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Top 9 Skills You Need to Boost Your Digital Marketing Resume in 2020

Welcome to a 2020 of increased innovations in the digital marketing industry. This year’s most priced digital marketing industry is coming on the heels of recent innovations witnessed in 2017. As the industry is continuously evolving, there is also a need for every marketer to stay advanced along with the newest advancements and innovations.

But then, many surveys say there is a talent gap in digital marketing. While the need for digital marketing skills has never been higher, the digital skills gap has never been wider as well. Almost 90% of digital marketers lack technical digital marketing skills, and only 8% stay active in this regard.

This discrepancy can provide you with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate your value and competency, if only you would learn these 8 basic yet technical and most recruitable digital marketing skills.

Without much ado, let’s dive into them.

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing holds its position in the top five digital marketing positions for nobody knows when. This is because it is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract, retain a clearly defined audience, and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

It’s the fulcrum that holds all the pieces of digital marketing together. Though the hype surrounding it has waned content remains the “king of digital marketing.” It’s no longer the “pretty new thing” everyone is talking about, but has matured to be a mainstay cornerstone of almost any comprehensive digital strategy.

Now anyone who can plan, strategize, create and promote compelling, targeted, engaging content is in high demand from digital marketing recruiters and content marketing staffing specialists.

What makes it such a valuable skill? Content touches nearly every component of a complete marketing program today. No matter what field you’re in, understanding what quality, well-targetted content brings to the table is crucial to getting and retaining the attention of potential customers.

This is not surprising. Content marketing helps companies rank higher in search results. Whether it’s a helpful and insightful blog post or a helpful piece of content like an eBook, it all helps to generate those valuable leads, increase website traffic and move businesses one step closer to that first-page result. Unfortunately for you, if you don’t have excellent writing skills as a backup for different platforms, then the skills you have in SEO, SMO and email marketing will be useless.

As part of your content creation and marketing skill, you should also learn to do brand storytelling. This involves a strategy to increase brand awareness and loyalty among consumers by providing them with compelling storylines about your business and products. Like Ian Rowden said; “the best brands are built on great stories.”

A brand story is more than content and a narrative. The story goes beyond what’s written in the copy on a website, the text in a brochure or the presentation used to pitch to investors or customers. Your story isn’t just what you tell people, it’s also majorly about why you are doing what you do and how it benefits them. This is the Holy Grail for many successful content marketers and content marketing strategies.

Fortunately for you, you can learn how to become a content marketer with this Hubspot Academy course.

2. Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a form of marketing focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines.

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Search engines are the primary method of navigation for most internet users. This is true whether your site provides content, services, products, information, or just about anything else.

Arising from content marketing, search engines rule a digital marketer’s life. Since the rise of Google and the death of outbound marketing, ranking on the first page of search results has become more important than ever. And there’s no surprise why this is. 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. In real terms, search engines handle 6,586,013,574 queries a day. That’s six billion, five hundred eighty-six million, thirteen thousand, five hundred and seventy-four, in case you’re wondering.

Whichever way you choose to look at those figures, the ability to put a prospective employer on the first page, or even top of a search result will make you instantly attractive. As we enter 2020 (well, a couple of months ago) and search engine algorithms are once again updated and made smarter, digital marketers will need to have the skills to produce high ranking content, while staying on top of all these updates to keep their clients content on that first page of results.

Even if you are not looking to be the person in ultimate charge of SEO, knowing the benefits and practices of good SEO will make you a better marketer and better teammate. Learning the ropes of SEO will allow you effectively and confidently make directions to others or take action when needed.

For 2020, beyond keyword implementation, there are a number of things you should focus on. Look at Search Engine Result Page (SERP), learn how to analyse your rankings and spot threats to your rankings. You should also be learning about structured data, voice search and mobile search optimization.

SEO can be both a creative and technical challenge, so learn how to do optimisations on your website and off it. To kick-start your SEO career, you should be familiar with Moz and SEMRush tools to become the competitive applicant who can find out the customers’ behaviour and fill those positions that many companies are now earmarking huge budgets for.

3. Website Design and Programming

Coding is an invaluable skill to add to your skill stack. The beauty is that you don’t have to be a code geek (though it wouldn’t hurt being one), basic level of skills and understanding will equip you to advance in the job market. With a basic level of HTML, CSS and other common coding languages, you demonstrate to employers you know how to troubleshoot basic problems without help from IT. And if you’re beyond the basics, even better!

Gone are the days when digital marketers can get away with not knowing basic coding. Today, you can do almost nothing without some bit of coding. In 2017, 20% of entry and mid-level jobs required HTML and CSS skills from digital marketers. In 2020, this trend will expectedly continue to increase, as demand increases. Instead of businesses outsourcing another person to make basic HTML and CSS changes on content, this job is now given to in-house digital marketers or technical growth marketers.

Marketers who can make small programming modifications in the backend of websites, design engaging email campaigns with HTML and improve landing pages will be in more demand than those who cannot.

Want a crash course on basic coding, sign up for free online HTML and CSS tutorials on sites like W3Schools.

4. Data Science and Analytics

Data is growing faster every day, and by 2020, it will be 1.7 megabytes of new information. If you’ve found a passion for crunching numbers, adding data analysis and science to your stack could be an excellent career move. You’ll be in a prime position where digital analytics staffing or recruitment experts will be knocking at your door.

In the current digital marketing landscape, marketers have an abundance of data to gain insights from. We can drill down into our customer’s personas, discover their wants and pain-points, pinpoint exactly their location on the buyer’s journey they are and determine which messages to send to them to move them one step closer to purchasing our products.

It is because of this volume of data that analytical skills are more important than ever. There’s no point in being good at creating an engaging digital campaign if you cannot analyse the results, reduce bounce rates, click though rates, impressions, attract better leads and reproduce the campaign’s success using analytic tools such as Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Hotjar, etc.

That’s why marketing operations are increasingly turning to data science recruiters to help them find experts capable of reading and interpreting those mountains of information. As a data analysis expert with data science skills, you can step to help sort, organize, and (most importantly) extract meaning and actionable insights from these huge data landfills. Turning all this mined data into something tangible and valuable is a highly sought after skill.

You should focus on expanding your knowledge of analytics tools beyond Google’s suite. Learn how to analyse e-commerce statistics. The world of digital marketing is always evolving and the skills needed are in constant need of refreshment, and adding data science and analytic skills to your bag of tricks should not be up for debate at all.

5. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is basically a software that allows digital marketers to automate tasks and marketing actions for desired outcomes. This can be used for repetitive tasks that allow the businesses to modernize, computerize, determine the promotion functions and as well workflows, so as to save quality time and increase the operational effectiveness and revenue.

Marketing automation is very much valuable for small and medium-sized businesses. The standard features that it includes are Email Marketing, Landing pages, social marketing, Lead Management, Campaign Management, Marketing Analytics and more. Though, to utilize these technologies possibly for business, the team should have an expert who knows the perfect ways to make use of them.

With over 4000 marketing automation solutions available, staying on top of them all can be an impossible job for digital marketers. However, it is a necessary evil to monitor them and determine which ones are the most valuable in order to become an indispensable asset.

Digital marketers who are well skilled in their industry’s marketing automation tools, and keep their finger on the button for new ones emerging, will be far more valuable to companies looking to save more time and improve workflow from automation. To make sure you are one of them, take advantage of the free certification courses many of these platforms like Hubspot, Hootsuite and Marketo offer.

6. Social Media Management and Marketing

By now, you should already know the revolutionary power of social media. Social networks have massive, highly engaged audiences that should be valuable marketing territory. Social media has become entrenched in our everyday lives and routines. Nearly one-third of the population is currently using some type of social media platform.  

This is why businesses are looking to capitalize on this unique digital marketing skill to drive new business opportunity. Having a social media marketing skill qualifies you to become a social media manager whose major responsibility is to manage contents on social media pages. You need to develop an understanding of unique copywriting, colour psychology, analytics, and visual marketing to improve your social media skills.

But in an environment where anyone can fire off a tweet in a matter of seconds and have it lost in a sea of other messages, images, links and more, it’s hard to make your voice heard. Sometimes the best way to ensure your message is heard is through sponsored posts, paid ads, and influencer marketing. To capture target audiences more quickly and efficiently, brands increasingly realize the advantages of working with paid opportunities.

That’s where you come in. You can maximize your company’s advertising results with paid social media advertising; either working in a social media advertising agency or as a freelance influencer marketer.

However, despite this, Small Business Trends reports that 24% of small businesses don’t use social media at all. Many will have to adopt at some point, meaning that they will need to hire staff. This year, you should be focusing on social media ad management, community management, customer service and the increasing engagement in engaging content like Facebook and Instagram live stories.

7. Email Marketing

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. It’s one of the oldest digital channels marketers have had to reach customers, yet it continues to have one of the highest click through rates and ROI out of any other marketing outlet.

Emailing is a mainstay in the marketing toolbox, but marketers need to continuously update and innovate their email tactics, like including automation techniques, in order to adapt to changing user expectations. Smart businesses, agencies, and digital marketing recruiters are hungry for email marketing staffing candidates and full-time digital pros who can help them grow, retain, and delight email subscribers.

Moreover, with social media channels turning to algorithmic feeds and Google trying to increase reliance on their paid ads, it’s crucial for brands to control where, when and how they are presented to their audience. Strong email marketing provides those capabilities.

8. Video Editing and Graphics Design

Today, video has become a powerful storytelling medium. It is not only for a brand’s business promotional campaign, powerful ideas, content marketing effort, but is also the best medium for developing the best relationship between the brand and its audience. This explains why many companies invest hugely in video content marketing.

YouTube, as one of the largest search engines in the world, consume and generates millions of engagements daily. But due to scarcity of necessary skills, many of them fail to make success in video content marketing. If you uprightly spend the time to learn about this, then it is for sure that you will get a larger audience and as well can expand your brand all over and make it memorable.

The value of video is seen all over the internet:

• 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter
• YouTube has one billion users and is the second-largest search engine in the world
• 87% of online marketers use video
• 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others

With those figures in mind, learning how to make and market video is a no-brainer.

Familiarise yourself with the hardware and technical basics of filming video, particularly live-streamed video such as Facebook Live and Periscope. Get to know editing programmes and how to put together a basic video, and market that video afterwards by adding meta tags, titles and descriptions to the video.

9.Graphics Design

Graphics design skills have almost become a basic life survival skill for every tech savvy individual. However, unless you work in a medium to large corporation, many businesses are not able to afford an in-house graphic designer for their content. This is why digital marketers need to be able to help produce attractive visual aids like Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram graphics that help their client’s content to convert and bring in quality leads.

Design sites like Canva make it easy for digital marketers to create attractive content for a variety of platforms with their ready to go templates and offer tons of resources to help you improve your eye for design.

Take Away

Although it’s important to establish a niche level of expertise in a special field, a sought after digital marketer today needs to encompass at least some sort of basic knowledge in all of the disciplines we’ve discussed above. These 8 skills simply cannot be ignored in the midst of today’s digital world.