5 Essential Marketing Skills in a Digital World

5 Essential Marketing Skills in a Digital World - Pel Hughes print marketing new orleans

The overall goal of a marketer is to build trust with the consumer. It’s this relationship that will plant the seed with your brand, and it’s the continued confidence that will keep them coming back. Building this trust is difficult – it always has been. However, as consumers and products become even more entwined online, gaining the trust of a consumer is tougher than it ever has been.

Successful marketing campaigns need to evolve their strategies and methods, and tailor them to meet today’s challenges. In this article, we discuss 5 of the most essential skills every successful marketer needs to be successful. It may not be exhaustive, but these skills will put you ahead of the pack in gaining, and keeping, consumer trust.

 

 

  • Online Influence

 

Establishing an online presence should be a given at this point. However, successful marketers should go well beyond a mere existence online. Consumers are constantly inundated with ads and continuously visiting different websites. Marketers need to be active participants in this experience with the consumer.

Marketers also need to understand which social networks best align with the goals of their company and product. It’s important to know which platforms to publish on, and how to build an online community. Successful marketing requires being savvy in the social environment, and active with their online influence.

 

 

  • Mobile Marketing

 

According to recent statistics, 48% of consumers start mobile research with a search engine, and over 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product while conducting a search on their smartphone. Mobile marketing has become one of the most important marketing skills, and this value will only increase as more activities are being completed with smartphones.

Prosperous marketers should understand not only how customers are using mobile, but also how to brand a digital presence and optimize content for a mobile medium. Marketers need to study mobile traffic analytics, e-commerce analytics as well as become familiar with mobile design.

 

 

  • Data Analysis

 

As noted above, marketers need to be familiar with various types of data analytics. And recent studies show that there is a huge shortage of marketers that are skilled in this area. In fact, a large study by the content creation firm Venngage showed that only 3% of marketers are competent in analyzing data.

With the power of tools such as Google Analytics, every visitor, view and share on a website is tracked and recorded. Sifting through such a large amount of data can be overwhelming, and as such, marketers are focusing on creative aspects while ignoring the numbers. Marketers that study the data can tailor their creative projects to those that will garner the most consumer traffic.

 

 

  • Communication

 

One of the best ways to plant the seed in building consumer trust is reflected in how well you can communicate your message to them. While this has essentially been the backbone of successful marketing for decades, its importance is no less significant in our digital age.

Successful marketers should be able to create content that is compelling and that tells the story of their company and/or brand. Additionally, the best marketers not only know how to create this story, but present it in a visually-appealing way. This visual rhetoric includes using the right titles, keywords and attention-grabbing visuals.  

 

 

  • Leadership

A truly effective marketer knows and understands that they cannot possess all of the necessary skills to be the best. The most successful marketer not only understands this, but can form a team that can complement their strengths and put together a campaign that reflects these abilities. This is especially true in a digital world that is changing faster than we can keep up.