Master These 7 Skills to Land a High-Paying Digital Marketing Job

Seven Skills You Need to Land a High-Paying Digital Marketing Job originally published in the AMA’s Marketing News.

There’s a talent gap right now in digital marketing. According to “The Future-Proof Marketer,” a white paper by digital technology training company Grovo, 90% of marketers report suffering from a shortage of digital skills, and only 8% of surveyed companies feel strong in the area of digital marketing.

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Here are seven of the most important skills that you need to make yourself a desirable candidate for a digital marketing job:

1. Search engine optimization: Of the companies we looked at for our Digital Professional Institute study, for which my colleagues and I analyzed hundreds of job postings for digital talent, 14% cited SEO as a required skill.

To compete as a candidate for a high-paying digital marketing job, you must have technical SEO skills, including server-side settings, sitemaps and server response codes. Moreover, competitive candidates should have experience using Moz, SEMRush and other tools to identify customers’ search behaviors and the competitive landscape.

2. Pay-per-click: Seven percent of the companies that we looked at in the study listed search engine marketing (SEM) as a required skill for their organizations, and one of the most important and growing facets of SEM is pay-per-click (PPC). In order to demonstrate your abilities in this area, you need to show that you have the research and analytical skills required to create and execute a strong PPC plan that aligns with an overarching marketing strategy.

3. Mobile: To demonstrate value in this area, you need to understand how mobile marketing differs from desktop marketing and communicate why that matters to the rest of the business. Moreover, a digital marketer should have a general familiarity with mobile development in order to best communicate with the design team and create a cohesive mobile marketing strategy that aligns with other online and offline efforts. Get familiar with its vocabulary, including things like SMS marketing and responsive design.

4. Email marketing: You need to be able to do more than send out regular communication. You must be able to optimize your email marketing by crafting a compelling strategy, testing relentlessly and refining content based on what works best. It’s also essential that today’s marketers understand the best ways to develop distribution lists and use email nurturing to create more business opportunities.

5. Social media: Ten percent of the businesses that we looked at in the Digital Professional Institute study cite social media experience as a requirement for applicants, and that doesn’t just mean that they want someone with an active personal Twitter account. Digital marketers need to understand how to develop a strong social media presence to help bolster their brands and further their marketing goals.

6. Content management: SEO, email marketing and social media skills are useless if you don’t back up your technical skills with excellent writing for multiple platforms. The ability to flow easily between writing emails, press releases, website copy, proposals, social posts and even code is key to success in today’s digital marketing field. Make sure that you demonstrate your ability to write across media, and to guide and polish the content of others on your team.

7. Analytics: In our study, a whopping 13% of businesses listed analytics experience as a required skill in their job descriptions. In order to be a truly great digital marketer, you’ll need to not only implement strong inbound and outbound digital strategies but also analyze them regularly and use those insights to constantly improve. If you want to make it in a high-paying digital marketing job, it’s time to make ROI your middle name.

Key Takeaways

To compete as a candidate for a high-paying digital marketing job, you must have technical SEO skills, including server-side settings, sitemaps and server response codes.
SEO, email marketing and social media skills are useless if you don’t back up your technical skills with excellent writing for multiple platforms.
In order to be a truly great digital marketer, you’ll need to not only implement strong inbound and outbound digital strategies, but also analyze them regularly and use those insights to constantly improve.

For a quick introduction to various digital skills, consider the following Mediabistro online courses:

Avi Levine is executive director of the Chicago-based Digital Professional Institute, a training facility for digital marketing professionals.

The American Marketing Association is the pre-eminent force in marketing for best and next practices, thought leadership and valued relationships, across the entire discipline of marketing. Its online publications include posts on industry trends, career advice and more.