14 Universal Digital Marketing Skills You Can’t Ignore

Even if you don't specialise in a particular marketing channel, you need to understand how they work.

• You will possibly need to work on the intersection of various digital channels.
• Your target audience will most likely hang out on different websites and platforms.

Brands need to embrace omnichannel marketing to ensure a seamless experience. It means digital marketers need to become experts at some of them but understand all of them.

Only video marketing and podcast marketing don’t utilize text as the main medium but even videos and podcasts start as text.

Everyone can learn to write well. This job isn’t about creating the next blockbuster novel. It’s about writing clearly and convincingly. To get you started, here’s a great, free guide on writing by Julian Shapiro. 

Marketing technology, or martech, makes digital marketing possible. Better tools can make you more effective. Many essential marketing tools have free trials or free versions. In addition, they often have certification programs.

For example,

• Doing SEO with zero budget, you can get Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free.
• Google Analytics has a demo account with prefilled data and a free certification program.
• You'll also need to be acquainted with Google Sheets. Browse through Sheets for Marketers to see what kinds of reports you can build with this free tool.

Design can show the user where to click or convey what your brand is about.

To get better at it, you should:

• Understand the basic web design principles.
• Learn how you can create better experiences for your users with UX design.
• Follow web design trends. 
• Start experimenting with design software such as Canva, Genially, UXPin, Figma and Webflow. Marketers design graphics for content, ads, infographics, presentations,  wireframes, and, sometimes, entire landing pages.

Assertiveness is the ability to express your opinions and know how to stand up for your beliefs. It’s the art of saying “no” in the workplace without being hostile or aggressive.

Start practising assertiveness in some typical, everyday life situations.

• Speak up when you’d rather watch a movie at home instead of going out.
• Let your partner know you won’t be able to do a specific errand without offering a detailed backstory.
• Visit a new restaurant and ask for a table that’s in a quieter area or near a window.

Work on these skills:

• Active listening – Be open-minded and empathetic toward others.
• Fostering positive feelings – Studies have shown that this is crucial to effective leadership.
• Observe managers in your workplace and try to identify how their actions and words affected others – Did they inspire people to do better work? Do people feel comfortable sharing opinions around them? What would you do differently?

Critical thinking can be seen as healthy skepticism. It's about not accepting things at face value when they lead to important decisions.

To develop an objective and independent opinion, you need to be able to question ideas to uncover

• the kind of argument or evidence that supports an idea and
• what a given idea leads to.

There’s always something new to learn. You'll need to stay up to date with new technologies, new tactics, new philosophies, Google’s algorithm updates, industry regulations, etc.

Optimise information gathering by following content curations, e.g., newsletters curated by industry pros.

The market and your goals may frequently change in marketing. You may work on a blog post one day and be doing conversion optimisation experiments on the next.

Acknowledge that things can change quite fast in this type of work. Reacting to change is part of the game.

Ethics is an area where a person should make conscious decisions. It is a marathon.

No one will want to work with you if you're not reliable, honest and respectful.

The recent popularity of growth marketing - a type of marketing - is characterised mainly by prioritising data over opinions. The source of that data is often experimentation. Performing experiments involves devising hypotheses and designing experiments to validate them.

A useful framework to perform marketing experiments:

• Analyze – Uncover areas of growth opportunities.
• Ideate – Generate ideas on how to improve the focus area and turn them into an idea pipeline
• Prioritize ideas by using the ICE scoring model 
• Test – Conduct the experiment and analyze the results

In marketing, there is always pressure to get results.

To get better at coping with pressure, pay attention to:

• Assertiveness
• Learning to recognise and enjoy other things in life
• Healthy diet
• Realising that perfect is not always better

Too much pressure in digital marketing is common, but there’s a point where pressure stops being your problem and starts to be the problem of the person putting pressure on you. Sometimes, the only way to cope with it is to find another job.

Sooner or later, your job may require something basic like inserting a tracking tag or editing some lines in your WordPress template. Other times, you may be required to do data analysis for customer databases with SQL or Python.

It’s best to acquire knowledge by completing courses.

• Data Analysis With Python (free)
• Python for Marketers (free)
• MySQL Tutorial for Beginners (beginner level is free)
• Codeacademy’s Coding for Business (free + paid)