8 Essential Skills Every Digital Marketer Needs
SOURCE: Digital Marketing Institute
The digital industry is vast and fast paced, and it can be tough to navigate for newcomers or marketers looking to find the right career path.
From knowing the latest social media algorithms to mastering SEO and leveraging omnichannel marketing , there can be a lot to grapple with if you don’t focus on the areas that matter to a business.
The great news is that there is a global demand for marketers with agile digital skills. This is especially true for those with experience in artificial intelligence (AI) as companies use it to increase productivity and improve efficiencies.
According to Epsilon’s ‘The State of AI in Marketing’ report, 94% of organizations already use AI to prepare or execute marketing while three-quarters of those not currently using AI plan to adopt it within the next year.
So, how do you fast-track your way up the corporate ladder, keep your knowledge and skills up-to-date and relevant or set yourself apart from the competition?
Check out these 8 essential skills to keep you relevant in the ever-changing digital industry:
1. Video Marketing
Video continues to take the internet by storm and this isn’t about to stop. The average daily time US adults spend watching social video content is increasing. In 2024, social platforms recorded 52 minutes of daily engagement, this is projected by Statista to reach 57 minutes in 2028.
For marketers, 93% report that video gives them a positive ROI (based on metrics such as video views and engagement such as likes, shares, and reposts), according to Wyzowl research.
Bear in mind that these are statistics that will vary and change depending on who you ask, but the point is that most statistics point to much higher conversion, engagement, and higher SEO rankings when it comes to video.
What makes it so engaging? Because it’s personal and relevant. When people can see your face (or the face of the person promoting the brand), they are more likely to trust your business. It’s also a versatile content type to use across different platforms. Just think about the success of Instagram and the popularity of TikTok!
Digital marketing professionals don’t have to know everything about video production. But knowing how to make videos without hiring a professional is a good place to start.
Plus it also helps to know the video types that are popular with consumers. When marketers were asked what the most popular use cases for videos are, the top purpose was explainer videos at 73% followed by social media videos at 69% and testimonials at 60%.
There are some great tools to help you do that such as Camtasia or an AI tool like CapCut. And if you have some training in this area and love it, your skills will never be wasted as video will always be in demand.
If you want to learn more on your own, you can try out video editing tools like Apple Final Cut Pro X or Adobe Premiere Pro.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) work together as they leverage search engines like Google or Bing to drive traffic and boost visibility.
However, there are differences between them which are important to know.
While SEO is used to optimize a website to drive organic traffic, SEM uses both organic and paid search such as Pay-Per-Click or programmatic advertising to boost traffic. This means that SEM covers organic and paid channels while SEO focuses on organic traffic, making it a subset of SEM.
While you may be able to leave the technical SEO, back-end stuff to the more technical people on the team, knowing how SEO really works and the basics of SEM is crucial for running a successful digital marketing campaign as they can help get your content and brand found by the right audience.
Let’s look at some of the key SEO ranking factors you should focus on.
Keywords - Once you identify the right keywords or phrases it’s important to integrate them across your website.
Content - Content is king when it comes to SEO and SEM. It’s not only about including the right keywords, you need to create high-quality content that speaks to your audience.
User Experience (UX) - If you want to keep customers on your website, it’s crucial to provide a good user experience by avoiding slow load times, poor navigation or irrelevant content.
Link Building - Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to backlinks. A high-quality backlink from a reputable site can help build your site’s authority.
Voice Search - With smart speakers and devices on the rise, it’s important to optimize for voice search.
Video SEO - Optimize your videos for search engines and social networks such as TikTok and YouTube to help get your content and brand found.
E-E-A-T - While Google E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor, it is used to assess the quality of your content and plays a role in ranking.
You should also have some knowledge of the impact of AI on search marketing , in the form of Google's AI Overviews as this can impact the visibility of your brand and content.
3. Content Marketing
Content is at the core of digital marketing and content marketing will continue to be a crucial part of the game no matter what happens. But content marketing is a huge job in itself.
You have to be able to create high quality, SEO-friendly content for many channels and understand how to create an effective content marketing plan to engage and convert audiences.
A great way to streamline your content and ensure it caters to your target audience is to create content pillars. These are the themes around which all your content will cluster and should be key topics that are relevant to your business and promote the products or services and values of your company.
You should also consider trying out AI for content generation and creation. There are a number of AI tools for copywriting including ChatGPT, Claude, Google Notebook LM and Perplexity. While content creation still requires the human touch (and a good proofread!), AI can help to craft ideas or outline a draft, saving time and energy.
Bear in mind that content can take many forms, from video to social posts, emails, web content, blogs, e-books, videos, whitepapers… the list goes on so it’s worth getting some experience in crafting different formats.
You also have to have a firm grasp of social media marketing as content is crucial on social platforms.
4. Data & Analytics
No matter what area of digital marketing you go into, analytics will play a part in your role and help you drive better business insights.
Monitoring and reporting via tools such as Google Analytics (GA4) is pretty straightforward. The tricky part is how to gather and use that information to learn more about consumer behavior and apply it to solutions that boost traffic and conversions.
Most businesses (even small ones) have huge amounts of data to track, and great digital marketers need to understand how to gather and use this to their advantage.
So, companies will always be on the lookout for people who not only know how to “read” data using their marketing technical skills but to extract value from customer data to improve future strategies. If you can show that you can do this in innovative ways that result in campaign success, you will be a valuable asset in the industry.
Bear in mind that you don’t have to stick to one platform for your analytics, check out some alternatives to Google Analytics to see if they would work better for you.
5. AI and Automation
Marketing automation has advanced with the development of AI to create highly intelligent and adaptive tools.
In fact, the technology is evolving so much that some systems are known as AI agents (autonomous systems that make decisions, take actions, and continuously optimize without human intervention).
According to Survey Monkey, 56% of marketers say their company is taking an active role in implementing and using AI while 70% expect the technology to play a larger role in their work
So as AI continues to develop, there will be more opportunities for marketing teams to use automation to create personalized and scalable campaigns that convert and take over time consuming and resource heavy tasks.
Some effective ways marketers can use AI are:
Analyze vast amounts of data
Conduct market research
Automate bidding for paid ads
Use chatbots for customer service
Create triggered email campaigns
Use predictive analytics based on existing data
Optimize SEO
Implement lead scoring and enhance sales automation
Leverage visual recognition for social media and ecommerce
Optimize and enhance campaigns
Perform measurement and adjust
Create an AI digital strategy
Create hyper-personalized content and deliver recommendations
It’s worth trying out AI tools like prompting for ChatGPT for different automation purposes so you have a good idea of what the technology can achieve.
6. Design Thinking & Planning
Design thinking is a term that refers to a way of approaching problems from a user-centred perspective. The approach essentially encourages us to think in a human-centred way when solving large-scale complex problems.
To develop an understanding of design planning online, it’s worth knowing the four design fundamentals: color theory, imagery, typography and composition. This will help you to design a great website or landing page and also be useful for any visual content your produce.
Consistency in brand is also important for brand recognition so use this brand style elements template to keep track of all the key design elements. This can be used by everyone in the business to ensure you keep the look of your brand on track.
As employers look for people with unique skills and knowledge and a way to stand out from competitors, it’s a good idea to have a solid understanding of design to pump up your marketing resume.
7. Social Media
As a marketer, it's essential to have some understanding of social media marketing as with over 5.3 billion users worldwide, it can help you attract, influence and engage an audience.
You need to understand that it's not as simple as creating a post and putting it out there. The content you create needs to be relevant, targeted and stand out so people will stop scrolling and click.
It's also about understanding the strengths of each platform and the formats and messaging that will suit your audience.
For example, if you're a fitness brand with a customer base of 20-30 year olds then TikTok may help drive brand awareness. You could post a video of customers at a fitness class or a promo video showing what you have to offer.
Or let’s say you’re a B2B business that sells software to companies then LinkedIn could help to make connections and engage in niche groups that drum up business.
For example, software brand Dropbox posts regularly on LinkedIn to promote its brand and services. This post promotes its new AI-powered universal search tool Dropbox Dash.
It's about knowing your audience base, creating content that will resonate, and using the right social platforms.
8. Email marketing
Email is an essential tool for any marketer, especially as first-party data is more important than ever, since the changes to the use of cookies on Google.
The great thing about email marketing is that it helps you to communicate with, and influence, a captive audience and deliver personalized messaging through segmentation and workflows.
According to Litmus, 44% of marketers say email is their most effective marketing channel, a greater percentage than for any other channel - Litmus’s State of Email Workflows report
There are a lot of great automation tools out there that can help with email marketing and many of them now have AI-powered capabilities (e.g. MailChimp, HubSpot and Omnisend) so it's important to familiarize yourself with them.
It's also important to have lists to keep your contacts in order. For example, if you run a paid campaign on social media, collate your contacts into a list so you can target them with similar information or messaging.
Triggered workflows and drip campaigns are an effective way to send relevant messages at regular intervals to re-engage prospects or customers based on actions.
For example, let’s say a list of people downloaded an ebook on your website. Based on the content of the ebook you could target that audience with relevant messaging that is more likely to be read and clicked as you’re basing the content on past behavior.
Conclusion: 8 Essential Digital Marketing Skills
The pace of digital marketing can be relentless, so it’s important to continuously upskill and update your knowledge to remain relevant.
The 7 skills above are the key ones we believe will help you stay ahead of your peers and advance your career in any sector.
To do this you should stay on top of developments and trends through content such as blogs, podcasts and webinars like those available on DMI and looking at digital marketing leaders on social media or at conferences.
If your skills need a refresh in a certain area, consider a short course or digital marketing certification that will validate your skills and demonstrate your knowledge whether you’re looking for a promotion or to move jobs.
Above all, embrace new developments and technologies like AI that can make your life easier and boost productivity while enhancing your skills as a digital marketer.
SOURCE: Digital Marketing Institute
