Great Digital Marketer
Marketing is taking a sharp turn from traditional forms of marketing e.g. brochures, billboards, word of mouth to digital forms of marketing e.g. social media platforms. Many companies or organizations are leaning towards digital marketing to get their products or services out to the existing and the potential customers leading to quick digital marketing growth.
What is digital marketing?
This is a form of marketing that uses electronic devices or internet. Products are marketed online and using digital technologies.
With internet access, billions of people are spending more time using electronic devices especially smartphones. The number is increasing every day. People are shopping and buying online. This means that offline marketing is losing its value. Marketers have to change tactics of their marketing strategy. They need to meet their audience where they are spending time; on the internet.
New digital marketing trends and strategies are changing and evolving very fast due to current high-tech. Marketers need to change their strategies too. They need to use the current trends and strategies to adjust in their effort to engage and convert many customers bearing in mind that what worked in some years ago may not work today.
The way companies are marketing themselves is changing. Currently, some businesses have diverted their focus from traditional ways of marketing to new and trending ones, such as social media, email, and websites. Digital marketing is now preferred to be effective as you can reach more potential customers and the message can be customized to reach the targeted group.
As a digital marketer, you need an in-depth understanding of who is using specific platforms, what their needs are and how your company or organization can help to tackle them.
Unfortunately, there is no specific university that offers deeper education insight into digital marketing. Only a few online courses, colleges and organizations that touch on this. As an individual, you need to work hard to possess these skills.
Skillset in digital marketing
Whether you are new to digital marketing or you have been practicing it for sometimes, you need some skillset. The list of skills is long but getting better is a journey. Prioritize what you feel is your passion and start building experience in each area. Set goals and start working on them immediately.
1.Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the process of optimizing your website to be ranked highly on the search engine result pages. Your content is shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers to be relevant to the users. In such a case, you affect the visibility of your website or a web page in search engine’s unpaid results. The purpose of SEO is to increase traffic through the unpaid or free listing. You need design, writing and linking to optimize your content. With these skills, you can help a website rank highly organically.
2.Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This is the process of increasing traffic and visibility of your website or web page from search engines through paid and unpaid efforts. The strategy is to target people who are interested in your website through online paid advertisements. Every time someone has clicked on the advertisement you pay the publisher. Here people search for what they want. The advertisers target specific searches, but only pay if someone clicks to learn more.
It involves the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) which is also called Cost-Per-Click (CPC). You pay to have a search engine display your website advertisement in or alongside search results. This can help the ranking of your website reach number #1.
As a marketer, you need to have a strong grasp of mathematics, marketing strategy, Google Analytics and AdWords. You have to develop campaigns that are providing measurable results to your clients, analyze those campaigns, and report on them. You have to show that you know how to bring in and increase targeted traffic through PPC.
3. Content Marketing
The aim of this is to attract and convert prospects into returning customers.
It is all about great storytelling. It involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) to stimulate the interest of the audience to want to learn more about your products or services. Quality content plays a great role.
Quality content is the content that utilizes the keywords, the relevance, and all internal and external links are well directed to the website through articles, other websites or social media platforms.
Different industries need different contents. In this case, creativity and storytelling skills are important. The skills help in creating captivating and compelling videos, articles and emails to reach out to the audience. Videos are found to be incredible, and with the increase of live streaming, the future of video content is becoming very promising.
You need to come up with campaign ideas which increase customer engagement, drives traffic to your website, increases leads, and sales. When you have skills to support campaigns by coming up with compelling content for your work to help meet your campaign’s objectives.
4. Social Media Management/Marketing
Social media platform allows people to link, interact, share and exchange information. Many people connect and share on social media every day. It allows you to talk directly to your customers and prospective customers. It helps you share content, increases your involvement in conversations, target and reaches more customers, your customers etc.
What is social media management?
Refers to the handling of social media platforms which includes: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest etc.
You need to master the best time of the day to post, the kind of the content to post and the way to use each platform to achieve specific goals.
The following skills are important:
- Creativity and fast thinker: This skills will help you come up with creative posts and think fast on relevant emerging trends.
- Communication skills: You are the brand’s voice, therefore, you need strong communication skills
- Analytical skills: Trends and strategies change very fast with time. You need to analyze them and make a decision relevant to your organization or company.
- Graphic design and video editing skills: This skills will help you visualize your message to your audience.
- Customer service skills: This involves handling customers. This skill will help you handle your customers well, maintain the existing customers and acquire new customers.
5. Email marketing
This is the use of interactive emails to communicate with your target audience. It helps you to connect with them to promote your brand and increase your interaction goals. Emails can help you share products, services, newsletter, share some news, tell stories, or share your promotional materials like coupons, sales notification, brochures etc.
As a digital marketer you need skills on how to:
- Establish and build your mailing list
- Select the type of campaign you want to send
- Create your campaign well
- Measure your email results
Summary
Digital marketing is a passionate field which requires a wide range of skills for a person to succeed in it. Learn the skills one by one. You will succeed!
