounded specialist and take your activities to the next level. Learning and refining 10 must-have digital marketing skills to stay on top in IT will allow you to produce better work and build a strong professional career.
Who knows, you might be the next guru in the world of information technology marketing!
