In today’s digital age, many companies, entrepreneurs, and institutions have embraced and adopted a modern marketing approach to promote and grow their businesses through digital marketing. In fact, local and big businesses allocate 5% to 14% of their revenue to their digital marketing budget. Through this strategy, they don’t only advertise products and services online, but also connect with a wider target audience.
However, a great deal of digital marketing skills and expertise are essential to make businesses succeed in the online world. Hence, a lot of enterprises, both big and small, have been either hiring in-house marketing professionals or working with companies that provide digital marketing services.
If you’re interested in carving a career path toward this challenging yet rewarding profession, then you’re on the right page! In this article, we’ll discuss the top digital marketing skills you need to acquire to flourish in this field. Plus, we’ll share with you some tips on how to improve them.
Defining Digital Marketing Skills
Digital marketing skills are sets of capabilities that digital marketing specialists apply to promote brands, products, and services across digital platforms. These skills—whether technical, soft, or hard—aid marketers to formulate and implement online marketing strategies to achieve a competitive advantage in business. Plus, these competencies are crucial to assess and determine the effectiveness and measure the success of your campaigns.
Must-Have Digital Marketing Skills to Thrive in This Field
Without further ado, below are the in-demand digital marketing skills you should master to keep your business growing through online marketing.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you wish to promote your brands, products, and services through a website, it’s important that you familiarize yourself with SEO. Doing so allows you to create and implement effective marketing strategies that will help your site improve its ranking and earn the top position in search engines. This, in turn, will increase the chances of attracting more visitors, generating website traffic, and eventually, driving conversions.
2. Content Marketing
Having the ability to create content that captures the attention of your readers can keep you thriving in the digital space. You can take advantage of this by creating not only high-quality but also SEO-friendly content to reach and win your target audience. These may come in the form of blog posts, infographics, or videos. In addition, this will improve brand awareness, establish industry authority, and generate quality leads.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms are one the easiest and most effective channels to promote your business, connect with your target audience, and identify the consumer’s feedback. Plus, they can help increase brand recognition, improve online visibility, and drive website traffic. Having said that, it’s important to know how social media marketing works to maintain your business’ presence on different social media platforms.
4. Data Analytics
With data analytics, you’ll be able to collect, analyze, and process results and information from various interactions with your target market. From the data, you can spot and indicate loopholes as well as formulate and implement innovative marketing strategies to better attain your goals. In addition, you can determine and generate actionable insights from the digital footprints of your visitors.
5. Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Learning PPC advertising allows you to manage and determine how much you’re willing to pay to encourage visitors to click the link leading to your website or landing page. This is usually for paid advertising platforms, including Google Ads; as well as different social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. When done right, PPC advertising can increase your business exposure, improve brand visibility, and earn the top spot in search engines.
6. Email Marketing
Another way to market your brand, products, and services directly to your audience is through email marketing. This lets you provide information to your customers about company developments, coupons and discounts, and new products and services. Moreover, email marketing is vital in generating leads, building brand awareness, and establishing customer relationships.
Apart from these digital marketing hard skills, you’d also need to exhibit soft skills to efficiently perform the tasks. These include communication, collaboration, time management, problem-solving, critical thinking, and basic design skills.
How to Improve Digital Marketing Skills
Now that you have an idea about the top digital marketing skills, it’s also crucial that you improve them if you want to take ahead of the competition. Here are some tips you should heed to enhance your skills in digital marketing.
1. Test new ideas and strategies.
Digital marketing is an ever-changing industry. Thus, you’d need to come up with and execute new ideas and strategies to keep your business thriving in the online world. Furthermore, this can help you improve not only your creative and critical thinking abilities, but also your analytical skills.
2. Participate in digital marketing training, workshops, and conferences.
Actively seeking learning opportunities can expand your skills in the industry. Plus, they will give you an advantage over other digital marketing professionals and keep you abreast of the industry’s latest trends, best practices, and approaches.
3. Network with like-minded professionals.
As the digital marketing field is continuously thriving, so are the experts. Hence, establishing connections and networks with other digital marketing specialists is now easy as you can reach out to them through digital platforms and networking events. Moreover, you’ll be able to gain new insights and industry updates.
4. Earn digital marketing certifications.
Getting different certifications related to digital marketing can help you learn and acquire new skills. Plus, these will keep your competitive edge in the field and boost your expertise and qualifications, making you the perfect fit for the role.
Sharpen Your Digital Marketing Skills with CIIT Philippines
It’s no secret that companies nowadays have been investing in digital marketing to achieve business growth—and this will continue for a long period of time as technology continuously evolves. With this in mind, it’s important to grab the opportunity to develop and boost your digital marketing skills from a campus that’s been recognized by industry experts!
With curricula that go beyond the usual business concepts and models taught in most universities, CIIT’s Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship allows you to obtain real-life experience through on-the-job training and mentoring from seasoned industry practitioners. Not only that, our Accountancy, Business, and Management strand will help senior high school students establish their foundation as an entrepreneur early. All of these will equip you with the ability to understand the best practices for businesses, navigate digital economies, and manage teams in a modern workplace.
Additionally, our Digital Marketing Specialist and Advanced Digital Marketing for Analytics and Marketing Technology courses can arm you with global and local understanding of marketing techniques and tools to empower your business.
Be part of our ecosystem of innovators and creators and become a digital marketing expert today!