Digital marketing is an exhilarating field to be in. With an unbelievable 150,000 digital jobs forecast by 2021 and a yearly growth rate of 9%, this high-growth sector is a great choice for enthusiastic professionals looking to make their mark.

But before you embark on a career in this field, it’s imperative that you do your research to find a specialization within digital marketing that you can excel at because digital marketing itself is a very broad field and very easy for someone to lose their way.

But where do you start?

Well, that is why we are here. We have learned exactly what marketing skills in 2021 people need to have in order to become successful in their careers.

Here are 8 digital marketing skills that you need to master in 2021 and are guaranteed to take your digital marketing career places.

1. Data Analysis

Studies show that 13% of digital marketing companies have listed analytics experience as a required and essential skill set in their job descriptions. To become a valuable digital marketer, it is important to not only execute inbound and outbound digital strategies but also analyze them frequently and use those insights to constantly improve.

You don’t have to be crazy when it comes to data analysis but you need to have more than just a basic understanding. The type of understanding that you want to have is one that includes knowing:

• How much traffic are you getting?
• Where is it coming from?
• What’s your conversion rate?
• What’s your ROI?
• Is there a dropoff in your funnel?

Being able to read, understand your analytics and answer these questions is the only way you’ll be able to grow.

Because if you can reach millions of people and keep them engaged, then the traffic, conversions, leads, and sales will become much easier.

This high-level understanding is what will aid you maximize the traffic that you are getting and help guarantee continued success for your business or your career.

2. Email Marketing

Email marketing is the process of sending emails to a list of email contacts with the goal of building a relationship with prospects and customers. Several platforms have made it very easy to create and send emails.

Email marketing used to be simple. Today, it is all about niche targeting, analyzing bounce, open rates, and optimizing conversions. The power of email marketing as a marketing tool is usually undervalued.

Social media might be taking over the marketing space, and though it is perfect for brand awareness, a company’s most loyal customers and prospects will prefer to keep in close touch through mail.

Most top-performing marketing campaigns and sales mostly come from a company’s email list.

Email marketing is more than just sending out regular communication. You need to possess the skill to optimize an email by creating a compelling strategy, refining content based on what works best, and testing relentlessly. It is immensely important that you find and develop the best ways to grow distribution lists and using email to nurture and create more opportunities.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media is the new norm, it’s what marketing firms are putting their focus on now. With most of the world’s population on one social platform or the other, it has become easy for marketers to target their audience. Though it may look easy, social media marketing is in fact complex in terms of understanding the diverse networks and social media marketing tools that will allow marketers to leverage efforts including automation.

It is important for digital marketers to find out ways to develop a strong social media presence in order to bolster their brands as well as their future marketing goals.

As social media platforms constantly evolve with new channels, strategies, tools, and trends, the demand for highly skilled social media marketers has never been higher. CNN has recently recognized roles in social media as one of the top 100 careers measured by growth opportunities.

Whether a brand is using social media as an organic distribution channel or as a paid acquisition, there is a continuous shift in the skills needed to sustain a successful career in this field.

The skills needed to be an effective social media marketer now include proficiency in analyzing performance data, developing agile strategies based on insights, and making data-driven decisions.

Some of the tools that can aid you with social media marketing are:

Buffer, Later, Hootsuite, Falcon.io, Tailwind, Facebook creator studio, Facebook Business Manager & Ads Manager, Buzzsumo, Canva and so much more.

4. Content Marketing

Marketing techniques like email, social media, and SEO, will be rendered useless if these technical skills can’t be backed up by exceptional writing skills. Marketers with the ability to flow easily between writing press releases, social posts, emails, website copy, and proposals are always in high demand.

Approximately 60% of marketers rate content marketing as extremely important to their marketing strategy. You’ve probably heard of the phrase “content is king” well, the sentiment still holds true in 2021.

Quality writing is the foundation of any digital marketing discipline.

More specifically, quality content marketing helps benefits audience retention, lead generation, social media traction, and site authority.

Customers nowadays want to know the story and mission behind the brands they consider before patronizing the brand. Quality content marketers can do just that by creating a brand narrative and using the right medium to share it.

5. Search Engine Marketing/Optimization 

There are two sides to this coin. SEM or SEO. SEM is paid while SEO is free. Both are useful and imperative for any company to succeed which is why you should master this skill. Companies are always on the lookout for SEO or SEM specialist.

Building an earned authority to rank high on search engines takes a lot of time and there is no shortcut to that fix. However, it is not something to be neglected because SEM/SEO ends up driving the majority of traffic over time. But to be honest, it takes years of content creation and constant effective strategies.

To give yourself an edge when competing for a high-paying digital marketing job, it is necessary to possess SEO skills, you should know about server-side settings, sitemaps, and server response codes.

Knowing how to use SEO tools is always a plus, so get good at using tools like SEMRush, Moz, and other SEO tools to find the search behaviors of customers and the competitive landscape.

6. Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy that allows advertisers or marketers to target their audiences on their smartphones, tablets via websites, MMS, SMS, email, social media, and apps.

The sudden mobile explosion and the rise of the smartphone were something marketers never saw coming. A number of brands have their websites ready but unfortunately, they are not accessible through mobile, making it hard for customers to access them. So, they end up losing customers.

Nowadays, nearly everything that was once done on the desktop can now be effectively done on a mobile. Besides, consumers’ behavior has moved towards mobile. The majority of them spend time on their mobile.

This is a marketing skill that most companies are looking for. The requirement for mobile marketing is on the rise. Hence, it is a good skill to acquire.

Mobile marketing can be quite challenging to learn, but, when the skill is mastered, it will help you stand out from the competition.

7. Video Marketing

Video Marketing is all about creating relevant and valuable content in the form of videos for channels like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

If a picture is worth more than a thousand words, then you can imagine the worth of a valuable video.

The online space always rewards creative and valuable content. The ultimate goal of video marketing is to create motion content that will drive customer engagement and inspire a brand lift in the right way to customers. And video marketing has become way cheaper and easier to make than ever before.

Visual marketing is crucial if you want to create brand awareness. Video helps add an extra layer to marketing channels and helps you break through the noise and excess of content that is flooding the internet.

More specifically, adding a video to a website can significantly increase traffic and move up the website in search engine results pages (SERPS). Your digital marketing effort is augmented when incorporating video marketing.

Acquiring this skill is also important and can give you an advantage, it might not be as wanted as SEO or Data analytics but it will definitely get you through the door.

8. Web Design and Development

You do not need to be a programming genius, but a general knowledge of HTML, PHP, CSS and other coding languages are in-demand skills within every facet of digital marketing. 48% of people believed that a website’s design is the No. 1 factor in shaping the credibility of a business.

Design and development skills give you the ability to make changes to a website’s front and backend without the need for a dedicated web developer.

Anybody who understands the technical side of websites, as well as the importance of user experience (UX), is a valuable asset. In 2021, customers quickly judge your brand off of the quality of your website and first impressions are hard to break. So, it may be worthwhile if you take some time to gain this skill and one other addition is that it works well with SEM/SEO, if you know web design, learning SEM/SEO won’t be a problem at all and if you go further and add data analytics to it, you become an indispensable member of any company. So indirectly you get two or three skills for the price of one.

So, there you have it – these are the 8 digital marketing skills to master in 2021.

The technical skills of digital marketing are constantly updated as each new trend and marketing tool developed in the marketplace. Every digital marketing professional needs to follow the experts and keep experimenting with new methods.

If you’re part of a marketing team or a digital marketing manager, 2021 is a time of great opportunity to learn and succeed as the business world grows increasingly more integrated with online marketing tools.

While it might look overwhelming at first, especially if you are new to the world of digital marketing, the good news is that there is a lot of information that is available to help you learn.

Odigital offers a Digital marketing specialist program that offers top courses in the digital marketing field to skill up in. With an industry-endorsed learning path, weekly mentoring sessions, and live sessions with renowned digital marketing experts, you will have everything you require to be a digital marketing champion.

Share This Post: :