Digital marketing refers to using online modes to promote brands for their product or services. Be it through social media, email communication or advertisements, digital marketing is the best way to connect with potential clients and convert them into loyal audiences.
The best way to grow your business and establish an excellent online presence is through online marketing. But the point is that in the fast-changing world even digital marketing is evolving at a staggering speed.
To stay relevant in this world, it may be necessary to gather skills left, right and centre. Hence there is plenty of space for professional growth and innovation. Not just newcomers, but those working in this field should be able to constantly learn to ensure that they will be able to achieve maximum results with the right skill set.
Hottest Skills in Digital Marketing
In 2022, digital marketers need to stay updated with the relevant skills to ensure that their clients are relevant and growing in the right direction. Here are the top skills that you must learn in the field of digital marketing:
1. Marketing Automation
Organizations desire to achieve higher revenue, increase operational efficiency and faster growth at a lower cost. However, the major problem lies in aligning their people, processes, and technology to achieve these goals.
Marketing automation is streamlining the massive explosion of data, automating repetitive tasks and measuring marketing tasks and workflows to increase operational efficiency. The most powerful marketing automation platforms allow you to manage the entire customer journey via one platform. All of this is without human action.
Common marketing automation workflows include behavioural targeting, lead prioritization, and personalized advertising. It recognizes its potential customers and leads and automates converting them into sales. This is done via email marketing, SMS marketing, or even pop-ups.
Targeted messaging, campaign tracking, lead scoring, and personalized customer experiences can build relationships with customers over more extended periods and help drive conversions.
Now, why is this helpful? Unfortunately, consumers do not buy the first time they come to the brand’s website. With automation power, you can create awareness about your brand. The more people know about your brand, the more you gain trust and eventually, it will translate into higher sales.
The main aim of automation is to keep you relevant in the consumer’s head, leading to business growth. As someone skilled in marketing automation, one can find it extremely simple to find a job from startups to Fortune 500 companies. The power lies in automated work to reduce human labour so that the human brain can be used for more creative work.
2. Content Marketing Skills
A vast majority of marketers and prominent organizations around the world like P&G, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems, are using content marketing to attract people to their websites. Small businesses and one-person shops have also adopted content marketing around the globe for the simple and important reason – IT WORKS.
Content marketing is one of the best ways to build an audience. Today companies need to stay relevant and consistent with their content on social media. People want to see well-written, well-researched and aesthetic articles, insights and social media posts that promote content for the business and nurture them into leads. When you create valuable content, your brand is positioned as a thought leader.
Skills like idea generation, research methodologies, visual marketing, copywriting techniques SEO and knowledge of different media types (blog, posts, videos etc.) are essential when working with content marketing campaigns.
The more experienced content marketers can do more than craft blog posts, pitch decks and website copy. They also track report analytics for different types of content and think strategically about distribution channels.
A content marketer hence becomes extremely important to implement the overall company’s content strategy; produce online and offline marketing to drive profitable customer action.
3. Video Production and Marketing
With the audience’s focus moving towards smartphones, there’s no better action plan than video marketing for educating, generating leads, and converting audiences into loyal customers, especially on social media platforms. In today’s businesses, video marketing has become the central focus of the marketing strategy as they quickly grab the users’ attention.
Video content can be uploaded directly on the company’s website or on video-sharing platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and DailyMotion to feature their products and services to the online community. However, marketers need to be smarter in creating their video production strategy. They need to be able to add value to the audience’s life. Instead of focussing on a product or service, scripting a relatable story for the video will help in increasing engagement, but also help impact buying decisions using emotional connections
While the concept of video marketing started in 2005 with the launch of YouTube, apps like TikTok, YouTube Shorts and reels have changed the way video content is perceived. Trending music, and hook steps catch audience attention and businesses are able to generate brand awareness or placement. Shorter form content has become the new black.
Right from ideation to execution, video production and marketing has been the best way to capture attention through visual
4. Project Management
While working with large teams, clients, outside consultants, vendors, and other professionals to do a project, it is very easy to lose track of the details. To stay organized and work well with others, project managers come to the rescue. In project management, you gather, curate, translate, and communicate to deliver a project on time and within a budget.
A project manager can get things done, ensuring everyone on the team has the resources, time, and skills needed to do their job. They are not personally responsible for any deliverables themselves, though they are positioned to hold everyone accountable.
They may even use tracking software to record how long was spent on different tasks throughout the day, from checking daily emails to web builds. This helps to monitor the progress, overcome roadblocks, and stick to the original timeline.
For example – If you’re launching an ebook, you’ll need to work with writers and designers to construct the ebook. Once it’s done, you’ll need to collaborate with the marketing managers to host the ebook on your website. Finally, you have to collaborate with your social media and email marketing team to distribute and promote the ebook. A digital project manager will know how to take various teams’ priorities and ideas into account, establish a process, set deadlines and provide instructions, and keep the project moving forward.
The 2022 project managers are moving their teams and processes online to keep up with the competition and deliver faster than ever.
Using online project management, collaboration software, and cloud file storage systems, work is done more efficiently and with better results. These digital project managers are the new faces of project management on a global stage.
5. Analytics
Data analytics is a field of research that deals with collecting, analyzing, and processing a large amount of unstructured information to find helpful information for future use.
Earlier mathematicians worked in the field of statistics, but with the development of technology, data analysts with the knowledge of algorithms make up the core of the profession. Web analytics in digital marketing focuses your efforts on saving time and money – optimize everything to maximize the return on investment.
This fantastic opportunity has also led to a new phenomenon in marketing known as Targeted marketing. Developing content focused on a specific person or group of customers with their characteristics and desires is possible. Companies use digital analytics to minimize churn, encourage experimentation, and increase the value of existing customers.
With digital analytics in marketing, you understand who your most likely customers are so that you can increase customer lifetime value. This helps build personas to build your digital marketing strategy around.
Since most of your customers now spend a substantial amount of time researching online before deciding to buy, it is critical for businesses to be proactive with how they handle their web marketing. Digital analytics in marketing helps business leaders generate insights, analyze data and spot trends using various tools and turn them into an actionable step – making this an in-demand skill without which a modern business can not survive.
To optimize your sales funnel, analytics indicate loopholes by streamlining it and helping them create solutions for it. Analytics let us know whether the project was a success or a failure, what to modify to stick to your plan and how to retain a larger audience for your business.
Data is the new superpower and analytics is the only way to use it well.
6. Lead generation
A ‘lead’ is the consumer who has shown interest in your company. Organizations will be able to refine and establish who the potential customers are, their needs, interests when they are interested in hearing from the brand, and the best channel to reach them.
Thanks to the new technology, you can focus on your target audience and research their habits using various analytics software(s). Lead generation is the process of attracting, identifying, and transforming online users into prospects for a business and eventually becoming paying customers. The method utilizes online channels, tactics, email campaigns and paid social media ads.
The two main areas to focus on for Lead Generation are –
(1) B2B Lead Generation
It is also known as Business-To-Business Lead Generation is an activity that brings new prospects into your sales funnel and potential buyers of your products or services.
(2) B2C Lead Generation
It is the process of marketing to consumers. The more leads you get, the faster you can focus on them. Businesses need B2C Lead Generation in large volumes to develop high-quality leads across various channels like social media and social media that fit certain criteria or provide specific details.
Hence, lead generation becomes an essential skill to ensure sales and conversions resulting in higher paying customers.
7. Email Marketing
Social media has been a boon for all marketers to promote their products, but you can never go wrong with good old-fashioned emails that can help to attract consumers. While all brands collect email IDs it is important to be able to stand out from the barrage of emails that an average Joe receives every single day.
Email marketing hence becomes a skill like no other. Akin to a mini-website, email marketers need to learn the basics of web design and content writing while crafting that email which will help to increase conversions with the right copy and design.
The best part is that email marketing allows you to make multiple iterations and refinements to create the best version, which is based on A/B testing and click-open rates. Eventually, for email marketing, it is necessary to configure, deploy and automate email solutions for success.
Audience segmentation, crafting the perfect email and personalization based on data is not every person’s cup of tea. Hence this skill is hot in demand for the next 10 years at least.
8. Performance Marketing
The latest and possibly one of the highest rewarding skills in digital marketing is performance marketing. The best part about performance marketing is that advertisers are happiest to use this form of measure since it results in payments only when a desired result or action happens.
Hence companies will be eager to hire performance marketers because they are sure that the marketing budget will be spent fruitfully. According to InMobi’s Marketing Report (2020), marketers plan to spend approximately 60% of their budgets on performance marketing campaigns since they have cleared linkage to the return on investment.
Individuals with this skill will be able to devise a solid marketing strategy, take care of campaign design and copy, along with the compliance with regulations to ensure that each campaign runs smoothly.
Campaign performances need to be optimized for maximum results through best practices, such as content marketing, landing page optimization, search engine optimization (SEO), etc.
Conclusion
Technologies and social media are constantly evolving, and thus new digital marketing trends also emerge at a moment’s notice. Pay closer attention to business strategies, industry news, sales strategies, and business strategy and overall developments being made within the digital industries. In addition, you need to develop a better understanding of software skills as they’re essential for a smooth working experience in any job role. Apart from knowing your digital marketing skills inside out, it is equally important to stay updated with the current information on brands, digital marketing trends, upcoming trends, predictions, and much more.
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