In the world of marketing, it’s not about bombarding customers with sales pitches, but about establishing genuine connections. It’s about understanding their preferences, motivations, and delivering value accordingly. Instead of pushing for a sale, focus on fostering trust so that when they’re ready to make a purchase, they naturally gravitate towards your brand. This principle applies to digital marketing as well, where interactions happen in the digital realm. While fundamental marketing skills like communication, curiosity, and empathy remain crucial, digital marketing demands a slightly different set of technical abilities.
This article will explore five essential digital marketing skills for success in today’s dynamic landscape, regardless of whether you’re aiming to advance your career, expand your business, or both. Additionally, we’ll provide a free resource for assessing, honing, or practicing each skill, along with a complimentary course to solidify your foundation in these areas.
1. The Art of Persuasive Writing
Copywriting involves crafting written content that promotes and motivates action. With the abundance of online channels today, copywriting is an indispensable digital marketing skill. Emails, landing pages, event invitations, online ads, social media content, chatbots, and product descriptions—all require compelling copy.
What sets copywriting apart from other forms of writing, like blogging or technical writing, is the need to captivate attention, convey value, and inspire action concisely. You must also adapt your style effortlessly, as audience expectations and mindsets vary across platforms.
Effective copywriting delivers value, resonates with the reader, and encourages action.
Your Free Copywriting Companion
Instead of trying to convince or impress, good copywriting should be easy to read, enjoyable, and engaging. That’s why we recommend the Hemingway App as your free copywriting tool. Simply paste your text, and it will highlight complex, lengthy, or disjointed sentences and sections. It also measures reading time and grade level (did you know you should aim for writing at 8th grade level?!).
These features ensure your writing is as polished and clear as possible.
Enhance Your Writing With This Free Course
For a free online course to develop your copywriting prowess, consider Copyhackers’ Conversion Copywriting 101. This course will guide you in prioritizing purpose and conversion in your writing for various web content formats, including landing pages, homepages, headlines, testimonials, ads, emails, and more.
2. Mastering Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines have become an integral part of the customer journey for virtually every business. From finding the nearest hair salon to exploring catering options or comparing car features, consumers rely on search engines to make informed purchasing decisions.
Therefore, understanding how to make a business visible in relevant searches is a critical digital marketing skill. SEO is a multifaceted discipline encompassing both technical and creative aspects, covering a wide range of sub-skills. You need expertise in creating and promoting valuable content, building effective directory listings, and structuring and securing your website.
SEO requires continuous effort, but the long-term benefits of ranking on the first page of Google are undeniable. Whether you’re refining your skills or starting fresh, SEO is a worthwhile investment.
Your Free SEO Audit Tool
Woorank’s free website review tool provides a free evaluation of your website’s SEO. It identifies your site’s targeted keywords and highlights any missing elements in title tags, meta descriptions, headings, alt tags, and internal links. It also checks performance optimizations such as security, mobile usability, sitemap validity, and file compression. Woorank analyzes both on-page and off-page SEO factors, compiling everything into an easy-to-understand report with a prioritized task list. It’s an indispensable free tool for refining your SEO skills and boosting your website’s ranking!
Boost Your SEO Knowledge With This Free Course
This free SEO Training course on Udemy covers SEO comprehensively, from fundamental concepts to advanced strategies. You’ll grasp the terminology, best practices, and most effective techniques, becoming well-versed in on-page, off-page, mobile, and local SEO. As Google and search engines constantly evolve, SEO requires ongoing learning. This course provides the necessary training to maintain your SEO expertise.
3. Harnessing the Power of Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
While ranking high in organic search results yields compounding benefits over time, building that presence takes time. Pay-per-click advertising offers a quicker route to relevant visibility. With PPC, your business enjoys guaranteed top placement, but you pay for each click your ad receives. However, higher spending doesn’t automatically translate to better visibility, as ad relevance and quality play a significant role.
This emphasis on relevance and quality is what makes PPC a specialized skill. It’s not simply about managing your budget but understanding which keywords to target, choosing the best channel and ad formats, and creating a cohesive user experience. Improved ad quality directly translates to lower cost per click and increased profits.
PPC advertising extends beyond search engines, encompassing social media, websites, apps, directories, and more, making this digital marketing skill essential.
Rover leverages PPC ads on social media and search engines.
Your Free PPC Performance Evaluator
nexus-security’s free Google Ads Performance Grader is a valuable tool to keep your PPC skills sharp. After signing in with your Google account, within a minute, you’ll discover potential areas of wasted spending and receive recommendations for improving key metrics like click-through rate, Quality Score, impression share, and more. The report also provides insights into best practices, keywords, text ads, and mobile advertising. It helps you optimize your online ad performance while staying current with PPC best practices.
Master PPC With This Free Course
nexus-security’s Growth Academy is a free, interactive learning platform offering courses to quickly master PPC fundamentals like account structure, keyword research, conversion rate tracking and optimization, bidding strategies, and essential metrics. It also delves into the inner workings and best practices of Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Display Ads, YouTube Ads, and Google Shopping. Whether your goal is to generate more leads, boost online sales, or venture into e-commerce or agency account management, Growth Academy equips you with the digital marketing skills to achieve them.
4. The Enduring Power of Email Marketing
Despite its long history, email remains a remarkably effective marketing strategy. In fact, for every $1 invested in email marketing, businesses gain an average return of the average return is $42.. Email marketing truly rocks!
Email marketing’s popularity as a digital marketing skill stems from its versatility. It effectively converts leads, re-engages inactive customers, builds loyalty, and more. You can share valuable content, important updates, exclusive deals, event invitations—the possibilities are vast.
With honed email marketing skills, you can expand your subscriber lists, conduct experiments, and gain valuable insights about your audience to drive your objectives.
Your Free Email Marketing Inspiration Hub
Really Good Emails offers a platform to learn best practices and draw inspiration from email marketing experts. Similar to Pinterest for emails, you can browse categories, search brands or keywords, and even save your favorites.
What sets this tool apart is that you’re not just browsing templates with placeholder text. You’re exploring real-world emails, gaining inspiration for both design and copy. Because sometimes, you need more than just lorem ipsum.
Develop a Winning Email Strategy With This Free Course
Wishpond’s free Email Marketing Masterclass for Beginners helps you create an email marketing strategy aligned with your business and career goals. This one-hour course covers different email campaign types, email marketing funnels and objectives, list-building strategies, A/B testing, and more. Whether you’re new to email marketing or seeking to enhance your skills, this course provides a solid foundation.
5. Optimizing for Conversions (CRO)
You’ve mastered copywriting, SEO, PPC, and email marketing, effectively driving significant traffic to your website. Congratulations! However, your journey to digital marketing mastery isn’t complete yet. What’s the point of attracting visitors if they don’t take any action on your site? This is where conversion rate optimization, or CRO, comes into play.
A conversion refers to the specific action you want visitors to take on any given page of your website—requesting a quote, downloading a free guide, or subscribing to your mailing list. Numerous factors influence whether visitors perform these desired actions, and CRO focuses on identifying the elements that drive the most engagement. Your CRO skills encompass A/B testing, conversion funnels, and engagement metrics like bounce rate. Understanding how page elements like copy, layout, button colors, website speed, and even site structure and navigation impact conversion is crucial.
Your Free CRO Data Analysis Tool
A/B testing forms the cornerstone of conversion rate optimization. However, data can sometimes be misleading. Kissmetrics’ Free A/B Significance Test Calculator ensures you accurately interpret your CRO data. Simply input your results, and it will calculate the confidence level you can have that the winning variation from the test will indeed increase conversions on a larger scale.
Master Landing Page Optimization With This Free Course
Unbounce’s free Landing Page Course equips you with essential landing page knowledge, covering page elements, architecture, call-to-action design, lead capture forms, and copywriting. Two accompanying video series provide further insights: “The Landing Page Sessions” analyzes real-world campaigns, while “The Landing Page Design” series demonstrates how to apply design principles for optimal conversion.
Make These Digital Marketing Skills a Priority This Year
Digital marketing empowers businesses to save money, expand their reach, personalize their content, and measure results effectively. Whether you’re a marketing professional or a business owner, staying current with the necessary skills is crucial to maximize the potential of today’s diverse tools and channels. These essential skills include:
- Copywriting
- SEO
- PPC
- Email Marketing
- Conversion Rate Optimization
While the channels may be familiar, the skills needed to fully leverage them are constantly evolving. Utilize the tools and free online marketing courses outlined in this post to maintain your competitive edge in the ever-changing world of digital marketing!