If you’re embarking on any digital marketing project, there’s a few essential skills that you need to have. Acquiring these skills requires extensive research. You’ll need to put in the hours and be committed to updating your skills as new developments occur.
To help you, we’ve put together a list of the top 5 essential skills that you’ll need for a basic overview of digital marketing. However, this list isn’t exhaustive. There’s many different facets to digital marketing, and new technology releases continuously. In the digital landscape, it’s essential to stay up to date and keep an eye on anything new that’s coming out.
Web Design
Web design is a crucial step to getting your business online. Without a website that’s designed to best practice standards, you’re putting all of your other marketing efforts at risk.
Why? Because your website needs to represent your business in the best light, both visually and functionally. If customers are directed to your site from paid ads, SEO or other marketing channels, they need to get a good impression. If your website looks spammy, outdated or unsafe, users will be very unlikely to stay. This could mean that your content goes unread and your marketing efforts are wasted.
An attractive, well-designed website gives users a clear journey. It allows them to digest your informative content and make an informed decision as to whether to use your services. High quality websites also help to build trust with users, as well as search engines. Better websites are more likely to rank higher, making it easier to gain and retain new website traffic.
Content Creation & Content Marketing
An attractive website ensures that users trust your website from their first impression. However, to keep their attention and gain their trust, the written content must be exceptional.
Not only does your content need to appease Google’s complex algorithms with carefully-selected keywords, it also needs to be useful to human readers.
Getting creative with your written content could be the difference between a potential customer leaving, or choosing to make a purchase. Words have the ability to evoke emotions, and many consumers are driven by their emotions to make purchasing decisions. This is why we don’t recommend using AI to write much – if any – content on a website. While AI can be useful to generate large amounts of writing, it doesn’t have the same ability as a human to create an emotional response.
SEO
When you’ve got a great website with engaging content, the next step is to make sure people see it. SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s a practice that consists of making sure all the content on a website is high quality and in-line with Google’s guidelines. When a website has a great SEO campaign in place, it’s more likely to rank high in the search results. Therefore, the site will be visible to more local searchers. This generates more traffic and in turn, more conversions.
Analytics & Data Analysis
Once your project is off the ground with a combination of great web design, written content and SEO, you’ll need to know how to measure your success. That’s where your analytical skills will come in. Google Analytics is a great, accessible platform that many digital marketers use.
However, your analytical skills will take a while to build. Not only does Analytics require extensive knowledge of technical terms, you also need to know how to use it to manipulate the data in a way that’s useful to you. Extra features like Tag Manager help you to collect more specific data as required. Google has plenty of free training documents to help, which we recommend looking at to get started.
Once you’ve found out how to get the data you need, you need to extrapolate it for analysis. Google Looker Studio can be useful for this, as you can connect Analytics to it directly.
Project Management
Lastly, and potentially most importantly, we believe that every good digital marketer should have excellent project management skills. This means that among all the other skills you need, you also need to be organised and great at time management.
Without good project management skills, all your other skills could be going to waste. Everything that makes you great at digital marketing needs to be used thoughtfully and at the right time. If you’re steaming ahead with creating complex analytical reports before you’ve even thought about your web design, you’re going to get mixed up very quickly.
A good project manager will be able to come up with a comprehensive plan. This plan could be subject to change, depending on how the project develops. Therefore, you’ll need to be flexible and open to making changes. If you’re working with a team, you’ll need to know who to assign work to and check in with them to ensure everything it being done correctly.
In the end, you’ll need to bring together all the digital marketing skills you’ve used to produce an outstanding result.
Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Professional Digital Marketer?
If everything we’ve just been through hasn’t overwhelmed you, you might have what it takes to run your own digital marketing campaign.
However, if you don’t, there’s no need to worry. The team at Search4Local are here to help. We can manage your digital marketing project from start to finish, with full support throughout. Our team consists of talented individuals that produce all work in-house. Allow us to take care of your online presence, leaving you with time to nurture your business and do what you do best.
Written by Alice Farley
