11 Digital Marketing Skills You Should Master

In this article, we will learn the 11 digital marketing skills that every good digital marketer should know so let’s delve deeper into this topic.

Hard Skills And Soft Skills

To cover so being a good digital marketer requires two different sets of skills, hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are learned abilities that are sharpened through experience and education, while soft skills are more about character rates and interpersonal skills. In other words, hard skills show employers how good you’ll be at your job from a technical standpoint, while soft skills show whether you’ll be a good employee, teammate, or manager.

Now, many people focus just on improving hard skills like coding, SEO, or paid advertising, but soft skills are equally important. A study from LinkedIn shows that 57% of employers value soft skills more than hard skills. Now, in terms of what employers look for in a digital marketer will vary based on the position and responsibilities. 

For example, when we hired a video editor, hard skills weighed heavier than soft. When we hired an outreach manager, soft skills weighed heavier than hard because interpersonal skills are more important than knowing how the software works. 

Now, we’ll share five hard skills and six soft skills that every employer looks for when hiring digital marketers, and we’ll explain why these skills are valuable for almost any digital marketing role. Let’s get started with the Hard skills. 

1. Copywriting

The first skill worth mastering is copywriting. Copy is often the bridge between the company and the customer. It lives on blog posts, landing pages, emails, and even videos, as tons of them are scripted. This means that being good at writing ads or messages is super useful for online marketing. 

You can use it for lots of things like making websites show up in search results, sending emails to customers, reaching out to people, posting on social media, putting up ads you pay for, and more. And because a big part of your job as a digital marketer will be to educate and influence your target audience with the copy. 

2. Search Engine Optimization

The second hard skill is SEO. SEO means making websites better so they show up higher in search results. It’s important because it helps get lots of people to your website without paying for ads. Businesses like that because they get regular visitors without extra effort. 

In addition, the principles of SEO will help you understand how the web works, particularly with Google SEO. If you want to learn more about SEO, Digiperform Academy has a Digital Marketing course that’ll give you all of this technical knowledge and help you get more traffic to your site. 

3. Data Analysis And Interpretation

The next hard skill is data analysis and interpretation. Data gives you something to analyze and your analysis will help you draw insights. And those insights are what marketers use to create marketing campaigns. This cycle is pretty important because if the data is bad, then everything else after will be flawed. Now, if your analysis is incorrect, the insights you drew from them will be invalidated and if your insights are wrong, you might be leading your campaign in the wrong direction. 

So it’s critical that you understand where your data comes from and b know how to analyze and interpret it. Sometimes you’ll have great insights from your analysis and other times you’ll learn that there’s no conclusive evidence to work with. Both outcomes are equally important because they’re going to guide you in the right direction to save your company time, money, and effort. If you want to be a data analyst you can do an online Data Science Course from Digiperform Academy.

4. User Experience 

The next hard skill is in user experience. While this is a common skill that designers need to have, it’s important for digital marketers to at least have a high-level understanding of UX best practices. After all, as marketers, we want to create interactions with customers and prospects so they have more meaningful and relevant experiences with our brand and content. Also, lots of marketing platforms look at how users feel. 

For instance, YouTube and all social media sites pay attention to what users like. Even Google’s search results can change based on how users feel about a website. The bottom line, the better experience you create for people, the better your marketing campaigns will be. And assuming your marketing campaigns are aligned with the business’s bottom line, the better the company will perform. 

5. Google Sheets

The last hard skill I want to talk about is expertise with Google Sheets. Now, I wouldn’t typically list software as a must-have hard skill, but knowing how to use Google Sheets beyond data entry and basic formulas is going to make you a more efficient marketer. How good you are at using Google Sheets can show how well you understand logic programming. 

Google Sheets is like a Swiss Army knife, it can do a lot of different things. You can use it to create reports, analyze, interpret, and manipulate data, and create automation for monotonous tasks. The use cases are truly endless and it’s a big plus that I love seeing for mid to high-level roles.

Soft Skills For Digital Marketers

Now, we’ll share six soft skills that every employer looks for when hiring digital marketers, and we’ll explain why these skills are valuable for almost any digital marketing role. Let’s get started with the Soft skills. 

1. Communication

Marketing is essentially a brand’s way to communicate with customers and prospects, so you can drive interest and desire for products and services. So if you’re not able to communicate effectively, your marketing will be ineffective. Now, you might be thinking big WHOOP. However, the repercussions of poor communication can be severe.

It can impact people’s first impressions of your company damage your brand reputation and lead to wasted time for marketers and anyone else involved in a campaign, like developers, designers, and outsourced teams. Beyond that, marketing also involves developing relationships with customers, affiliates, influencers, and brand evangelists. Fail to communicate effectively, and you’ll have a very bumpy road ahead.

2. Problem-Solving 

Next up are problem-solving skills. Marketing campaigns rarely go smoothly, and you will run into problems and unexpected bumps along the way. The thing is, nobody wants to hold your hand through every single problem. Companies hire people to fix problems, so your job will often involve finding creative solutions, even if company rules or money limits you. In the SEO world, for instance, some companies buy backlinks, but if yours doesn’t allow it, you need to think of other clever ways to compete. 

Another common disadvantage I see in competitive industries is with ad budgets. Leaders in an industry will often have what seems to be an infinite budget. And if you’re working at a bootstrap startup with one 100th of your competitor’s budgets, you’ll have to get extremely creative to have a fighting chance at winning, let alone surviving. The best marketing is when your product and marketing align to solve people’s problems. But that, in and of itself, is a problem that marketers are often tasked with solving. 

3. Creativity

The next soft skill on my list is creativity. Creativity is something that’s incredibly difficult to teach. In fact, according to George Land, a famous researcher and scientist, noncreative behavior is learned, meaning we learn to become less creative as we get older. 

And this is the same test that was used by NASA to select innovative engineers and scientists. And to his surprise, 98% of five-year-old’s scored in the highly creative range. But when he retested them at ten and 15 years old, there was a dramatic drop in the percentage of people who scored in the highly creative range. 

Now, land also tested 280,000 adults with the same test, and only 2% of this group scored in the highly creative range. Meaning, that for those that are creative, it’s going to be one of your greatest assets. When you pair creativity with the hard skills of data analysis, you end up having a very powerful combination of skills that will play in your favor as a digital marketer. 

4. Teachability 

The next soft skill is teachability. Now, the reason why I think this is a critical soft skill to have is because marketing is collaborative. And if you’re the stubborn type who refuses to hear feedback from your managers and teammates, you will naturally be an awful team player. In my opinion, teachability shows humility, adaptability, and one’s desire for growth. 

This is why after doing hundreds of interviews, if a candidate doesn’t seem teachable, it’s a break. It kind of attribute for me. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to be a yes man and make other people feel better about themselves. It’s about being open to other’s opinions and collaboratively coming to the best ideas for your marketing campaigns. 

5. Self-Motivation

The next soft skill is self-motivation. This is a skill that I think separates the wheat from the chaff. Naturally, there are going to be people who show up to work and do the bare minimum. After all, we all guts to make money to pay the bills. But there will be a few individuals who have put in the extra time, effort, thought, and focus simply because they want to produce good work. 

These are self-motivated people. They’re willing to go the extra mile to make their work great. They don’t define themselves from their salary mentions or accolades, but ironically, self-motivated people with raw talent tend to get paid more and praised publicly. They’re a rare breed, and in my opinion, it’s a skill that’s nearly impossible to fake over the long haul. 

6. Dependability

The final soft skill is dependability. Because marketing usually happens in a team setting, you need to be able to depend on your teammates to do their part. It makes marketing operations much smoother, and the result is a highly effective team. A standout example that immediately comes to mind is our academy team. 

From the day I started working at Ahrefs, they have not once missed a deadline. But deadlines aren’t a be-all and end-all of dependable people. Our entire academy team is directly impacted by the invasion of Ukraine. Frankly speaking, I have never worked with a team that’s this dependable. It says a lot about character and plays directly into team dynamics.

CONCLUSION 

To be a successful digital marketer, focus on improving these key skills. Before concluding, I would like to say that if you want to learn Digital Marketing, keep yourself up-to-date with all the latest trends, and make your career in the field of achievement then you can do an Advanced Digital Marketing course from Digiperform. India’s Only Most Trusted Brand in Digital Education and Asia’s 1st & Only Award Winning Digital Marketing Training Program.

In this Advanced Digital Marketing Course, You will learn 25+ Modules, and 3 Live Projects, and get 9 Super Specializations with 100%* Placement Assistance.