Digital marketing is huge. There are so many topics within digital marketing (it’s insane). It is no wonder beginners get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of knowledge you need to learn.

No worries. While digital marketing multiverse is huge, you will realise that a lot of them overlap conceptually and technically.

The 16 core digital marketing skill-sets every marketer should know:

1. Marketing Fundamentals

The most important topic in determining the success of your business and marketing campaign. This is the cornerstone of all great marketing – knowing your businesses well and empathising with your customer. This will affect your marketing strategies and copywriting.

Marketing fundamentals cover aspects of customer survey, avatar creation and business positioning.

2. Website & Landing Page Conversion Optimisation

Have you walked into a messy store and leave immediately? The same concept applies to your website. You should optimise your page for conversion – be it to generate leads or sales. It is both an art and a science that involves optimising the layout, having good copywriting and putting in the right visual assets.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media presence is important. This is how people find out about you, interact with you and validate if you are credible. You have to understand how individual platform works and make sure you start optimising your Facebook business page profile, Twitter account, Instagram business account, LinkedIn and other core social media your audience group might be using.

Not just that, your layout, post, tweets, highlights and images matters in resonating with your audience.

4. Tracking and Analytics with Google Analytics

Data is important to help you make business decisions as well as to monitor your website traffic.

Firstly, you will need to know how to setup your Google Analytics properly for cleaner data.

Secondly, you will need to learn to understand the different data points that Google is providing – Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversion.

Thirdly, learn to make decisions based on data.

Fourthly, understand other platform’s data analytics (e.g. Facebook’s own data dashboard) and how it differs from google analytics.

5. Content Marketing

Content creation is needed to inform, educate and delight your audience.

You create content on your social media to keep your audience posted, create blog content with SEO and audience intent in mind and create content assets such as eBooks, Infographic or online quizzes which you can reuse over time.

Not just that, the bulk of your effort should be placed on content distribution. Your content is only as good as how many people consume and value it.

6. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Your website and the blog content you create must have SEO in mind. The key goal is to understand how the ever evolving search engine works.

It is important to create valuable content that people are actively searching for. You first need to do keyword and search query research to understand how people are using the search engine to look for answers. Next, create content that people truly care about.

There is on-page SEO optimisation to help search engine discover and read your content more efficiently. Furthermore, there are off-page SEO strategies to help elevate the credibility of your website.

7. Email marketing

Email is a crucial identifier of a person. Today, people attach their emails to their social media accounts and online websites. We use email to interact with other people as well. 

You can do email marketing to update your audience with your latest news and promotion, or you can use it to nurture your audience across a timeframe. There are several email marketing strategies to attract attention and push your audience to sales. You would be missing out if you think that email marketing is dead.

8. Facebook and Instagram Marketing

Facebook and Instagram are the most commonly used social media, and that makes it an advertising haven for advertisers. As a marketer, you should have a Facebook and Instagram Business account to make full use of the platform’s ad manager and Facebook pixel.

Understand the different marketing strategies based on objectives, targeting, intent, ad assets and copy are crucial in helping people to discover you and achieving the business goals you have. We share with you tools and tips to help you get the best of your paid advertising.

9. Search Engine Marketing/ Google Ads (Adwords)

The best time to target a potential customer is to catch them when they are googling for solutions online. Keyword research with Google keyword planner tool and keyword matching strategies are needed to ensure your ads are visible at the right keywords.

10. Display advertising with Google Display Network (GDN)

Google Display Network (GDN) is a part of Google Ads. You have probably seen banner ads when you are browsing websites. With GDN, the targeting strategy and how you are being charged matters in ensuring you don’t burst the bank using GDN.

11. Youtube SEO and Advertising

YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google. You need to put together your SEO knowledge and optimise it for Youtube. Youtube advertising is a subset of Google Ads. Choose your ad format, pay close attention to the targeting options and create content that tells a story or solve a solution.

12. Conversational Marketing with Chatbot

Chatbot has been trending. People are talking about building bots to manage their store 24/7. You can use chatbots to qualify leads, navigate people to the right products or help them through their concerns before they make the purchase. With chatbots, you will need to ask how to get your bot to converse with a human being and assist them in decision making.

13. Referral Marketing

Word of Mouth is powerful. Throw in some incentives, it might become even more insane! Firstly, understand what makes your audience tick and provide them the incentive. Then use referral tools to keep track of their referral performance.

14. A/B Testing

How do you determine which image can convert or which headline resonates better? You should always A/B test you ads, websites and emails to see which version help you reach your goals more efficiently. You will learn how to setup the tools you need such as Google Optimize to make this work.

15. Marketing Funnel

Understanding the customer journey and how customers move through the marketing funnel would allow you to see gaps and opportunities. With this, you can push your website traffic and leads one step closer towards your business goals. This skill is a must have for people who want to advance to a marketing strategist role.

16. Growth Hacking

To be good at digital marketing, it is not just about putting together campaigns. It is about having the growth mindset and thinking out of the box. Growth hackers experiment a lot, find new avenues to grow sales, tap into human psychology to make them take action. We share with you some interesting ideas on what you can do to growth hack your business.

These are the key topics which we believe marketers should know. A marketer may not be a master of everything but they should know enough and understand how everything works together. There will be other platforms and also new technology which are variations of this core topics that you have to adapt to in the future.

We will never stop learning and the tech world will never stop evolving. The goal here is to have a marketer’s mindset and learn to strategize as well as adapt to the ever fluid digital landscape.
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