Do you know what differentiates a good and not-so-good candidate for the same position in digital marketing? It’s his or her potential for upskilling. Hopefully, if you don’t feel confident enough, you can disrupt that by preparing now. Thanks to my 12 years of experience as a senior consultant and consulting director, I have concocted the following list for you.
Summary
- Understand customer acquisition and retention levers, including SEO, SEA, SMA, affiliation, display and emailing.
- Know the web analytics tools and the data analysis process.
- Know the vocabulary of the digital marketing world
- Build experience in graphic design and content creation
- Knowledge and experience with marketing automation tools
- Understand the customer journey and experience
- Have strong project management skills
- Understand web design and development
1. Understand digital marketing acquisition and retention channels, including SEO, SEA, SMA, affiliation, display, and emailing
In digital, activating media and organic channels is your only possibility to be visible. They each have their functioning, tools, and actors. For example, the SEA (or sponsored links) works on a keyword bidding system. The paid links displayed on the search engine are those of the advertisers who have won bids. For each click of an Internet user on the ad, the advertiser pays a certain amount to Google or Bing.
When I worked in a digital marketing agency, the media challenges consisted of constantly optimizing the investments, the content, and the way to distribute it. The goal is still the same: maximize performance.
Here are some examples of commonly used tools:
Google ads: for SEA campaign management
SemRush and Ahref: to optimize the organic referencing of your site
Google Search Console: to check if Google correctly indexes your website
Google Manager 360: to manage your display campaigns
Facebook ads: to manage social media campaigns
2. Know the web analytics tools and the data analysis process
As soon as a site generates traffic, the question arises of understanding the behavior of visitors. This requires implementing measurement tools (e.g. Google Analytics for the best known). These tools then allow the analysis of the collected data and/or their restitution on a dashboard. And all this is always done to optimize the customer journey for example, but also the media channels.
In practice, all digital marketing actions are systematically tracked. As a consulting director in a media agency, my challenges were: tracking 100% of the audience, monitoring media performance, and identifying optimization paths. A data analyst did the data analysis. He uses dedicated languages (R or Python) to identify correlations between data.
The most used tools are:
Google Tag Manager: for the management of tracking elements
Google Analytics for data analysis
R: free software environment for statistical computing and graphics
PowerBI for building dashboards
Some useful browser extensions:
Tag Explorer to identify the tracking tools used on a site.
Meta Pixel Helper to check if your tracking is working properly.
3. Know the vocabulary of the digital marketing world
It may surprise you, but in the marketing world, communicating clearly is a daily challenge. The field has its vocabulary and uses many English terminologies. For the same concept, different terms can be used. Finally, new terms regularly appear according to the evolution of tools or strategies.
To prepare yourself as well as possible, I can only invite you to familiarize yourself with the basic terminologies. Some sites do an excellent job on this subject. Then practice explaining them in your own words to neophytes. This will help you get the hang of it.
Examples of sites summarizing the vocabulary of digital marketing:
20 Digital Marketing Terms Every Marketer Should Know
Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms
The Ultimate A-Z Digital Marketing Glossary
4. Build experience in graphic design and content creation for digital marketing
Content and design are the heart of the marketing engine. And for a good reason, a good part of a marketer’s time is spent producing compelling content to influence the behavior of his audience. We talk about brand content to evoke the strategy of brand content production. Storytelling to design a coherent content structure to interest the audience. Or copywriting to write content that convinces and motivates people to buy.
In companies and media agencies, positions are dedicated to this field. There are art directors, designers, and content strategists. The best way to get a first experience is to create graphic or textual content on Canva, for example.
The most used tools remain:
Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop, Figma, Invision, or Sketch.
5. Knowledge and experience with digital marketing automation tools
In digital marketing, media investments to acquire new customers are rarely profitable. Its ability to retain its customers allows a company to make profits. Why? Because the effort needed to convince a customer to buy again is much less than the first one.
However, customer expectations are increasingly high. To maintain the same communication quality across a large audience, a company has no choice but to use a marketing automation tool. It allows scripting and automates the sending of communications to customers.
The most used tools on the market are:
6. Understanding the customer journey and experience
In marketing, you often hear about the “seamless customer journey.” It represents all the steps followed by a prospect before buying. This is a constant point of concern because the consequences can go as far as threatening the survival of a company. This can increase the abandonment rate (i.e., the share of prospects who leave the conversion path) and, therefore, the conversion rate (i.e., the share of prospects who do not buy).
The marketing department, therefore, thinks a lot about its optimization actions on the site according to what we call the “customer journey map” (see the online course to learn more) or customer path, the type of audience.
The most used tools on this subject are:
Contentsquare or Hotjar for user behavior measurement
Eulerian or Piano: for multidevice and multichannel measurement of customer
Mediarithmics (Customer Data Platform): for multi-channel customer tracking (i.e. in-store and on-site)
7. Strong project management skills
Daily, digital marketing will require you to learn how to manage a project correctly. Today, the most complex projects are managed in agile. It is a framework that applies to the organization, tools, and rituals. It was initially used on development projects. Its effectiveness has been sufficiently proven that I highly recommend training on this subject. And especially on one of the most used variants: Scrum.
You will find an approach that can easily be adapted to your projects and daily management.
The most used tools are:
Trello: for Kanban project management
JIRA: for backlog management
8. Understanding of web design and development
Your ability to understand the technical aspects of digital marketing will make you an excellent marketer. By this, I mean programming languages (HTML, CSS, Java) or data manipulation languages (R, Python), tools, and the functioning of data architecture. Without data, digital marketing is just a tiny thing. You, therefore, can cross the border between technique and communication that will make a difference in the field.
Because I’ve been able to understand and adapt to technical constraints, I’ve successfully completed my most important projects—for example, the construction of a multi-levier media dashboard.
About us: We are a collective of experts providing online & offline courses in digital marketing and digital transformation for future/current professionals. Our mission is to help you get the skills you need in digital to achieve two things. 1/ Get job-ready for the current work market and 2/ Build your business autonomously. We’ve included in all our courses three key components: practices, real-life examples, and illustrative theory.