Eight Exceptional Skills Every Digital Marketer Must Have

Bhavik Sarkhedi
4 min readAug 2, 2021

The digital marketing industry continues to evolve. The rampant demand for digital marketers is staggering, but the supply of highly skilled digital marketers is marginalized. The challenge of lack of availability of high-end professionals makes one ponder: What skill sets a digital marketer must possess to stand out of the crowd?

With an annual growth rate of 9%, the digital marketing industry is currently flooded by self-proclaimed professionals. The companies need to cut through the clutter and find the ‘digital marketing warriors’ all set the spearhead the digital campaigns.

We bring you the top-8 skills that make a digital marketer a pro in his field. If you are on a prowl to find the ideal one, read on and find an expert:

Prowess in SEO/SEM
According to Estorytellers, SEO alone drives more organic traffic than organic social media marketing. It comes down to the SEO strategy, and the experts claim optimizing mobile performance should be an indispensable part of the SEO Strategy. A digital marketer must be hands-on with SEO as it’s the basis of content creation.

It takes months to get leads organically, but user-centric content created based on the latest SEO guidelines and strategy can speed things up. Also, a DM expert needs to supervise the team, including SEO executives, content writers, designers, and social media executives, so he should have in-depth knowledge of SEO.

Top-notch Google Analyst
The volume of data consumed on the internet is humongous, and companies today want to decide based on data analysis. A digital marketer should be skilled in analyzing the company’s data derived from Google Ads, Social Media Ads, and other sources.

According to the reports, it’s imperative to have technical proficiency in Google Analytics as it’ll help in understanding human behavior and strategizing.

Killer Content Marketing
The latest stats claim that 58% of content downloads generate the highest conversion. The basis of the claim is that when the content is highly targeted, only interested people will download the quality content. A digital marketer needs to understand the basics of content marketing.

Without a consistent flow of quality content, other marketing techniques such as SEO or SMO won’t create user experience and generate leads. The digital marketer should learn the marketing aspect and develop effective content strategies that boost SEO and other marketing activities.

Exemplary Email Marketing
The research conducted by Taletel states that welcome email alone has an 82% open rate. Now you can imagine the importance of email marketing in the digital marketing industry.

Many eCommerce companies opt for email marketing to boost their sales, and online coaches swear by it. It’s immersive, addictive, and educational, which is why part of digital marketing strategy.

Digital marketing with knowledge of email marketing is a lethal combination as he can create audience segmentation and send emails based on the previous performance. Also, he can analyze the data and formulate a different strategy to warm up the cold audience or create a new one.

Proactive Project Management
Project management is a necessity in digital marketing as even a single product launch demands inter-department coordination. It’s a project in itself, and a digital marketer is a part of every activity from market research to conceptualizing to strategizing and execution, and finally, promotion.

Also, if things spiral, he can take corrective actions and get the project back on track. A digital marketer is accountable to a project manager who may or may not have digital expertise in most companies. If a digital marketer is a project manager, there will always be a Plan-B in crisis.

Visionary Visual Marketing
The fact is the market is saturated with basic and overused strategies. It’s not getting the leads or conversion, and there’s a need for a new strategy to attract customers and retain their attention span.

Today 86% of the small companies and start-ups claim that visuals are an essential part of their digital marketing strategy. It’s mainly because visual marketing helps them convey the message the way their audience wants to hear. Including visuals in marketing and creating a theme around it is essential.

A digital marketer should have the vision to develop short and long-term visual marketing strategies to penetrate the market.

Technophile
A digital marketer without technical knowledge of website designing, graphics designing, or automation tools. A techno-savvy marketer will choose the right tools and platforms for promotions and easily navigate the challenges.

There’s a new update every day and advancement in technologies, a marketer that stays updated will stay ahead in the competition as he’ll launch the latest campaigns and pop-ups to boost sales.

Strategic decision-maker
It may not be a technical or managerial skill, but it is an essential skill. Companies invest millions in marketing with a single goal of increasing sales or expanding their market segment.

A digital marketer is the captain of the ship who needs to take every small or crucial decision. Be it revamping the website or launching a new product, or promoting an existing product with new offers and deals, a digital marketer must take the call. Therefore, he needs to think long-term and strategic decisions based the past performance and future trends.

He needs to have an analytical mind to reason the pros and cons, analyze the consumer behavior and consider the profit and risk ratio while making a decision.

Digital Marketers today can’t stick to one expertise and call themselves an expert. They need to be versatile and flexible enough to adorn multiple hats based on client requirements. Apart from the skills mentioned above, a digital marketer must build soft skills and organization skills to ensure effective delivery of the project and client satisfaction.

He must possess a combination of technical, management, and PR Skills as he’ll be working with diverse teams and clients. Leveraging technical skills is essential, but developing managerial skills will help in client acquisition and retention, thus paving the way to success.

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Bhavik Sarkhedi

2000+ Published Articles | Author of 8 Non Best Selling Books | Writer to 35+ Reputed Magazines | Connect with me at https://bhaviksarkhedi.com