What skills do you need to stay relevant in the constantly evolving digital marketing industry? The rapidly changing digital sector is extensive, and it can be tough to navigate for new businesses, even marketers looking to find their niche. There can be a lot to wrestle with: from content marketing using data analytics tools to mastering SEO.

Are you looking for online success? Do you want to grow or improve your business through several online strategies? Focus on these digital marketing skills, and there will be no limit to how much your business can earn, expand and grow.

Analytics

Analytics tells you what works and what does not in your online business. Learn to read the tracked and reported website traffic and make better data-driven decisions. Google analytics and its alternatives enable you to gather, learn and monitor data to improve future marketing strategies by applying it to solutions that boost traffic, engagement, and conversions.

Content 

"Content is king." - Bill Gates.

The world of digital marketing revolves around content. While other digital skills drive traffic or build communities, content is at the core of digital marketing and links everything. Creating a high-quality, often SEO-friendly, effective content strategy for blogs, e-books, emails, social media, web content, whitepapers, and videos to engage and convert is a crucial skill.

Design

"Design is thinking made visual." - Saul Bass.

Content on all social media platforms performs better with visuals, but you don't have to become a design pro. As a digital marketer, you need the skill to quickly create and edit your visuals: whipping together a banner ad, social media image, presentation, etc. You can use free and easy-to-use graphic design platforms where you can drag and drop elements into professionally designed templates.

Email Marketing and Newsletters

"Email has an ability many channels don't: creating valuable, personal touches at scale." - David Newman.

Emails are a terrific way to tap into a captive user base to extend the reach of any of your disseminated content. It has the potential to become your highest converting traffic medium. Everyone reads their emails. Search engines and other social networks can change their algorithms or features, but you can always reach all of your email subscribers.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sends you highly targeted and converting traffic for free since organic search results are about eight times more likely to be clicked than paid search results. Knowing how SEO works and understanding the best practices to utilize SEO are vital skills for running a successful digital marketing campaign. 

Social Media Marketing

"A large social-media presence is important because it's one of the last ways to conduct cost-effective marketing. Everything else involves buying eyeballs and ears. Social media enables a small business to earn eyeballs and ears." - Guy Kawasaki.

In 2022, almost 4.5 billion people will use social media worldwide, up more than double from 2.07 billion in 2015.

You should capitalize on this unique marketing opportunity and understand how to leverage the different social platforms to achieve your business goals. Social media is a place to connect, build relationships and grow your audience, so social media marketing is an invaluable skillset to learn and develop. However, social media marketing is not only about posting on Facebook: knowing how to generate user engagement, creating visuals, copywriting, building ads, and analyzing reach and engagement. You need to understand how to utilize some of the social networks for traffic and conversions and keep up with the rapid changes on each platform.

Storytelling

"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world." – Robert McKee.

What makes your content stand out? 

Why will people read your blog posts? What will keep people on your list? Storytelling. Stories are one of the great secrets of genuine persuasion because they let people decide for themselves. It might be challenging to create more and more engaging content but remember that storytelling is the oldest form of communication, and everyone wants to hear a good story.

Targeting

"In marketing, if you're trying to talk to everybody, you're not reaching anybody." - Jennifer Yesbeck.

Learn how to target all your activities, or your broad messages will be bypassed or disregarded. Ambiguous and generic statements are far less likely to resonate with audiences than precise and direct communication, so your email marketing, website content, and ad campaigns will be less effective. When you don't know your ideal customers, they cannot identify with and feel connected to you and your brand.

Video Marketing

You don't have to know everything about video production, but you have to know how to make videos and market them. Customers love explainer videos, vlogs (video blogs), video interviews, video presentations, tutorials, product reviews, product demos, recordings of live streams, video testimonials, and video ads. Most statistics point to higher conversion, engagement, and SEO rankings for video. Just think about Instagram and TikTok. With the increasing demand for video, being able to produce different types of video content is a must-have skill.

Advertising

Why did we put this last? Even if we believe that you don't necessarily need it for success, advertising can help you scale. However, take note that you can waste a fortune on ads without seeing many results if everything else is not in place in your online business.

You can expand your reach and generate high revenue and brand awareness through pay-per-click advertising or PPC and social paid advertising. It would help if you used Google AdWords and Google Analytics simultaneously to do PPC well. You can pay Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc., to have your content shared through "boosting" or designing unique advertisements.

You will come across most of the abovementioned skills, develop, and learn them as you build anything online.