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Language: en
In this video, I'll share 11 in-demand digital
marketing skills that'll help you get hired,
make more money, and become
a better rounded marketer.
Stay tuned.
[music]
So being a good digital marketer
requires two different sets of skills.
Hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills are basically learned abilities
that are sharpened through experience and
education, while soft skills are more about
character traits and interpersonal skills.
In other words, hard skills show employers
how good you'll be at your job from a technical
standpoint, while soft skills show whether
you'll be a good employee, teammate, or manager.
Now, many people focus just on improving
hard skills like coding, SEO, or paid advertising.
But soft skills are equally important.
In fact, a 2018 study from LinkedIn shows
that 57% of employers value soft skills more
than hard skills.
Now, in terms of what employers look
for in a digital marketer will vary based
on the position and responsibilities.
For example, when we hired a video editor,
hard skills weighed heavier than soft.
And when I hired an outreach manager, soft
skills weighed heavier than hard because
interpersonal skills are more important
than knowing how software works.
Now, while I won't be able to cover every
single skill that'll be helpful in your digital
marketing career, I'll share 5 hard skills
and 6 soft skills that I personally look for
when hiring digital marketers.
And I'll explain why these skills are valuable
for almost any digital marketing role.
Let's get started with the hard skills.
The first skill worth mastering is copywriting.
Copy is often the bridge between
company and customer.
It lives on blog posts, landing pages, emails,
and even videos as tons of them are scripted.
This makes copywriting arguably the most
transferable skill in online marketing.
It applies to SEO, content marketing, email
marketing, outreach, social media, paid
advertising, and the list goes on.
And because a big part of your job as a digital
marketer will be to educate and influence your
target audience with copy, this in my
books is a skill worth improving.
The second hard skill is SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization
and it's the process of optimizing web pages
to rank higher in search engines.
Now, the reason why it's an important skill
to have is because you can use it to get free,
passive, and consistent traffic
that doesn't fade over time.
And that's essentially what businesses want.
In addition, the principles in SEO will help
you understand how the web works, particularly
with Google SEO.
If you want to learn more about SEO,
we have a free course that'll give you
all of this technical knowledge and also
help you get more traffic to your site.
I'll link it up in the description.
The next hard skill is in data
analysis and interpretation.
Data gives you something to analyze and
your analysis will help you draw insights.
And those insights are what marketers
use to create marketing campaigns.
This cycle is pretty important because if
the data is bad, then everything else after
will be flawed.
Now, if your analysis is incorrect, then the insights
you drew from them would be invalidated.
And if your insights are wrong, then you might
be leading your campaign in the wrong direction.
So it's critical that you a) understand where
your data comes from, and b) know how to
analyze and interpret it.
Sometimes you'll have great insights that
come from your analysis and other times,
you'll learn that there's no conclusive
evidence to work with.
Both outcomes are equally important because
they're going to guide you in the right direction
to save your company time, money and effort.
Alright, the next hard skill is in user experience.
While this is a common skill that designers
need to have, it's important for digital marketers
to at least have a high level understanding
of UX best practices.
After all, as marketers, we want to create
interactions with customers and prospects
so they have more meaningful and relevant
experiences with our brand and content.
On top of that, many marketing channels
depend on user experience signals.
For example, YouTube's and pretty much every
single social media network's algorithm is
driven by user experience signals.
And even in Google SEO, user experience
signals can impact ranking positions.
Bottomline: the better experience you create
for people, the better your marketing campaigns
will be.
And assuming your marketing campaigns
are aligned with the business's bottom line,
the better the company will perform.
Alright, the last hard skill I want to talk
about is expertise with Google Sheets.
Now, I wouldn't typically list software as
a must-have hard skill, but knowing how
to use Google Sheets, beyond data entry
and basic formulas is going to make you
a more efficient marketer.
And depending on your proficiency, it can be
telling of your knowledge in logic programming.
Google Sheets is arguably the most versatile tool.
You can use it to create reports, analyze,
interpret, and manipulate data, and create
automations for monotonous tasks.
The use cases are truly endless and it's a big
plus that I love seeing for mid to high level roles.
Alright, let's move on to the soft skills,
starting with arguably the most important
one in my books, and that's communication.
Marketing is essentially a brand's way
to communicate with customers and
prospects so you can drive interest
and desire for products and services.
So if you're not able to communicate
effectively, your marketing will be ineffective.
Now, you might be thinking… big whoop.
But the repercussions of poor
communication can be severe.
It can impact people's first impressions of
your company, damage your brand reputation,
and lead to wasted time for marketers
and anyone else involved in a campaign
like developers, designers, and outsourced teams.
Beyond that, marketing also involves developing
relationships with customers, affiliates, influencers,
and brand evangelists.
Fail to communicate effectively and
you'll have a very bumpy road ahead.
Next up are problem solving skills.
Marketing campaigns rarely go smoothly and
you will run into problems and unexpected
bumps along the way.
The thing is, nobody wants to hold your
hand through every single problem.
Employers hire employees to solve problems.
So naturally, a big part of your job will be
to solve problems with creative solutions
even if company policies or budgets
may play against you.
A common example in the SEO
world is buying backlinks.
A lot of companies have no problems doing
this but if your company is like ours and has
policies against these practices, you have
to come up with creative ways to compete.
Another common disadvantage I see in
competitive industries are with ad budgets.
Leaders in an industry will often have
what seems to be an infinite budget.
And if you're working at a bootstrapped start-up
with 1/100th of your competitors' budgets,
you'll have to get extremely creative to have
a fighting chance at winning, let alone surviving.
The best marketing is when your product and
marketing align to solve peoples' problems.
But that in and of itself is a problem that
marketers are often tasked with solving.
Alright, the next soft skill
on my list is creativity.
Creativity is something that's
incredibly difficult to teach.
In fact, according to George Land, a famous
researcher and scientist, non-creative behavior
is learned.
Meaning, we learn to become
less creative as we get older.
In his 1968 study, he gave 1,600
five-year-olds a creativity test.
And this is the same test that was used by NASA
to select innovative engineers and scientists.
And to his surprise, 98% of five-year-olds
scored in the 'highly creative range.'
But when he retested them at 10 and 15 years
old, there was a dramatic drop in the percentage
of people who scored in
the ‘highly creative range.'
Now, Land also tested 280,000
adults with the same test.
And only 2% of this group scored
in the highly creative range.
Meaning, for those that are actually creative,
it's going to be one of your greatest assets.
And when you pair creativity with the hard
skill of data analysis, you end up having
a very powerful combination of skills that
will play in your favor as a digital marketer.
Alright, the next soft skill is teachability.
Now, the reason why I think this is
a critical soft skill to have is because
marketing is collaborative.
And if you're the stubborn type who refuses
to hear feedback from your managers and
teammates, you will naturally
be an awful team player.
In my opinion, teachability shows humility,
adaptability, and one's desire for growth.
This is why after doing hundreds of interviews,
if a candidate doesn't seem teachable, it's
a "break it" kind of attribute for me.
Now, that doesn't mean you need to be a yes-man
and make other people feel better about themselves.
It's about being open to others' opinions
and collaboratively coming to the best ideas
for your marketing campaigns.
Alright, the next soft skill is self-motivation.
This is a skill that I think separates
the wheat from the chaff.
Naturally, there are going to be people who
show up to work and do the bare minimum.
After all, we alls gots to make
monies to pay the bills.
But there'll be a few individuals who'll put
in the extra time, effort, thought, and focus
simply because they want to produce good work.
These are self-motivated people.
They're willing to go the extra mile
to make their work great.
They don't define themselves from
their salary, mentions or accolades.
But ironically, self-motivated people
with raw talent tend to get paid more
and praised publicly.
They're a rare breed and in my opinion, it's
a skill that's nearly impossible to fake over
the long haul.
And the final soft skill is dependability.
Because marketing usually happens in a team
setting, you need to be able to depend on your
teammates to do their part.
It makes marketing operations much smoother
and the result is a highly effective team.
A standout example that immediately
comes to mind is our video team.
From the day I started working at Ahrefs,
they have not once missed a deadline.
But deadlines aren't a be all and
end all of dependable people.
Our entire video team is directly
impacted by the invasion in Ukraine.
And even though I've told them countless times
that our videos can wait, they all continue to go
above and beyond despite
being in a freaking war.
Frankly speaking, I have never worked
with a team that's this dependable.
It says a lot about character and
plays directly into team dynamics.
Now, as I'm sure you caught on, hard and
soft skills tend to complement each other.
For example, creativity is intertwined
with copywriting.
Problem solving helps in SEO and SEO
helps you become a better problem solver.
So whether you want to become a better marketing
leader, get a performance-based raise, or get started
with your first job in internet marketing, honing
these skills is going to help you achieve that.
And I only wish you the best.