Digital marketing has become indispensable in business. From search engine optimization (SEO) to social media strategy, digital marketing allows businesses to connect with consumers like never before.
According to the agency Social Shepherd, digital ads can boost brand awareness with prospective customers by a staggering 80 percent.
To keep up with the market’s evolving needs, you need to understand what digital marketing is and the skills that can enable you to excel.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing comprises strategies and techniques for using digital channels, platforms, and technologies to connect with your target audience.
While traditional forms of marketing—like print advertising and TV commercials—can be effective, the emergence of e-commerce, social media, and mobile technologies have drastically changed consumer behavior.
“These technologies completely changed the way consumers connect with brands, how they search for information, and how they buy products,” says Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta, who teaches the online course Digital Marketing Strategy. “They’re the reason digital marketing has become an integral and important part of every company.”
If you want to become an effective digital marketer, here are the skills that can help you make a strategic impact.
What Are the Top Digital Marketing Skills?
1. Technology Proficiency
Technology proficiency is essential in digital marketing. To execute campaigns successfully, you must know how to use automation tools, software, and digital platforms.
Digital marketing tools include:
- Customer relationship management systems
- Analytics software
- Ad management tools
- Content management systems
By using these technologies, you can better understand, learn from, and segment your target audience. You can also identify emerging trends in consumer behavior to maximize your marketing efforts’ impact.
In Digital Marketing Strategy, Anne Lewnes, chief marketing officer at technology company Adobe, says understanding your customer is crucial to successful marketing.
“I don’t think marketing has actually changed fundamentally,” Lewnes says. “I think a good idea, a good product—those are always going to be core to marketing. I think engaging your audience with some emotional kind of stimulus is always going to be important. I think the thing that’s really changed is the ability to understand the customer deeply. So you need technology to be able to do that.”
2. Data Analysis
Whether using traditional or digital marketing tactics, data analysis—systematically collecting, interpreting, and utilizing data—is critical.
Channels you can collect data from include:
- Websites
- Social media platforms
- Email marketing campaigns
However, data isn’t useful without clearly defined metrics or key performance indicators.
“At the simplest level, you need to measure what you set out to achieve with your marketing objectives,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
For example, if you’re interested in measuring your company’s brand awareness, you can analyze data from social media shares and mentions, your website, and customer surveys to gain valuable insights into prospective and existing customers.
3. Search Engine Marketing
Advertising is crucial to succeeding in the digital age.
As a digital marketer, it’s essential to strategically plan and execute search engine marketing (SEM)—promoting your website by increasing its visibility in search engine results through paid advertising.
“As a key driver of conversion in the customer journey, search engine marketing, or SEM, is a critical tool to have in your paid media toolkit,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
According to the course, campaigns fall into two categories:
- Paid search: Bidding on keywords to prominently display ads in search engine results when users enter those terms, and then paying a fee each time they click on those ads.
- Display ads: Visual ads on websites—such as banners, images, videos, or interactive media—that promote your products, services, or brand to your target audience.
SEM is particularly valuable in digital marketing because it allows you to create targeted ads that can have a greater consumer impact. Implementing SEM involves five components:
- Choosing keywords that lead to your ad
- Designing your ad’s content
- Identifying the best landing page for your ad
- Developing a bidding strategy for keywords
- Analyzing results and optimizing content accordingly
Search engine marketing is more relevant when consumers actively search for something online. Keep that in mind when choosing what keywords to bid on.
For example, if you plan to travel to Boston, you might search for “hotel in Boston'' on Google. While several hotels will match those keywords, chains like Hilton could use SEM and bid on that generic keyword to ensure you see its website first.
“By investing in generic keywords, you’re more likely to attract a wider range of consumers who may not be familiar with or thinking of your brand when searching for a product such as ‘hotel in Boston,’” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
4. Search Engine Optimization
Another essential digital marketing skill is search engine optimization (SEO)—improving your website's visibility and ranking in organic search engine results.
Nearly 68 percent of online experiences begin with search engines like Google. Unlike SEM’s focus on paid search, SEO improves your website’s content, keywords, meta tags, site structure, and user experience so that web pages appear toward the top of search results.
According to Digital Marketing Strategy, search engines rank web pages according to:
- Relevance: Whether content matches the intent behind your user's search query.
- Authority: Your website’s credibility based on factors such as content expertise and brand reputation.
By understanding search engine algorithms and implementing SEO best practices, you can avoid spending too much on paid ad clicks and improve your website’s traffic, visibility, and user engagement at little to no cost.
5. Brand Development
According to a survey by digital asset management company Bynder, one of marketers’ top concerns is effectively engaging with consumers on crowded digital platforms.
One way to improve consumer engagement is through brand development—managing your company’s identity and reputation across marketing platforms. But it can be an uphill battle.
“Digital marketing can have a harder time building brands,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy, “building the imagery, and creating a story around the brand. This is changing over time, but typically, digital marketing has been focused on performance marketing rather than on brand building.”
Performance marketing focuses on meeting specific, short-term, measurable targets. For example, when consumers are ready to buy, performance marketing considers their Google search, what ad or owned media they click on, and whether they bought your product.
To account for their emotional motivations, you must focus on brand-building—the long-term process of building broader awareness and knowledge of your brand. You can do so by establishing a unique brand voice, visual identity, and messaging that resonates with customers so they connect with your products and services.
6. Email Marketing
Before digital marketing emerged, most companies reached customers through print mail and advertisements. But that’s changed. According to a study by technology research firm The Radicati Group, the number of email users is expected to reach nearly 4.5 billion by the end of 2024. Research also shows that the average time users check their email daily is 172 minutes, making it crucial to understand how to use email marketing.
Email marketing involves sending targeted, personalized emails to segmented groups of customers to build relationships, promote your products and services, and educate them.
It’s critical to balance broad email content for new customers with more targeted content for your existing ones.
“You have to use both approaches and balance them,” says Kate Laliberte, head of e-commerce at footwear company OOFOS, in Digital Marketing Strategy. “You have to have a marketing program that reaches a broad set of customers talking about the products and the company. But you have to be able to make it feel relevant to the consumer as well by sending some of those emails that are more focused on the activity or the actions they took.”
This means your customers should expect personalized emails featuring their names, tailored recommendations from their past purchases, and exclusive deals that align with their interests and browsing habits.
Another benefit of email marketing is that it’s budget-friendly.
“Email marketing is cost-effective because a company can reach consumers without paying ad dollars to Google or Facebook,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
By gaining confidence in your email marketing, you can nurture customer relationships, drive conversions, and increase your target audience’s engagement.
7. Social Media
Social media is one of the most commonly used digital platforms. According to data from Pew Research, nearly 72 percent of the U.S. population uses social media.
In an age of social influencers, your business must maintain a digital presence to ensure it remains relevant to consumers.
Social media platforms your business can use include:
While Facebook is the most popular, you should understand how to incorporate other channels in your digital marketing plan. Doing so enables you to engage with a more diverse audience and gain additional consumer insights.
“In contrast to surveys and focus groups to gain customer insights, social media provides a free and unfiltered forum for companies to become aware of and understand their consumers’ attitudes and behaviors,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
By capitalizing on social media, you can better understand your customers’ preferences and enhance your marketing strategies.
How to Improve Your Digital Marketing Skills
While some marketers can improve their digital marketing skills on the job, others require a more in-depth approach. If the latter resonates with you, an online course can be an effective way to develop your skills while having the flexibility to continue developing professionally at work.
For instance, Digital Marketing Strategy is designed to help you craft digital marketing strategies that reach and retain your customers. Through real-world case studies, you can learn how to become a more effective marketer using today’s digital tools.
Do you want to enhance your digital marketing skills? Explore Digital Marketing Strategy to discover how. If you’re interested in exploring online education but aren’t sure where to start, download our free guide to online learning success.
