What Hard Skills do you need to be one of the Best Digital Marketers?

There is no denying we are living in a digital world. Marketers that truly embrace digital marketing techniques can propel their earnings and career potential, open up doors to lucrative consulting, writing, speaking and training opportunities and make stellar improvements on the performance of their organisations.

This post outlines the hard skills that the best digital marketers master in order to operate at the top of their craft. Hard skills are also referred to as “teachable” skills meaning they are things you can learn and improve.

What do you think? Have we missed any?

1. Improve your understanding of research and data collection

Digital marketers need to pull data from various sources throughout their job. There are lots of tools that can help in all areas of the digital marketing toolset – from Ubersuggest, SEMRush, BuzzSumo, Klout and many more – that can transform your ability to underpin recommendations with solid customer data.

2. Learn to “search” well

People constantly waste time asking questions they could easily query in Google. It can take quite a bit of refinement to find exactly what you want. Understand how Google search works and you’ll save time and find more of the right information you need to make better decisions, faster.

3. Get comfortable with data in spreadsheets

The best digital marketers are big fans of data analysis. Whether it is Google, Excel or other software, as a minimum get comfortable with performing basic spreadsheet functions.

Why? Because spreadsheet data is often how businesses report performance, how budgets are formed, how expenditure is tracked, how marketing engagement is output and how SEO tracking and keyword data is assembled.

4. Become proficient with analytics

Google provides some amazing tools through its many webmaster and analytical tools. It is important for digital marketers to stay up to date, especially as Google retires Universal Analytics and replaces it with Google Analytics 4 in 2023.

If Google is giving you information about your site, you absolutely need to use it. And it do so much more in terms of identifying audiences and behaviour to influence your decision making further.

The best advice is to migrate now so you can start to build benchmark data. New sites have to use the new version.

5. Be a better communicator

As organisations decentralise and become more remote in nature, the need for clearer communication has never been more important.

The best digital marketers recognise that is their job to evangelise about marketing and encourage the whole organisation to get involved in promote it.

Always aligning activities back to core organisational goals and stressing the positive impact activities will have (and why colleagues should therefore get involved) is a critical skill.

Being a good communicator is a lifelong skill, whether it is in career progression, working with customers and suppliers, or managing your personal relationships.

6. Measure the right things

There are two ways the best digital marketers typically assess the performance of their marketing efforts. The first is on output and the second is on outcome. Steadily improving markers like traffic and dwell time on websites, or opens and clicks on emails are important as they show a direction of travel. But they don’t move the needle.

Your C-suite will be more interested in conversion metrics. This is where you need to track the actions taken – form fills, live chat, webinar views, downloads, enquiries, free trials, demos and ultimately sales will project your value to a different level.

Set KPIs that assess the function and the impact on the business.

7. Identifying where things go wrong and quickly fixing them

Digital marketers will be the first people asked if there are sudden traffic drops or a decline in incoming enquiries and interest. It’s your job to keep these things running as high as possible and be able to diagnose and treat possible issues.

Knowing how to use essential digital tools to find the root causes is an essential hard skill for digital marketers – the best are doing this routinely and reporting after the fact, rather than being hauled over the coals for it!

8. Be able to create (something)

Digital marketers are often required to be a jack-of-all-trades which is an increasing challenge in a fast-moving and fragmented discipline. The best in class, however, are adept at one specific aspect as well. This speaks to the concept of the T-shaped marketer.

Whether it’s being to write, design, code, run ad campaigns, orchestrate SEO campaigns, aim to have an additional skill so there is one thing you are truly specialist in. This means you will always have a valued up-to-date practical skill.

Can we help become a better digital marketer?

Qualifications like these our new Digital Marketing Institute backed courses provide practical, fast start thorough tuition in critical aspects of digital marketing practice.

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