In today’s digital world, digital marketing has become a cost-effective and primary method of advertising.
With most people now having access to the internet via mobile phones, laptops, and tablets, the potential for reaching your target audience through digital mediums is huge. As we fast approach 2023, new innovations and key strategies will appear. That means that you need to stay on the ball to keep ahead of the game.
In this guide, we’re going to go over ten digital marketing skills needed to thrive in 2023’s fast-paced sector. Keep reading to find out more.
Why is digital marketing so useful today?
In years gone by, businesses had to utilize traditional advertising methods such as printed adverts, mailed coupons, and outdoor billboards/posters to get their message across to leads and customers.
But in the digital era, these methods are less likely to yield high-performing results. That’s because the rise of digital marketing has led to smarter, more efficient, and more targeted marketing campaigns that meet your customers and prospects where they hang out online.
Markets are also much more competitive now. For example, if you run an e-commerce store, there will be plenty of other popular online shopping websites for you to contend with. This is why being a digital marketing master is crucial for standing out in the crowd.
It’s crucial in 2022 and beyond that, your business understands the latest digital marketing trends, techniques, and effectiveness of each method. It would be foolish to overlook these, especially when they’re accessible and easy enough to master.
Let’s take a look at the main benefits of digital marketing.
What are the benefits of digital marketing?
The potential pool of leads you can access digitally dwarfs what you could achieve at a local level with traditional advertising techniques.
Digital marketing lets you reach a worldwide audience with campaigns that are cost-effective, efficient, measurable, and scalable.
Here are some of the key benefits of digital marketing:
- The ability to reach out to your customers and prospects where they hang out online.
- The ability to break down locational boundaries and market your content globally.
- Gather data to better target your ideal audience and offer personalized marketing content.
- Improved communication with your clients through each stage of the buying journey.
- More cost-effective campaigns.
- Implement customer loyalty schemes to improve retention rates and repeat purchases.
- Track key metrics and monitor the results of your campaigns in real time.
- Make data-backed decisions to maximize the potential of your efforts.
These are just some of the benefits that digital marketing can bring to your business. But in order to reap these benefits for your business, you’ll need to brush up on the digital marketing skills needed to thrive in 2023.
Let’s now explore them in greater detail.
10 digital Marketing skills needed to thrive in 2023’s fast paced sector
The following list includes the key marketing skills you need to master to thrive in 2023’s fast-paced sector.
1. Understand your customers
The customer always comes first. After all, your product or service is based on supplying a solution to their needs.
In order to maximize the potential of your digital marketing efforts and prevent time and focus from being wasted, you’ll need to really get to the bottom of who your customers are.
Here are three key things to consider when researching your target audience:
- What are your audiences’ preferred digital channels?
- What’s their demographic?
- What problem does your product or service intend to solve?
As they say, fail to prepare…prepare to fail. Understanding your customers is fundamental to your marketing efforts.
2. Understand data and analytics
In the digital world, collecting and analyzing data has become synonymous with marketing.
Digital marketing both needs and produces data. A good digital marketer will use any available data to maximize potential through data-informed decisions. The data used by marketers can come from many sources. This can be tracking website traffic, engagement, email open rates, click-through rates, or any other digital metric. What’s more, collecting this data is now easier than ever given the plethora of analytics tools available.
Forward-planning businesses should be looking to employ marketers that know how to interpret data properly and turn it into useful information.
3. Adopt a design-thinking approach
Design thinking isn’t a new concept, but it’s becoming more common within digital marketing.
Design thinking places the needs of your customers at the heart of your processes. By doing this, whenever a problem arises, the solution can be thought of in terms of the end user’s needs.
A design-thinking strategy gives marketers a more systematic framework for solving problems with the customer at the forefront.
For digital marketers implementing deep-thinking strategies, the question is not ‘How can we get more sales?’ but rather ‘How can we create amazing content that our target audience will enjoy and want to engage with.’
4. Search engine optimization (SEO)
In the last month alone, there were 84.7 billion visitors to Google.
Search engines are probably the first place most of us look when we want to buy something new or get information. Search engine optimization (or SEO) is a strategy used to make web content appear higher up search engine results pages when people search for specific queries.
For example, if your business provided training programs on a variety of software tools, you could optimize your content for the keyword ‘what is software testing?’.
SEO boosts your visibility online, which is what makes it a perfect tool for marketing.
Optimizing your marketing content for search engines could be one of the best ways to grab the attention of Google’s billions of users. A regular blog page is a great way to keep your audience updated with the latest marketing and boost your SEO potential with optimized content.
Remember, there are millions of Google searches each month, so tailoring your marketing around the latest searches and trends could be an excellent technique for getting your marketing efforts seen by the right people.
5. Copywriting
Copywriting is a marketing art that’s just as crucial now as it was 50 years ago. Sure, we now have AI bots that can ‘write’ essays and word processors with spell and grammar checks, but the power of well-written, persuasive writing is still a valued skill for any marketing team.
Copywriting isn’t just writing descriptive text. It’s about capturing the viewer’s attention, encouraging engagement, and inspiring them to make a purchase or subscription.
There are many things that go into good written content. For copywriting, some of the most important aspects of the content will be:
- Catchy headlines.
- Compelling openings that draw the reader in and hint at your proposition value.
- Structure an article that people want to read.
- Maintaining a brand voice across all content.
- Write email subject lines to increase open rates.
- Apply SEO techniques to writing to boost its online performance.
Think of copywriters as being your frontline task force. They’re responsible for maintaining your brand identity, tone of voice, and producing copy that’s better than the competition!
6. Social media marketing
It seems like everyone has social media these days (and even pets!)
In 2021, there were 4.48 billion social media users worldwide. For forward-thinking businesses, this has made social media marketing a primary strategy for connecting with leads and customers.
To achieve success with social media marketing, your team needs a fundamental understanding of each platform, what kind of content suits them, and what kinds of content your target audience would enjoy via social media. Become a master of social media marketing and people may begin sharing your content to really get the buzz going. It can quite easily snowball into some nice traction.
Another good thing about social media marketing is the list of key metrics it automatically gives you. These include likes, comments, views, shares, and more. By keeping track of these metrics over time, you can begin to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts. A lack of engagement could signal that a change of approach is required.
You can find some tips on creating engaging branded content here.
7. Project management
One of the most important but often overlooked digital marketing skills is effective project management. It’s far too common to see businesses rush into marketing campaigns without enough prior planning. This is a huge error.
From start to finish, your digital marketing campaigns need to follow a plan that utilizes people for their strengths. A good project manager will oversee and implement a range of tasks to ensure marketing campaigns are running at their greatest potential. These include:
- Assign roles and keep team members accountable for their performance.
- Help with initial research and gather resources for the rest of the team.
- Assign technical tasks like web development and using autoML products.
- Help and support the marketing team throughout the project.
- Track performance metrics for marketing campaigns via data analysis.
- Identify challenges and help solve them.
- Ensure that the brand’s identity is maintained across all marketing efforts.
Digital marketing is a collaborative effort between creative individuals. For example, if the next marketing project is the creation of an eBook on CSAT score metrics to supplement your customer relationship software, the project manager will need to bring the right individuals together to make the perfect campaign.
They’d, for example, assign the research and development team, assign copywriters for the textual content, then bring web developers and a marketing technology expert on board to host the eBook online. From here, social media marketers and email marketers can help with the ongoing promotion of the marketing material online. The project manager will help the team outline, define, and complete the campaign in the best possible way.
8. User experience (UX) design
Today’s consumers expect a good experience. That’s why marketing teams need to understand UX design.
There’s nothing worse than having all of your marketing efforts undone by a poor user experience. You need to make sure your website is responsive, loads fast, and is optimized for both mobile and desktop.
When you set up your website you will have looked at the available domain names. It is also important to register variations of this domain so that you can protect your brand and help to build awareness of it. You want to make sure that the customer experience is as smooth as possible.
Users should be able to navigate your pages with ease, and any call-to-action buttons should be well-placed and logical. If your current setup is unreliable and buggy, then prospects will think the same about your business in general. You want to leave them with a lasting impression.
Solid UX design will also help with your SEO. That’s because many design aspects are also important ranking factors when it comes to boosting your SERP performance. You’ll need to pay attention to the layout of your pages, links, buttons, your sitemap, color pallet, fonts, images, file formats, and more.
By offering a good user experience, users are more likely to engage with your marketing efforts and find them valuable.
9. Understand your CRM software
Customer relationship software is a crucial digital marketing tool that you need to thrive in 2023.
Your customer relationship software centers around the most important thing, the relationship with your customers. Being a master of this software will help marketing teams boost the customer experience while monitoring customer satisfaction levels. This strategy lets marketers measure the effectiveness of each campaign by comparing it against previous efforts and typical patterns of customer behavior.
Your CRM software will help you create customer lifecycle marketing and personalized experiences for your customers, with the ultimate goal of increasing conversions. Here are some key reasons you need a CRM tool in your setup:
- Better understand who your customers are and what they need.
- Gain a data-informed view of your target audience.
- Increase retention rates through data-informed marketing campaigns and loyalty schemes.
- Attract new leads.
- Optimize the customer experience process.
Quite simply, you need a CRM to thrive with your marketing efforts in 2023.
10. Utilize AI and automation
It sounds like the stuff of futuristic, sci-fi fantasy, but artificial intelligence is now here to help us in the marketing world.
Although robots aren’t here to take the jobs of marketers just yet, using AI in marketing could be one of the most intelligent things you do. AI can help your marketing team in a range of ways, including:
- Gain valuable data for a deeper understanding of the target audience.
- Real-time analysis of data to indicate performance and highlight issues.
- AI content writing tools.
- AI content editing tools.
- AI chatbots.
Automation is another essential tool in a modern digital marketing toolkit. Automation lets you bypass some of the most common marketing pain points such as manual data input, sending emails, and generating potential leads, all while gaining valuable data that goes beyond human capability.
Final thought
Hopefully, this guide has helped you think about the ten digital marketing skills needed to thrive in 2023’s fast-paced sector.
Digital marketing is always evolving and always changing, so get ahead of the competition now by getting comfortable using these vital digital marketing skills. As new developments emerge in the future, you can add these to your existing arsenal of digital marketing skills. Quite simply, digital marketing is one of the fundamentals of a successful business development strategy.
