7 Smart Tips To Grow Your Digital Marketing Skills

Whatever product you sell, there’s no way you can sell it without digital marketing skills. Today, the job of a digital marketer is as important as ever, and it’s growing more and more complex.

To sell anything on the internet, you’re likely to work with multiple sales channels, configure multi-channel experiences, create, and track dozens of ads and content pieces that all drive traffic to your business.

To be really successful in your craft, you need to build an all-around digital marketing skillset. If you want to be proficient in one aspect of marketing, you need to at least understand the basics of other marketing strategies and techniques.

Thankfully, growing your digital marketing skills today is easier than ever. This article will walk you through everything you need to know about digital marketing skills and how to grow them continuously.

Stay Updated with Industry Trends

Most industries these days are constantly developing, improving, and changing for the better. One of the industries that changes the fastest is digital marketing. Digital marketing skills needed for a successful career ten or even five years ago are vastly different from what is required today.

A decade ago, social media marketing was the new digital marketing skill every business needed. Today, we’re learning to use AR experiences for marketing and exploring new possibilities of AI generation.

You never know where the digital marketing industry is going to end up in another couple of years, so the best tip to build your marketing skills is to stay updated on the latest trends.

The most straightforward way to do this is to find reliable resources that report on the current and future trends of digital marketing. It’s best to use sources both from platforms that you use and from experts who are using these platforms.

So, for instance, to get a better understanding of trends in SEO, you should follow the official Google blog, Twitter accounts of their employees who give updates on the new features, and a couple of top-ranking industry blogs like Search Engine Journal.

The same goes for any branch of digital marketing that you’re interested in. Follow the official platform source, if there is one, and the top expert blogs that provide context to the new updates.

These two will give you a heads-up on the latest trends in any type of digital marketing, but only in general terms. If you want to learn how to utilize the new trends with great proficiency, you’ll have to attend webinars and online courses to learn the details based on the practice of other experts.

A more relaxed way to learn about the small day-to-day details of applying digital marketing skills, you can listen to podcasts while doing something. Many podcast guests will casually share their real-life cases that might help you grow your digital marketing skills.

Enhancing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Skills

One of the most important digital marketing skills is search engine optimization. SEO deals with optimizing your website for organic search. This involves working on optimizing your site’s internal structure, acquiring backlinks to your website throughout the web, and optimizing third-party profiles that are important for an organic search, like Google Business Profile.

If you want to enhance your search engine optimization skills, your first step is learning more about on-page optimization. This means optimizing your site’s structure and code to be more accessible to Google and users, which will improve rankings as a result. Use free SEO tools by SE Ranking to check and optimize your website.

This SEO platform can also be used for another important on-page optimization process, keyword research. With SE Ranking, you can upload a list of the main keywords that you plan to focus on and expand it. You’ll find similar keywords you can add to your pages to increase the traffic by optimizing for multiple related keywords, as well as find new informational keywords that can be used in your blog.

The same tool can be used to research backlinks that your competitors have. Compile a list of websites linking to your competitors, and reach out to them to get them to link to you too. Most often, you’ll have to write an article for an industry blog to get a link or register your business in a business directory.

Here, you can start seeing connections between different marketing skills. As outreach is very important for SEO, building a robust understanding of email marketing will grant you more backlinks.

SEO marketing skills also involve the optimization of platforms other than your website that matter for organic traffic. One of these is Google Business Platform (formerly Google My Business), your Google profile that shows up for local searches.

Source: Google

The other is Google Merchant Center, the Google account that shows products for ecommerce searches.

Source: Google

You can find plenty of tips on optimizing your GBP, as it has been around for quite a while. To find more information on optimizing your Merchant Center products, you’ll have to look for webinars and podcasts focusing on it.

Resources to check out:

• Google Search Central on Twitter. Google employees use this account to post the latest updates on their service.
• r/SEO on Reddit. This Reddit sub has a lot of followers and you’re likely to get your niche questions answered.
• Matt Diggity YouTube channel. Even though Matt posts a lot of content tailored toward SEO newcomers, he often tests novel SEO ideas and reports on their performance.

Mastering Social Media Marketing

Marketing skills in social media marketing are essential for the success of any kind of business. No matter what line of business you’re in, you’re likely to have some form of social media. Having an Instagram or a Messenger app can be a great way for users to connect to you, even if you don’t create content on these platforms.

If you are willing to create content for one or several social media platforms, it can become a tool for organic discovery on par with SEO. The largest benefit of it is that you don’t have to work on link building and keyword research. Creating great content that is picked up by the algorithm is enough to have new users discover you.

The first thing you have to do to grow the skill of social media marketing is get to know all the most popular social media platforms and their unique characteristics. Different social media platforms are mostly frequented by slightly different demographics. For instance, only a third of TikTok’s audience is above 35 years of age.

Source: Statista

That figure is closer to 50% for Facebook.

People also choose different platforms for different types of content. A large part of success in social media marketing is figuring out what platforms you want to use and what to avoid.

The most difficult skill you’ll have to learn in regards to SMM is content creation. Results on social media depend largely on how interesting your content is and how well the audience receives it. So, creating engaging content, whether it’s imagery or video, is key to success.

You can intertwine SMM skills with content and email marketing by using your social media to entice people to subscribe to your email list. When you’ve built an audience on a social media platform, the subscribers will be more likely to participate in an exclusive email list where you share your advice.

Resources to check out:

• Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio newsletter. Rachel shares social media marketing insights every other week in a free newsletter, and paying subscribers get access to the Discord channel.
• Social Media Examiner weekly podcast. The podcast is live since 2012 and the hosts have been interviewing experts on different aspects of running an SMM operation.
• Buffer blog. This blog often hosts SMM experts who share their experiences and opinions apart from posting how-to articles on the basic SMM topics.

Developing Email Marketing Proficiency

Email marketing is arguably the skill that will provide you with the largest ROI out of all other marketing channels. Email is also a marketing channel that can be used in synergy with most other marketing channels.

It takes some effort to get people to subscribe to your email newsletter, but since your subscribers are interested in what you have to offer, conversion rates are typically much higher than with other channels.

Your main focus with growing email marketing skills would be improving subscription rates, crafting engaging email campaigns, email personalization, and analytics.

One of the most important things you could do to grow your email marketing skills is to subscribe to a bunch of newsletters from companies in your niche or companies that are known for good email marketing. Read their emails and take note of what strategies they use to appeal to their customers.

Receiving dozens of emails weekly might be too much for your work email, so consider creating a throwaway email address to use for reading email marketing copy.

To improve the subscription rate, experiment with different placements of the subscription form. Try placing it in a pop-up, in a side panel, between paragraphs of the text, or in a footer like in the example below.

Source: Stripo.email

Test what gives you more subscriptions and what doesn’t work at all. It would be great to conduct a customer satisfaction survey to see if any of the placements affect customer experience negatively.

Mastering email list segmentation and creation of email copy may prove harder. Here, your best bet is first taking inspiration from the best emails and then learning with practice as you A/B test ideas like using AI-generated images and copy variants like different subject lines. You can come up with multiple email copy options at a time by using AI generation.

One thing that can help you get better at email marketing is getting good-looking email templates. An email that looks good will always have more effect on the user than a simple text email, and creating a good-looking HTML email from scratch may be too much work. Get an email template instead and add text and images to it to simplify the process.

Resources to check out:

• Stripo Email blog. This blog covers most topics on email marketing from the very basics to the advanced stuff.
• Chase Diamond on LinkedIn. Chase is an experienced email marketer and he shares a lot of resources for both beginners and pros.
• Really Good Emails. This website hosts hundreds of promotional emails that you can check out for inspiration.
• Humans of Email podcast. This podcast interviews people who work in email marketing and discusses different aspect of their professional lives and experiences.

Embracing Content Marketing Strategies

Content marketing skills are among the most important ones in modern digital marketing. Creating great content is always a good thing for business because most organic forms of interacting with your target audience involve content. Whether you want to be discovered on organic search or on social media, the key to that is producing great content.

As is the case with the previous point, the best way to improve your content marketing skills is to consume a lot of content. Subscribe to blogs, social media pages, and YouTube accounts of businesses related to yours. Make it a daily habit to read and watch their content with the aim of analyzing what seems to work and what doesn’t.

With that inspiration, create content yourself, experiment with different forms and formats, and record performance data. This is the best way to learn what works for your business and improve your content marketing skills.

Here, a synergy between marketing skills appears as well. Developing a good grasp of email marketing can supercharge your content marketing campaigns. You can send content you’ve created to your subscriber base to kick off views, shares, and likes.

Resources to check out:

• Very Good Copy. This is a blog by Eddie Shleyner, where he shares his experience on copywriting for every aspect of the web as well as general marketing advice.
• Content Marketing Institute. This website has hundreds of articles, webinars, and other resources useful for writers. It focuses mostly on long-form writing and content marketing strategy.
• The Elements of Style, written by Willian Strunk Jr. Even though this concise book is from 1918, it is packed with useful basic advice it should be in every writer’s library.

Exploring Paid Advertising and PPC

Paid advertising is also an important part of any marketer’s skillset. While content marketing can provide you with a relatively good ROI, it’s more of a long-term strategy as it generally takes a bit of time before your content starts producing results.

Pay-per-click (PPC) or any other form of paid advertising, on the other hand, produces results instantly, even though it might be expensive to run.

Your first goal towards improving marketing skills in PPC is exploring the fundamentals of it. Learn from official sources and experts about the basics, such as your targeting options, budgeting and bidding options, and requirements for ad creatives.

In particular, you want to learn more about each advertising platform that you can use. The most popular one is Google Ads, with placement options ranging from regular search ads to shopping ads and Google Display Network. Other popular options for PPC are Meta’s social platforms and YouTube.

You need to understand what each can give to your business so you can make an educated decision when you’re choosing the platforms to advertise on.

Then there’s the skillset related to optimizing your ad campaign. An average ad campaign on any platform has multiple things you can optimize to either increase conversion or decrease cost.

You can include or exclude specific keywords for search ads, choose or exclude specific audiences, including showing ads to subscribers of a specific account, or allocate budgets to different ad groups.

Apart from learning to prioritize your campaigns, experimentation is your biggest help in figuring this out. Do plenty of A/B testing on your campaign to see what audiences convert better, what creatives seem to produce more results, and what ad groups deserve more budget. Analyze your findings and make the necessary changes as you go. This is the best way to build your marketing skills.

Since you rely on large amounts of data to figure out how to handle your PPC campaigns, it’s best to spend more at first to get more data.

PPC can also benefit from email marketing. You can use your email list to target your subscribers with ads. This can be a great way to reduce email overload and engage with your audience with a different medium.

Resources to check out:

• LinkedIn Marketing Blog, specifically the section on LinkedIn Ads. It’s the best resource to understand the basics of running PPC ads on the platform.
• Google Ads Blog. This is the fastest way to get updates on paid search ads right from the source.
• The Perpetual Traffic podcast hosted by Ralph Burns and Kasim Aslam on their own or with guests. The hosts and their guests who are often high-ranking digital marketing agency partners go into details on how to use the latest updates in both social media and search PPC ads.

Networking and Collaboration in the Digital Marketing Community

The advice that can help you improve any kind of marketing skill is to read industry blogs and listen to podcasts. Another piece of advice that can be applied to any kind of digital marketing is to be socially active in the digital marketing community.

When you join an online group of marketing experts, you can receive a lot more knowledge than from reading most blogs. Folks who have been in these groups for years have vast amounts of insight into digital marketing and would be willing to answer questions as long as they’re not absolutely basic.

You can also share your insight with people who are seeking to grow their marketing skills and network for job opportunities.

You can find communities like that on Facebook, Discord, Slack, or LinkedIn.

Source: LinkedIn

However, it might be difficult to find the best ones as they’re typically invite-only. You’ll have to talk to your acquaintances in the digital marketing field to find a group like that. Talking to people in the comment section of a LinkedIn influencer might be a starting point for you.

If you feel confident enough, you can do networking by becoming an influencer yourself. Create a newsletter where you would share digital marketing tips, call on your counterparts to subscribe, and create a community around it. Use your email marketing skills to lead subscribers from the newsletter to an online community page where you can exchange ideas and network.

Conclusion

Growing your digital marketing skills is a necessity as the industry is constantly evolving, and you don’t want to be working with outdated checklists. You want to understand how things work in digital marketing, how they change, and how you can make use of it in new productive ways.

To do that for any industry, you need to do three main things.

First, you want to find great content that covers it. This can be documentation, the official help portal of a platform, an industry blog, a podcast, or a YouTube channel. This will let you learn the basics and get information on updates in the advertising platform or techniques that experts use.

The next thing you want to do is network with people in your line of work and join a social group. This can be a gateway to niche practical knowledge and job opportunities.

The most important thing you can do to grow your marketing skills is to experiment. Try vastly different approaches, try tweaking small details, and monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns. Analyze the results, and you’ll improve your marketing efforts and grow your digital marketing skills.