11 Digital Marketing Skills You Should Master

In this video, I'll share 11 in-demand digital marketing skills that'll help you get hired, make more money, and become a better rounded marketer. Stay tuned. [♪ Music ♪ So being a good digital marketer requires two different sets of skills. Hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are basically learned abilities that are sharpened through experience and education, while soft skills are more about character traits and interpersonal skills. In other words, hard skills show employers how good you'll be at your job from a technical standpoint, while soft skills show whether you'll be a good employee, teammate, or manager. Now, many people focus just on improving hard skills, like coding, SEO, or paid advertising. But soft skills are equally important. In fact, a 2018 study from LinkedIn shows that 57% of employers value soft skills more than hard skills. Now, in terms of what employers look for in a digital marketer will vary based on the position and responsibilities. For example, when we hired a video editor, hard skills weighed heavier than soft. And when I hired an outreach manager, soft skills weighed heavier than hard because interpersonal skills are more important than knowing how software works. Now, while I won't be able to cover every single skill that'll be helpful in your digital marketing career, I'll share 5 hard skills and 6 soft skills that I personally look for when hiring digital marketers. And I'll explain why these skills are valuable for almost any digital marketing role. Let's get started with the hard skills. The first skill worth mastering is copywriting. Copy is often the bridge between the company and customer. It lives on blog posts, landing pages, emails, and even videos as tons of them are scripted. This makes copywriting arguably the most transferable skill in online marketing. It applies to SEO, content marketing, email marketing, outreach, social media, paid advertising, and the list goes on. And because a big part of your job as a digital marketer will be to educate and influence your target audience with copy, this in my books is a skill worth improving. The second hard skill is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And it's the process of optimizing webpages to rank higher in search engines. Now, the reason why it's an important skill to have is because you can use it to get free, passive, and consistent traffic that doesn't fade over time. And that's essentially what businesses want. In addition, the principles in SEO will help you understand how the web works, particularly with Google SEO. If you want to learn more about SEO, we have a free course that'll give you all of this technical knowledge and also help you get more traffic to your site. I'll link it up in the description. The next hard skill is in data analysis and interpretation. Data gives you something to analyze and your analysis will help you draw insights. And those insights are what marketers use to create marketing campaigns. This cycle is pretty important because if the data is bad, then everything else after will be flawed. Now, if your analysis is incorrect, then the insights you drew from them will be invalidated. And if your insights are wrong, then you might be leading your campaign in the wrong direction. So it's critical that you a.) understand where your data comes from and b.) know how to analyze and interpret it. Sometimes you'll have great insights that come from your analysis and other times, you'll learn that there's no conclusive evidence to work with. Both outcomes are equally important because they're going to guide you in the right direction to save your company time, money, and effort. Alright, the next hard skill is in user experience. While this is a common skill that designers need to have, it's important for digital marketers to at least have a high-level understanding of UX best practices. After all, as marketers, we want to create interactions with customers and prospects so they have more meaningful and relevant experiences with our brand and content. On top of that, many marketing channels depend on user experience signals. For example, YouTube's and pretty much every single social media network's algorithm is driven by user experience signals. And even in Google SEO, user experience signals can impact ranking positions. Bottom line, the better experience you create for people, the better your marketing campaigns will be. And assuming your marketing campaigns are aligned with the business's bottom line, the better the company will perform. Alright, the last hard skill I want to talk about is expertise with Google Sheets. Now, I wouldn't typically list software as a must-have hard skill. But knowing how to use Google Sheets beyond data entry and basic formulas is going to make you a more efficient marketer. And depending on your proficiency, it can be telling of your knowledge in logic programming. Google Sheets is arguably the most versatile tool. You can use it to create reports, analyze, interpret, and manipulate data, and create automations for monotonous tasks. The use cases are truly endless, and it's a big plus that I love seeing for mid- to high-level roles. Alright, let's move on to the soft skills, starting with arguably the most important one in my books, and that's communication. Marketing is essentially a brand's way to communicate with customers and prospects so you can drive interest and desire for products and services. So if you're not able to communicate effectively, your marketing will be ineffective. Now, you might be thinking, big whoop. But the repercussions of poor communication can be severe. It can impact people's first impressions of your company, damage your brand reputation, and lead to wasted time for marketers and anyone else involved in a campaign like developers, designers, and outsourced teams. Beyond that, marketing also involves developing relationships with customers, affiliates, influencers, and brand evangelists. Fail to communicate effectively, and you'll have a very bumpy road ahead. Next up are problem-solving skills. Marketing campaigns rarely go smoothly and you will run into problems and unexpected bumps along the way. The thing is, nobody wants to hold your hand through every single problem. Employers hire employees to solve problems. So naturally, a big part of your job will be to solve problems with creative solutions, even if company policies or budgets may play against you. A common example in the SEO world is buying backlinks. A lot of companies have no problems doing this, but if your company is like ours and has policies against these practices, you have to come up with creative ways to compete. Another common disadvantage I see in competitive industries are with ad budgets. Leaders in an industry will often have what seems to be an infinite budget. And if you're working at a bootstrap startup with 1 one-hundredth of your competitors' budgets, you'll have to get extremely creative to have a fighting chance at winning, let alone surviving. The best marketing is when your product and marketing align to solve people's problems. But that in and of itself is a problem that marketers are often tasked with solving. Alright, the next soft skill on my list is creativity. Creativity is something that's incredibly difficult to teach. In fact, according to George Land, a famous researcher and scientist, non-creative behavior is learned. Meaning, we learn to become less creative as we get older. In his 1968 study, he gave 1,600 5-year-olds a creativity test. And this is the same test that was used by NASA to select innovative engineers and scientists. And to his surprise, 98% of 5-year-olds scored in the highly creative range. But when he retested them at 10 and 15 years old, there was a dramatic drop in the percentage of people who scored in the highly creative range. Now, Land also tested 280,000 adults with the same test. And only 2% of this group scored in the highly creative range. Meaning, for those that are actually creative, it's going to be one of your greatest assets. And when you pair creativity with the hard skills of data analysis, you end up having a very powerful combination of skills that will play in your favor as a digital marketer. Alright, the next soft skill is teachability. Now, the reason why I think this is a critical soft skill to have is because marketing is collaborative. And if you're the stubborn type who refuses to hear feedback from your managers and teammates, you will naturally be an awful team player. In my opinion, teachability shows humility, adaptability, and one's desire for growth. This is why after doing hundreds of interviews, if a candidate doesn't seem teachable, it's a break-it kind of attribute for me. Now, that doesn't mean you need to be a yes-man and make other people feel better about themselves. It's about being open to others' opinions and collaboratively coming to the best ideas for your marketing campaigns. Alright, the next soft skill is self-motivation. This is a skill that I think separates the weak from the chaff. Naturally, there are going to be people who show up to work and do the bare minimum. After all, we all's gots to make monies to pay the bills. But there will be a few individuals who'll put in the extra time, effort, thought, and focus simply because they want to produce good work. These are self-motivated people. They're willing to go the extra mile to make their work great. They don't define themselves from their salary, mentions, or accolades. But ironically, self-motivated people with raw talent tend to get paid more and praised publicly. They're a rare breed and in my opinion, it's a skill that's nearly impossible to fake over the long haul. And the final soft skill is dependability. Because marketing usually happens in a team setting, you need to be able to depend on your teammates to do their part. It makes marketing operations much smoother and the result is a highly effective team. A standout example that immediately comes to mind is our video team. From the day I started working at Ahrefs, they have not once missed a deadline. But deadlines aren't a be-all and end-all of dependable people. Our entire video team is directly impacted by the invasion in Ukraine. And even though I've told them countless times that our videos can wait, they all continue to go above and beyond despite being in a freaking war. Frankly speaking, I have never worked with a team that's this dependable. It says a lot about character and plays directly into team dynamics. Now, as I'm sure you caught on, hard and soft skills tend to complement each other. For example, creativity is intertwined with copywriting. Problem solving helps in SEO and SEO helps you become a better problem solver. So whether you want to become a better marketing leader, get a performance-based raise, or get started with your first job in internet marketing, honing these skills is going to help you achieve that. And I only wish you the best.