Digital marketing is constantly changing, and new technologies and platforms affect how we engage with online content and ultimately spend our money. For businesses, this presents a highly competitive marketplace where you need to make marketing smarter. The best way to stay profitable in your business is to know the methods of upskilling your digital marketing team.
Read this guide to understand what digital marketing is all about, plus the critical skills you need to sharpen.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is all marketing activity that uses the internet to promote a product. To set goals and track performance, a digital marketer must understand the entire digital marketing process. Here are the main components of digital marketing today:
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is a digital marketing tool that uses keywords, links, images, and tags for top-page rankings on search engines. A search engine-optimized website carries the exact information your customers want online. SEO is the first step in implementing OKRs to capture and convert customers.
2. Digital Content Marketing
Digital content marketing uses different online mediums to promote your product or business. Content marketing structure involves text, videos, images, and audio to educate, entertain and convert your audience into paying customers. You can create blog posts, landing pages, infographics, podcasts, or any other medium to reach your audience.
3. SMM (Social Media Marketing)
The average person spends about 95 minutes on social media daily, so marketers need to capture user attention through social media marketing. Marketers can use Social media KPIs to track the performance of their social media marketing efforts. Include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and TikTok in your marketing strategy to discover SMM’s importance in your business.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing has the highest ROI in digital marketing at $36 per dollar spent. It’s an effective tool to guide customers through the sales funnel and engage with other digital marketing content. The importance of A/B testing is best demonstrated through email to reveal your digital marketing success. A small change in the text or graphics can greatly impact your ROI.
5. Native Advertising
A native advertisement looks like the host platform’s content, blending seamlessly with the “Sponsored” tag. Native advertising doesn’t interrupt the user experience compared to other digital ads like pay-per-click (PPC). Since this is a relatively new form of digital marketing, include it in upskilling your digital marketing team.
Critical Digital Marketing Skills That Every Marketer Needs
Before we look at the methods of upskilling your digital marketing team, let’s answer one question: Which skills does a marketing marketer need in the first place?
1) Audience Knowledge
A digital marketer must understand customer needs and wants from their products and services. Customers choose products based on age, gender, values, background, preferences and other factors. Create profiles for each type of audience to accurately set your marketing OKRs.
2) Product Knowledge
Know what you’re trying to sell before you build a marketing strategy. People love to buy products that solve their problems effectively and add value to their lives. Understand your product to identify your unique selling proposition (USP) and how to speak to your customers.
3) Sales Funnel Knowledge
A successful digital marketing strategy targets each piece of content to a specific stage in the sales funnel. Awareness-stage customers need a different type of messaging than consideration and decision-stage customers who are closer to purchase. Digital marketing strategies like “how-to” content and influencers are the final push to conversion at these stages. Your marketing team must identify and target customers with messages at the right point in the buying journey.
4) Storytelling Skills
Digital marketers must interpret business data into compelling stories to present to their audiences. The more engaging and relatable your brand story, the better your audience will spend on your products. Use an OKR tool to set objectives for your brand story.
5) Creativity Skills
Creativity is at the heart of digital marketing, and it’s more than posting blogs or social media content. It’s about finding those ideas that spark conversations or open minds about your brand. Digital marketers often have to make risky creative choices but always have accurate data to back them up.
6) Copywriting Skills
Copywriting helps you craft your marketing messages to win over your audience. Write clear sentences and proofread your content before you publish it on any digital marketing platform.
7) Listening Skills
Pay attention to what your customers say through your feedback channels. Both positive and negative feedback is essential to improve their marketing product management process. It helps you place your customer at the heart of all your marketing campaigns and build a loyal fanbase.
8) Teamwork Skills
Digital marketing is a collaborative process between your marketing team and IT, sales, customer service, finance, and other players in your business. Teamwork makes the difference between a mediocre marketing strategy and a consistent winner.
Digital marketing is a field that is constantly evolving, so it is important to stay up-to-date with the latest trends, tools, and best practices through continuous learning. You can improve your digital marketing strategy in the following ways:
Increased Website Traffic
Your marketing team uses their newfound skills to create impressive sales copy that engages audiences. Your social media content and online ads convert more visitors into paying customers. You can also adapt your digital marketing content to work across different channels to bring more traffic to your business from every side.
Better Lead Generation Results
Your marketing team can use their skills to dig into the sales funnel and understand the best route to conversion for each type of customer. Lead generation is no longer frustrating for your digital marketing team thanks to better targeting and product visibility.
Cost Savings
Methods for upskilling your marketing team cost time and money but ultimately lead to savings and a higher bottom line. With upskilling, your team better understands how to make the most of your digital marketing budget. They optimize your digital marketing channels so that every piece of content fetches a good ROI. You have a healthy balance between marketing, sales, and conversions.
Conclusion
Digital marketers must be highly adaptable to various marketing channels and build strong customer relationships. Your marketing team must stay up-to-date with market trends and manage workloads to create a great brand.
