Marketing serves as the most important area of every business. It refers to certain promotional activities to make people aware of the products/services of a company, ensuring that the products are available for purchase. The traditional marketing techniques include billboards, print media, and traditional marketing channels for product promotion. In the current era, most marketers have switched to digital marketing, which uses the internet to reach the target audience and create awareness regarding a specific product or service.
While the idea is pretty simple, there’s way more to it. If you don’t have the right skills, digital marketing can be quite challenging. However, if you’ve got the right set of skills, nobody can stop you from making an impression in the digital world. Today, roughly 40% of the world’s total population is online. Billions of new users have joined digital media in the past few years. Undoubtedly, the growth of digital marketing has been massive, pushing the industry worth billions of dollars.
More and more organizations are hiring talented digital marketers that are skilled with all the current marketing tactics. With the rise in online customers’ availability, local businesses realize the importance of digital marketing in business success. Therefore, seeing several digital marketing agencies making their way into the market doesn’t come as a surprise anymore. Perhaps, the question is, what skills do you need to become a sought-after digital marketing consultant and succeed in this promising industry? Let’s find out.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Compared to paid search results, organic search results have a far better probability of being clicked. Therefore, understanding SEO basics will be an integral component of your digital marketing career. Currently, most people use ‘white hat’ SEO tactics, for example, link building, guest blogging, and content marketing. However, you need to familiarize yourself with technical SEO tactics like incorporating keywords, H1, and H2 tags, and updating title tags.
Plus, a digital marketer should know how to perform keyword research, as keywords play an active role in promoting PPC, blogs, and website content. They are further essential to produce results for the brands you work with.
- Photo Editing
Well, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Undoubtedly, visuals are a big part of the marketing world – there’s no doubt about it. People love visuals because they help them learn fast. Since website users don’t have a significant attention span, your content would be of no use if you fail to capture their attention. However, visuals can help you get the users’ attention.
According to some studies, our brains are better at processing visuals, transmitting and retaining much more information. It is better to add relevant images to your content to increase its viewership. Unlike other types of content, visual content has more chances to get shared on social media. What does this mean? You need to be aware of what makes a good visual great by utilizing your editing skills.
No, we’re not asking you to become a full-fledged professional photographer. Still, you should at least know what makes a picture ideal for an article. If you pair the right images with the right content, you’ve already done your part to make the content look engaging. So, what’s the takeaway? Learn photo editing skills to develop and edit pictures because they’ll be a great addition to your digital marketing efforts.
There’s a lot of places you can visit to get started. For example, search for some high-quality photo editing tutorials on YouTube – they’ll be sufficient for now!
- Writing
It is one of the most critical skillsets a digital marketer should have. There’s no job in the field of digital marketing that does not require writing. If you know the recipe for an excellent blog post, you’ll go very far as a digital marketer. You should know how to transform a bad piece of content into good and source unique content. It would be best to get a gist of some copywriting tool.
- WordPress
WordPress is a great tool and is unsurprisingly the most popular CMS (content management system) in the entire world. CMS refers to a platform or software people use to build their blogs or websites. There are a ton of websites that use WordPress. In fact, it’s used by over 35% of the whole web, with the second competitor Joomla having a measly share of just 2.7%.
WordPress became a personal publishing platform in 2001 and transformed into an all-inclusive content management system by 2008. Thanks to WordPress, you’ll have creative freedom and 100% control to do whatever you want to because you’ll be owning everything. Numerous recognized brands use WordPress, for example, Vogue, Mercedes-Benz, Harvard Business Review, New York Times, and CNN. Some government websites of the US and the UK also use WordPress. Even the US military has powered some of their sites through WordPress.
If you intend to rank websites on search engines, WordPress is your best bet. According to reports, Google rates WordPress above its own Blogger platform. It is quite secure and includes frequent updates. Also, several security plugins are available to safeguard you from potential attackers. Perhaps, WordPress isn’t difficult to learn and is pretty easy to use. If you dedicate a few hours, you can finish up learning it in just a week. Search for an online tutorial to learn more about its working. After learning WordPress, you’ll be able to pinpoint any technical glitch on a WordPress-powered website and fix it without an issue.
- Paid Social Media Advertising
Social media is no longer free.’ Today, paid advertising through social media is the best way to ensure your content reaches the maximum audience. If you strive to be a great digital marketer, understand how to write a copy – variations and length – and follow the best imaging practices on every website. It is best to know how to alter and monitor bids so you can optimize your ads. If you face difficulties understanding it and don’t have enough time to spend on it, get some help online!
Conclusion
These are the top five digital marketing skills you need to compete in the digital world. It would be best to master all these skills, pull them together with the near-perfect combination of analytical and creative strategies to become a successful digital marketer.
