10 Foundational Skills for Digital Marketing Specialists

Digital marketing isn’t the side gig it used to be. These days, it’s the main stage. Every brand needs to implement strategies for grabbing attention online and converting that attention into sales, sign-ups, or even just great brand recognition. 

This sounds easy enough, but considering how competitive the digital landscape is and how many other entities are vying for the attention of your target audience, the talents of digital marketing specialists that deliver results really cannot be overstated. A good specialist has to be part storyteller, part strategist, part data detective, and part chameleon.

So how do you strike that precarious balance? Here are ten skills that form the backbone of the job.

Creative Content Development

Strong content is the backbone of any digital marketing strategy. It’s what breaks doomscrollers from their pattern and instead prompts them to pay attention to you and your brand. 

To create strong content that aligns with your branding, you need a sense of voice, rhythm, and style that feels unique to your brand and engaging for your target audience. In other words, you need to know what resonates with your audience and deliver to that.

Granted, creating strong content isn’t always an accessible task for small and medium-sized enterprises – but great digital marketing specialists are also renowned for being just as resourceful as they are creative. Using tools like stock photo and video libraries and even an AI text to image generator, can help bring abstract concepts into sharper focus, alongside helping to fill in gaps in your brand’s own asset library.

For digital marketing freelancers and contractors looking to bolster their professional portfolio, consider adding these creative content development tools to your artillery alongside outlining your proficiency with these tools in your CV.

Visual Communication

The way you package your campaign messaging visually matters just as much as the words you use. Humans are visual creatures, which means that you can expect digital audiences to take in images before they even read text. 

As such, if your designs look clumsy, you’ve already lost them. The good news here is that you don’t need to be a professional graphic designer, but you do need to have a sense of balance, colour and understanding of how visuals can affect the mood of your message.

One surprisingly practical skill is learning how to design infographics. These information-dense resources often take the form of PDF files, making them great downloadable and printable assets for prospective customers. You can share infographics with blog content, on social media, or even to drive email subscriber campaigns by encouraging people to sign up to your mailing list in order to receive that useful branded resource from you. 

Designing information-dense content like infographics requires precision, however. The clearer and more reader-friendly your infographics, the stronger and more authoritative they are. And the more authoritative resources you provide, the stronger your brand trust and reputability online.

SEO Know-How

Speaking of brand trust and authority, it’s time to delve into any digital marketer’s strongest technical skill: SEO (search engine optimisation). SEO often gets talked about like it is some secret code, but in fact, it’s just making sure that people can find the stuff you put out. You don’t have to memorise the details of every single Google update, but what you do need is a basic sense of how search engine optimisation works. If your website loads slowly and is difficult to navigate, your bounce rate will skyrocket and Google will look at that data and prompt them not to recommend you as a resource to its searchers, which in turn will hurt your site’s search visibility and search traffic (organic traffic).

At the end of the day, SEO is about being helpful. When a question relating to your market or niche is punched into Google, you want to make sure your website provides a plain and simple answer that meets the user’s search intent to a tee. 

That’s where SEO elements like keyword optimisation, clear headings and subheadings, and plenty of relevant links come into play. If your content is useful, easy to read and easy to navigate, you can stay ahead of the crowd and appear on page one of Google results for all the keywords you’d like to rank for. And it all starts with a strong understanding of SEO best practices to craft your helpful digital content.

Paid Ads Management

Running ads online can be stressful because it’s easy to spend way too much for very little return. That’s why monitoring from a skilled eye is so essential to maximising your digital ad spend and evaluating your campaign performance over time.

Much like SEO which requires consistent web and content updates, paid ad campaigns aren’t something you set once and forget about. They need A/B testing, data analytics, and targeted messaging driven by keyword research. 

In truth, paid ads management can be so intensive as a skillset that a lot of digital marketers may opt to specialise in paid vs. SEO and vice versa. But if you want to be a jack of all trades, you could gain a foundational understanding of both and seek opportunities across either of these marketing streams. Basically if you can’t decide between specialising in paid or SEO, you could A/B test your own career and see what facet you thrive in! 

Social Media Strategy

Social media advertising looks simple from the outside, but keeping a brand active and relevant can actually take a lot of effort and strategic, platform-specific knowhow. Learning how to produce content for each social media platform is key here. What works on Instagram might come across as odd on LinkedIn, and if you post the same content everywhere, you can run the risk of making your brand look stale and your audience getting fatigued by your presence rather than engaged by your content.

The trick here is paying attention to what people actually want to see on each platform vs. churning out marketing dribble. For Instagram, producing convoluted industry content that alienates your target audience is a quick way to get people tapping on that “unfollow” button. Whereas on LinkedIn, that same industry content may actually perform better – but will it drive conversions with laymen as much, or just help bolster your business’ brand authority? 

In principle, the best way to use social media is to cultivate the type of engagement you’re looking for from your target audience. You can create social media content that sparks conversations and educates alongside entertaining. Replying to comments, sharing stories, and essentially building digital communities around your brand can also make your business more accessible and approachable, which will not only help strengthen your brand visibility and reputability, but also help you accrue stronger, more purpose-driven leads along the way.

Reading and Using Data

There’s an overwhelming amount of data in digital marketing, so it’s easy to get lost in it. You’ve got dashboards, reports, graphs and endless numbers. The list goes on. And in all cases, the hard part isn’t collecting the data, but rather sorting and analysing it all to determine what insights actually matter. 

Saying traffic went up sounds nice, but if traffic increases aren’t leading to conversion increases, it doesn’t mean much for your business. And what comes up must inevitably always come down – so time is always of the essence when it comes to capitalising off of any momentum online

Thankfully, there are a wide variety of digital marketing analytics tools available out there today, so marketers who want to hone their data reading and reporting skills can focus on building proficiency using these tools. A good place to start is by experimenting with SEO keyword research tools like SEMrush and AHREFs, as well as Google Search Console and Google Analytics. There are plenty of free short courses and even tutorial videos on YouTube on using these tools as well, so you can bolster your CV with these proficiencies at minimal cost too.

Email Marketing That Actually Works

The reason email marketing works is because you can create targeted messages that are sent directly to your subscribers – aka, people who have already expressed interest in your business and are just waiting for the right opportunity to make a purchase with you. 

A good email sounds like it was written for the person reading it. This isn’t to say you have to hand-write every single email you send out, but rather that someone at the top of your customer sales funnel shouldn’t be getting the same messaging or offers as someone that’s nearing the end of the funnel. 

On top of producing tailored messaging to drive user actions, you also need to make sure your email content is engaging to drive clicks. Your subject line needs to be intriguing, the content digestible and clear, and the timing has to be right to ensure your open rates stay optimal. Again, someone who just bought from you doesn’t want the same message as someone who hasn’t clicked in months.

It takes time to develop these hyper-specific messaging skills, which is why marketing specialists who can facilitate email marketing campaigns are so valuable. And given that with the right approach, email marketing can be a lot more cost-effective than SEO and paid, this may be the service that you’ll be able to sell prospective business clients on more than any other facet of digital – so it’s well worth honing these skills.

Seeing the Bigger Picture (Customer Journey)

The majority of people don’t purchase right off the bat. They come, they look, they ponder, they compare with other options, they forget, and they may come back later. If you know that, you can begin to orchestrate what it is they need to hear at each stage of the customer journey (or customer sales funnel), rather than hoping they just magically convert.

Think about the flow of engagement with a brand, from first exposure to the business all the way through to research, deal-hunting, and finally making a purchase. An ad could catch their eye, a blog post might earn their trust, and an email might encourage them to complete their checkout.

Ultimately, each part of that sales journey plays a role in cultivating trust with your customer, and when it’s all joined up, their interaction and patronage of your business feels natural instead of pushy. The goal isn’t to rush people into buying, but rather to guide them at their own pace and make their buying experience with you as smooth as possible. That’s what turns one-time buyers into loyal customers, and good limited-run campaign managers into bona fide digital marketing managers.

Working With Others

Digital marketing campaigns are never created in isolation. Week to week, you’re bouncing ideas off a group of designers, writers, developers and the sales crew. Sometimes this collaboration flows well, and other times it can feel like too many cooks in the kitchen. But throughout all kinds of weather, great digital marketing specialists are able to communicate clearly and maintain relationships without losing sight of their campaign’s overall goals and objectives.

Most campaigns look simple once they’re out in the world, but behind the scenes there’s a lot of back and forth. But if that back and forth isn’t productive, you run the risk of your campaigns stagnating or your decision-making regarding strategy not being fast enough. Great marketers know that a quick chat often solves more than a long and drawn out meeting. Keeping people in the loop makes a huge difference and stops projects from dragging on forever. If you can help keep it all moving without too much stress, you’ll make life easier for everyone, and people will be more likely to want to work with you again across many future campaigns to come.

Staying Flexible

Finally, the only constant in digital marketing is change. With algorithm updates and changing consumer sentiments, what’s effective now may not be effective in a few months. This is what makes stagnation in digital so deadly – if you get stuck in one way of doing things, you’re going to struggle hard.

The people who succeed in these cyberspheres are those who remain curious. They experiment, they stay on top of what’s changing, and they don’t freak out when something suddenly stops working. It’s not so much about having all the answers, as it is being willing to learn and grow over time. 

Ultimately, a career in digital marketing never gets boring if you relish change and learning everyday. There will always be new tricks to pick up, or better ways to do things, which is what keeps this career pathway so interesting in the long run. 

Reach Greater Heights as a Digital Marketer with These Skills

Digital marketing is a mix of creativity, numbers and evolving with change. These ten skills provide a great foundation for any digital strategists, but the real magic and power is your capability to combine your competencies and maintain a multidisciplinary mindset. Some people gravitate to the creative side of things, some live for the data, but the best marketers are the ones who continue to learn and adapt across both their left and right brains.

At the heart of it all, digital marketing is about connecting with people. Behind every click, like, or sale is a person deciding if what you’ve shared matters to them. If you focus on being useful and genuine by creating data-driven strategies and human-oriented content, the rest usually falls into place.