8 Best Skills for Digital Marketing
Digital marketing connects a business with its online customers through various marketing methods and digital platforms. It is essential for every business in today’s technology-driven world, and a successful digital marketing strategy requires many skill sets. Whether you’re a business owner or entrepreneur looking to grow your brand online or you simply want to grow in your professional career as a digital marketer, Blue Compass can help. Our digital marketing experts share 8 of the best skills needed to be successful in digital marketing and how you can use them to connect your target audience with your business online. Here are the 8 digital marketing skills we're going to cover:
- Copywriting in digital marketing
- Storytelling skills in digital marketing
- SEO & SEM skills for digital marketing
- Social media marketing skills
- Data analysis and digital marketing
- CRM skills for digital marketing
- Creative problem solving for digital marketing
- Basic understanding of design skills in digital marketing
Copywriting is vital to digital marketing. It will improve your website’s rankings in search engine results and bring more traffic to your business online. This skill set, however, is only effective when done right. That’s why our experts showcase the benefits of copywriting and how you can use it to your advantage. But first, let’s learn a little more about copywriting in digital marketing.
What is copywriting in Digital Marketing?
Copywriting in digital marketing is any written copy used to sell your business’s product or service online. It is often referred to as the “backbone of digital marketing” because it connects your brand to its target audience. Good copy will address the wants and needs of your audience and sell them your product or service without you having to do all the heavy lifting. Keep reading to learn how else copywriting can benefit your business.
What are the benefits of Copywriting?
Connects you to the perfect customers - Through excellent copy and good storytelling, you can connect with existing and potential customers on an emotional level. Copywriting enables you to create a brand identity that online users can relate to and want to return to for more information. Additionally, quality content is a top-ranking factor on Google. If your website provides original, in-depth content, its rankings will improve significantly, placing your brand above your competitors and ultimately earning you more exposure with your target audience.
Saves you from unnecessary costs - Copywriting in digital marketing is a great way to communicate your brand’s values across all digital touch-points easily. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into your copywriting. All of the content you create on your website should be created with SEO in mind. In other words, your content should strategically integrate words and phrases that are keywords your visitors are searching for while still creating a clear message built around your brand’s needs.
Helps you achieve overall business goals - Great copywriting presents information about your business that your target audience might be looking for in a way that sucks them in. The benefits and features of your brand should jump out to readers. When done successfully, those readers will show their appreciation through shares, return visits and a positive association with your brand.
Creating quality content means communicating your ideas clearly, and in a way that feels compelling to the people you want to attract to your business. This can be accomplished through storytelling. Storytelling in digital marketing is one of the most important skills a company can possess for many reasons. For one, consumers tend to retain information much more easily when presented in the form of a story. It can also enable you to express your brand’s values.
Storytelling in digital marketing can also come in many forms. This valuable skill set can be utilized when creating videos, blog articles, social media posts and more. To help you create a brand identity through effective storytelling, check out the following tips you can utilize storytelling in your digital marketing efforts.
How to Use Storytelling in Digital Marketing
Know your brand story - Your brand story is a narrative that connects you with your target audience on an emotional level. This will provide your visitors a sense of belonging and camaraderie between your brand and them.
Show, don’t tell - Help your audience recognize the value of your product or service without the need for a hard-sell like “buy now before time runs out” or “limited time only”. At Blue Compass, we often show the value of our services by sharing real-life examples of our clients’ successes. This not only tells visitors that your product or service works but that you also truly care about your customers and meeting their needs and demands.
Keep your story consistent - Consistency is critical in all areas of digital marketing, especially when it comes to storytelling. Maintaining a consistent brand story will allow you to build trust with your customers. When creating content, it is important you use a consistent brand voice and messaging that aligns with your brand’s core values.
Google’s algorithm is constantly updating. Adaptability within your website is critical to improving and maintaining your rank in Google search results. Through search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), you can easily adapt and update along with Google's everchanging algorithm. But, the digital marketing skills needed for SEO and SEM are very similar. Learn the primary differences between the two and see examples of how you can use these skills to master each.
What’s the difference between SEO and SEM?
Simply put, SEO focuses on optimizing your website to appear higher in search results so you can capture more organic traffic. SEM, on the other hand, focuses on using SEO and paid strategies together, like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to bring more organic and paid traffic to your website.
When you should use SEO or SEM
There are many elements involved in SEO, so seeing results from your SEO efforts can take some time. While many business owners want to see growth and an immediate ROI, SEO drives traffic 24/7 to your website without costing you advertising dollars.
SEM is beneficial when you need to generate traffic, leads, or sales immediately! However, it only works when you pay. With SEM, you can reach more of your audience as your ads will appear on the first page when users search your industry, service or product.
When Google released its core web vitals update in the summer of 2021, it put a premium on page speed and user experience. Many digital marketers and business owners had to scramble to improve their websites. At Blue Compass, our team of experts utilized our SEO and SEM skills to prepare for these CWV updates and ensure a fast-loading, smooth website experience for users. The process included SEO efforts like decreasing third-party plugins on our site, decreasing the file size of images, and eliminating any unnecessary shifts in content from flashy design functions throughout our site. We utilized SEM to ensure our website continued to appear at the top of search results while our SEO updates were kicking into gear.
Social media continues to grow in importance and its role in finding and driving new customers to your business. This means that having social media marketing skills in your arsenal as a digital marketer is also increasingly important. Social media users are some of the most engaged people on the internet. While this is a huge positive in the eyes of digital marketers, it doesn’t make social media marketing any easier. Even though social media users are the most engaged, the clutter and options presented to users each day are endless and can make it hard for your business to stand out. Our experts at Blue Compass share what social media marketing is and how you can use social media marketing skills to your advantage.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and their networks to connect valuable and potential customers to your business. With social media, you can engage with existing customers and reach new ones while promoting your company’s culture, values and services/products.
How to Be Successful on Social Media
While consistently posting new content is important, posting quality and relevant content is just as, if not more, important. Users want to see consistency across your posts in terms of branding. This includes the tone of voice used in your social posts, the content you’re marketing on social media, and set in stone brand values that your audience can relate to on a personal or emotional level. It’s also critical that you understand the advertising platform’s of each social media outlet as social media is very much becoming a “pay-to-play” marketing method, similar to Google.
When used correctly, social media marketing skills will open the door to transparent customer communication via comments and direct messaging. While promoting your brand’s products or services is important, social media should be a conversation that not only gives your audience more immediate and personal responses to their questions and issues, but also a place to let them celebrate your brand.
Data analysis in digital marketing is growing rapidly and should be at the core of your brand’s digital marketing efforts. Brands must continuously create unique and personalized experiences for their customers, and data analytics can help! Keep reading to learn how data-informed digital marketing efforts can drive more conversion actions on your website.
How is data used in Digital Marketing?
With data analysis skills, you will analyze and interpret data to make relevant marketing decisions that drive more conversions for your business. Data analysis relies heavily on automated processes. When it comes to data analysis and digital marketing, you need to be familiar with Google’s algorithm and utilize data collecting platforms like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
It’s important to remember that your data must be accurate to see positive results from data analysis. If it isn’t, you could potentially harm your digital marketing strategy. Once you have your key performance indicators (KPIs) in place, you can use data to determine your audience and if your efforts are working as anticipated.
Data analysis and digital marketing can also improve your brand’s SEO efforts. It lets you see what keywords are performing well and which aren’t. This will help you understand which services or products users are searching for most and discover new keywords you might not have been using before. Data analysis can also help you optimize your website’s copy and any ad campaigns you might be running to ensure you get in front of the right customers at the right time.
Achieving Success with Data Analytics
There are a few key skills to help you achieve success with data analytics in digital marketing:
- Data visualization - the ability to interpret and present the meaning found in the data rather than just the numbers.
- Critical thinking - the ability to understand the data presented and what it means for the company.
- Communication - the ability to present data in a way that management, other departments or a client can understand. This can be via reports, presentations or verbal communication.
- Business awareness - the ability to understand how a company functions so that you can determine what data is essential to the business.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is technology that allows digital marketers to oversee a company’s customer experience. CRM stores data records based on your company’s relationships and interactions with customers, which you can then use to understand the growing needs of your customers and improve any pain points throughout your company’s customer journey.
What is CRM in digital marketing?
CRM in digital marketing covers sales, marketing and customer service in one central database so that you can better understand and adapt to your customer’s needs.
The benefits of CRM in Digital Marketing
Improves inbound leads - Lead generation is the process of driving prospective customers that are willing to convert to your website. A CRM system can help you establish and maintain a systematic lead generation process for your company.
Tracks KPIs - Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are standard measurements used to evaluate your company’s customer satisfaction. With a CRM, you can set KPIs that are pertinent to the satisfaction of your customers and track their performance to determine any pain points and meet your customer’s needs.
Map out your customer’s journey - You can use a CRM to see how your customers are interacting with your business. All interactions that occur throughout the customer journey can be used to create a customer journey map. Your customer journey map can then be used to develop different types of journeys for different customers for your business.
Automation and marketing sequences - A CRM system enables you to create marketing sequences – step-by-step plans of prospecting activities pertaining to a potential contact. A sequence tells your sales reps what they should be doing and when so that they can focus more on closing sales and less on repetitive, manual tasks.
Every business has competitors trying to achieve the same things. As a digital marketer, you must find innovative ways to gain an edge over your competitors and stand out as the primary expert in your industry. Creative problem-solving skills for digital marketing are essential and can be used throughout all aspects of your strategy. These skills will allow you to find any issues your company or customers might be experiencing, identify the cause, and successfully design and implement a solution.
How to Use Problem-Solving in Your Marketing Strategy
There are several ways you can utilize creative problem-solving skills in digital marketing:
Refocus Messaging - It’s not uncommon for businesses to focus on themselves, their products and their services in their messaging. But, if you can scan your content and refocus your message on your customers and the problems they want solved, you are likely to see excellent rewards for your effort.
Upgrade Content - With so many choices available to users online, visitors are quick to leave a website with a poor user experience. Make your prospects’ and clients’ lives easier through content upgrades. Fresh content that answers their questions or solves a user’s problems will create a memorable experience and leave them wanting to return for more.
Be responsive - Responding to comments, emails, reviews and social media messages , whether negative or positive, shows customers and prospects that your business is personable and truly cares about its customers’ needs. Though it isn’t always easy to respond to negative messages left by customers, creative problem solving can help you respond positively and helpfully.
Personalize your lead generation efforts - To impact your market, you must be unique and creative in how you solve problems because everyone in your industry is trying to address the same ones. Creative problem-solving skills for digital marketing will allow you to come up with new and fresh solutions to critical issues and conflicts, and ultimately stand out amongst your competitors.
Visual content marketing uses images, videos and infographics to present valuable information to users about your brand in a fun and engaging way. Ultimately, visual content gives your brand more exposure to its target audience. As a digital marketer or someone looking to implement digital marketing strategies for your own business, having basic website design skills will help you create visual content like videos that can be shared with users across numerous platforms.
Image Guidelines and Best Practices
When it comes to visual content marketing, every social platform has unique image size requirements. Following these guidelines will ensure your content is consistent across all devices and can give your content an edge over the competition:
- Facebook/LinkedIn: Image size - 1200 x 630 pixels | Video size - 1280 x 720 pixels (mp4 format)
- Twitter: Image size - 1100 x 630 pixels | Video size - 1280 x 720 pixels (mp4 format)
- Instagram: Image size - 1080 x 1080 pixels | Video size - 1080 x 1080 pixels (mp4 format)
- Pinterest: Image size - 1000 x 1500 pixels | Video size - 540 x 960 pixels (mp4, mov, or m4v format)
How to Succeed in Digital Marketing
Digital marketing encompasses many skills, all of which are required for your business to be successful online. While digital marketing may not be for everyone, these are all skills that, with time and dedication, can be learned and used to your advantage.
We understand it's hard to cover all the bases on our own, which is why we have a team of talented, skilled marketers ready to help you! Reach out to the professional digital marketers at Blue Compass to learn more about digital marketing and the tools you need to be successful.
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Kevin McMurray
Kevin McMurray is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Blue Compass. He enjoys spending time with his family, cheering on Cyclones sports and leisure sports.