5 essential skills needed for a career in digital marketing

While starting my journey in Paid social, I have found that five skills were particularly useful when starting my career in digital marketing.

Are you currently working in digital marketing? Starting out? Or even hiring digital marketers? These sets of skills could be essential for your growth or even your team’s growth.

Here are five characteristics used at any level of role throughout the industry that can benefit your day-to-day life within a digital marketing agency.

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Communication

It might sound obvious but a good level of communication works wonders! Whether delegating work or communicating ideas, having the ability to voice problems and highlight potential opportunities becomes established around effective communication.

Communication comes in multiple forms, whether vocal or written. In marketing, effective communication reflects transparency and is well respected by your clients, helping to build trust.

Good communication can also be used to explain strategy, making it clear-cut and easier for the client to understand. I do believe that one of the most important and often forgotten benefits of good communication is when communicating your brand externally. Whether at conferences, meetings, or even individual networking events, whatever you do, the brand will be communicated to external competitors, businesses, and even potential clients.

This form of brand communication is imperative; you can either reap the rewards of good brand communication but also suffer the consequences of bad brand communication.

Curiosity

Most think curiosity is an essential skill for people new to the world of marketing. And while being curious early on can help to learn more effectively this is certainly not a skill reserved for those early in their career.

Having a curious mindset will set you up for an exciting future because not only will you learn but you’ll do it in twice the time if your curious and enthusiastic.

Upon starting a digital marketing agency at the graduate level, you have general information regarding the industry but know little about the day-to-day involvement. A great way to change this is curiosity and eagerness to learn. Even at the management level or even at the owner level, curiosity helps growth, whether that is becoming curious about how other agencies do things, how other teammates do things, or how clients do things.

Being curious and open to learning is a huge skill that helps propel growth at any level. A lot of owners of digital marketing agencies are very curious and that is what has helped them succeed within their business. Being curious about the direction of the industry helps mould the business into an attractive agency.

Creativity

Being creative in a digital world can be difficult. Within large quantitative, numerical tasks for clients—analysing numbers, patterns, and tracking results—room for creativity can sometimes be left behind, despite its importance.

The London School of Business and Finance says “Creativity aids in crafting compelling content and innovative marketing campaigns.”

Creativity focuses on doing something different or showcasing something no one has seen; this creates interest if an agency is doing something others are interested in, which can increase demand.

Creativity can also help you approach tasks in a way that makes them easier to achieve. Obviously having a creative mindset can also improve copy and asset creation. In a saturated marketing industry packed with agencies, big and small, creativity can help separate your brand.

Having people within your organisation who are creative will help your agency diversify from others, it’s down to these individuals at any level who hold ideas for continuous improvement for the agency.

Organisation

When working at an agency as opposed to working in-house, the environment is fast-paced; it constantly fluctuates; strategy changes, and new clients come on board, this makes the ability to stay organised and on top of your work essential.

Some obtain an organised trait, and within life, as a digital marketer, this particular skill can come in pivotal to one’s role. I also argue that managing people is for someone with high-grade organisation; the ability to take on multiple levels of responsibility as well as your own requires a high level of organisation and can be a real separator of a team leader. The balance of agency life, working between clients whilst meeting deadlines, calls for good organisation. The biggest factor that an organisation prevents is room for error; at the end of the day, it’s your client’s money you’re working with; any problem or error prevention is down to high-level organisational skills.  It also improves the accuracy of campaigns as well as time management, it becomes a lot quicker to run campaigns and it becomes a lot quicker to execute strategy, if your whole team is organised the campaigns are accurate, ultimately meaning they are more likely to achieve their objectives.

Connectivity

Finally, to finish this list off, we have connectivity: having the ability to get yourself out there and network in itself is a skill. The industry is that competitive, you will come into contact with a lot of competitors as well as other digital marketers in similar positions. The network you build is essential in a career in digital marketing. LinkedIn is an excellent way to build a community; it also helps businesses look for potential candidates.

What is very beneficial about LinkedIn is the information you get from the digital marketing world. It acts almost as a constant update page for the industry. As well as being able to connect with external businesses or people, connecting with your internal team is a huge factor in performance. Above all, connecting with your team will bring better performance overall within each individual, whether that’s advice, brainstorming or learning from one another, being able to connect helps all areas of digital marketing rather than attempting to work individually.

Feel like you have the skills?

To conclude, agencies work with a variety of people whose skill sets differ from person to person, ultimately wherever you work you should value and celebrate individuals’ skills and notice and help people with areas where they struggle.

Each person will excel in some areas and struggle in others, noticing this is key when working within a team, as quite often, teamwork relies on differences in skill.

Feel like working with Embryo, with experts holding these skills, contact our team!

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