There’s plenty of money to be made in digital marketing.
Businesses are starting to recognize the value it holds and are willing to pay big money to the right people.
The people they are looking for are experts in their field and know how to get results.
If you are already a digital marketer or are thinking about becoming one, you might be wondering what skills you can learn that will help you stand out from the crowd and make more money.
The power of marketing experience in any form cannot be underestimated.
If you’re going to join a business and hit the ground running, it’s essential you know how to run a marketing campaign.
There are so many ways you can specialize as a digital marketer, some of which you may not be familiar with.
Here are 10 skills that you can learn that will help you to earn more money.
What is Digital Marketing & why is it important?
Digital marketing is simply marketing that happens online.
This encompasses any number of different channels from email to social media, blogging, and paid advertising.
To run a successful marketing campaign, you need to be where your audience is.
With billions of people accessing the internet every day, the chances are your audience is hanging around online somewhere.
This is why digital marketing is so valuable. It lets you reach more people than you’ve ever been able to before with traditional marketing, even taking into account strategies like TV and radio advertisements.
People are, almost literally, at your fingertips.
Whether they’re spending their day on social media, or you’re catching them with a weekly newsletter, you’re giving your audience a way to get to know you, and you, them.
The best Digital Marketing skills to help you earn more money
- SEO skills
As a digital marketer, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the principles of SEO.
You probably dream about it.
It’ll come as no surprise to you, therefore, that SEO skills are essential to earning money as a digital marketer.
When you’re targeting an online audience, you need to consider SEO in almost everything you do. Blog posts, social media, product descriptions…
SEO is what helps bring organic traffic to your website.
Working in marketing, you’ll know that budgets are always tight. That’s why this stream of free traffic is so valuable to businesses.
Over the years there have been many conversations about how “SEO is dead”.
It’s not.
What has happened, however, is that how you do it has changed according to what the search engines consider important in satisfying user intent.
SEO experts are always in demand because it’s a tricky and often technical skill to learn and stay on top of. It changes in accordance with updates in technology and the ever-changing mystery that is Google’s algorithm.
Businesses have come to understand the importance of having an SEO expert, or team of experts, who understand how and why of SEO.
It’s usually not something they can, or want, to do themselves and are willing to pay an expert to help them get it right.
If you know SEO inside out, there’s serious money to be made. - Copywriting
In marketing, you know how important your words are.
The way you write a campaign can make or break its success.
That’s why an understanding of copywriting is so valuable.
As a digital marketer, you’ll often find yourself writing blog posts, landing pages, advertisements, social media posts, and more. All of these tasks require a certain level of copywriting skills.
You need to be able to capture the attention of the reader and call on them to take a particular action that you want them to take as a result.
There’s a lot of psychology behind the perfect piece of copy. When preparing an advertisement, you also usually only have a relatively small amount of time and space to use in capturing the attention of the reader.
It’s important you know how to use it.
Expert copywriters can charge expert rates for their skills. - Social media expertise
For digital marketers, knowing how to navigate social media is one of the most important aspects of the job.
Social media is often immeasurably valuable to businesses, especially those who sell through it or have a very large following.
As a digital marketer, any business you work for will expect you to know your Reels from your Tweets and your TikTok.
With Facebook having almost 3 billion active users, and Instagram having 1 billion, almost every business will be able to find their target audience online.
It’s therefore an incredible resource and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, anytime soon.
The problem is that businesses without a dedicated social media marketing person or team often struggle to make it work properly for them. They either do not know how to do it or don’t have the time/resource to allocate in doing it properly.
This makes social media expertise incredibly valuable.
You need to understand how to use each individual platform and know how to measure success. This involves a lot of analysis work in determining the right types of posts to make and when to post them.
There is so much that goes into social media marketing. Proven success in growing an online platform for a business will help you in finding a high-paying role. - Email marketing
Many businesses still find that their most successful form of digital marketing is through email.
With an average return of $42 for every $1 spent on email marketing, it’s not hard to see why.
Having an email list full of engaged readers is like gold dust to businesses.
You have a list of people who are either previous customers or are interested in becoming a customer, and you have direct contact with them.
That’s almost unheard of in the marketing world.
When used correctly, email can bring in a lot of money through sales, offers, and affiliate marketing.
This is why talented email marketers are so in demand and can make a lot of money.
Learning how to be successful at email marketing is something that takes a lot of time and dedication. There is a significant amount of technique and experience that goes into crafting the perfect email.
Building an email list from scratch is a very difficult job. Then once you have a list of people, you need to make sure you segment it to target the right people at the right time.
It can become very technical.
This is why businesses are willing to pay big money for digital marketers who have had proven success with email marketing.
If you have evidence of building an email list from scratch, you’re even more desirable. - Paid advertising
While SEO is usually the ultimate long-term goal for businesses in bringing traffic to their website, you may need paid advertising to begin with.
It takes a while for SEO to work, and you often don’t have time to wait for that when you need to make money.
Businesses look to pay-per-click advertising in the first instance to help them gain visibility and customers.
Knowing how to put together a PPC campaign that works is a skill.
You need to know how to work with a budget, what keywords to target, and the best formats to use.
More than that, you need to create a valuable and enjoyable experience for your audience.
People generally don’t like advertisements in their content. You, therefore, have to make them non-intrusive yet effective enough to be worth the money you spend.
If you can bring over as many people as possible to a business’s website without costing the earth, you’re extremely valuable. - Graphic design skills
Basic graphic design skills are going to help you get along as a digital marketer.
You may need to create your own Instagram and website graphics, or a graphic to accompany an advert.
Knowing how to do this well is going to help you in your role, especially if there is no dedicated person in the marketing team allocated this work.
If you are a whizz with Photoshop or Canva and know how to design clickable graphics, these skills will prove very useful. - Content marketing
Content is key.
Only through great content will you bring in an audience.
Content alone, however, is not going to be enough. You also need to make sure that people see that content. If you don’t, it’s worse than useless.
That’s why content marketing is so important.
If you can create great content and market it to the point that thousands, if not millions, of people are seeing it, you’re incredibly valuable.
No matter what your digital marketing role is, you need to know your way around content marketing.
And it works both ways.
The more advanced and knowledgeable you get as a digital marketer, the better you will be at marketing your content. - Analytics
How do you know if your marketing campaigns are working if you can’t analyze the results?
Having analytical skills is integral to the digital marketer role.
Knowing when to post on social media, or how to write a great blog post is all well and good.
Marketing requires a lot of testing, data tracking, and analysis. This is the only way you will understand how you can improve and what is/isn’t working.
You also need a good deal of patience and imagination while also being able to quickly adapt a campaign when it isn’t working. - Mobile marketing
What is mobile marketing?
While often overlooked, it is one of the most sought-after skills in the digital marketing world.
There are big differences between desktop and mobile marketing and understanding what these are will be important if you want to specialise in this area.
How often have you heard someone refer to themselves as a mobile marketer?
Probably never.
Mobile marketing is a great niche area to get into as it’s less competitive than some other areas like SEO. There is still a huge need for it.
It’s a tricky skill to master but can reap huge rewards if you find the right role. - UX design
UX design is important in determining the success of your online marketing campaign as it helps you to understand the experience they had with your company.
It’s important that customers enjoy your content as much as possible and this means making it easy and aesthetically pleasing.
Don’t underestimate the value of a professional website as this is what most customers will judge you on.
As a UX designer, you are responsible for making sure all the online platforms you have are user-friendly and create an experience for the customers that is enjoyable and pleasant.
It’s not a job that is specifically digital marketing like the others listed above.
It’s so important, however, because marketers have worked so hard to get users to a website. The content needs to be great once they get there!
How can you learn new skills?
If you’re wanting to learn a new digital marketing skill, there are plenty of ways you can do it.
For example, you can:
- Take an online course
- Obtain a digital marketing certification
- Build your following on your own social media accounts
- Manage your own blog or website
- If you already work in the field, see if you can take on new responsibilities in your job right now
- Practice
Conclusion
There are so many opportunities out there in the digital marketing world.
It’s also what makes the field so desirable and interesting to those looking to find digital marketer jobs.
If you sell yourself as an expert with the right skills a company is looking for, there is no limit to the amount of work you can do and the money you can make.
One of the best ways to learn a new skill is by taking a course. Here at Digital Academy, we have lots of interesting courses available for you to take right now.
Head on over and take a look at what we have to offer!
