A good digital marketer should be a tech savvy marketer. Here are the top 5 tech skills that will help digital marketers be successful as they adopt emerging technologies and lead transformation initiatives.
It may come as no surprise, but the digital marketing landscape is constantly changing. What worked last year doesn’t necessarily work now.
Unfortunately, most digital marketers focus mainly on the marketing side of the business. But that is only one side of the coin. So even when they succeed with their marketing strategy, they can still come up short.
Technology has the potential to be a game changer for any digital marketer. It can revolutionize their marketing and make it more effective.
In this post, we’re going to explore the top five tech skills that digital marketers need to know in order to be successful and stay ahead of the curve.
Table of Contents
1. Marketing Automation
The first priority would be to learn how to save time and improve productivity with marketing automation.
Digital marketers are often at their wits’ end trying to manage the demand for many products, services or brands – and the expectations associated with so many different campaigns.
A time-consuming, overwhelming task. And because marketers know that there is always something important that they will miss out on, there’s an extra layer of stress because they don’t feel prepared.
Marketers who understand how automation can help them can focus on delivering more creative work rather than missing important deadlines and tasks.
There are a lot of automation tools digital marketers can use such as HubSpot, Marketo and Eloqua. These tools allow marketers to set up specific rules or triggers that will trigger when a customer interacts with the company.
For example, a company can set up an automation rule to follow up with any customer that’s been on their website for longer than three minutes.
HubSpot, for example, can help a marketer use marketing automation to automate tasks like email campaigns, lead generation and list building.
Tools like these make things better for digital marketers because it abstracts away from manual tasks so that it’s easy to repeat your ‘repertoire’ of activities across your marketing campaigns. The more processes you can standardize and the less errors you make, the more time you have to focus on the important stuff like strategy and creativity.
2. Data and Business Analytics
Understand that data is the new oil.
And if you are not well versed in data intelligence and analytics, then your success as a digital marketer will be limited.
The key to success for any digital marketing strategy is understanding your customer and what they want or need, even if that includes the things they don’t know they want or need.
In doing so, it is not enough just enough to have a website and some social media – you need to know how to collect, study and properly utilize data.
There are several useful tools out there to help marketers do this such as Google Analytics, Google Optimize or CrazyEgg.
For instance:
Knowledge of Google Analytics allows you to track website traffic performance as well as customer activity on-site. This information is invaluable for digital marketers to understand how customers interact with them, which in turn allows you to create the best possible digital marketing strategy.
And what if you want to glean valuable information from a large tangle of data? A basic understanding of SQL (Structured Query Language) can make this process go much smoother.
When you look at how important data is for making decisions, you can see why digital marketers need to know more about data and business analytics so they can make sense of the ‘raw’ data.
3. Basic understanding of Programming
Think of coding as the digital alphabet.
Digital marketers who are skilled in this area have an advantage over others because they can communicate and share ideas with other programmers to more efficiently accomplish tasks. Or if they are bootstrapping a company, they can do things like create a basic website without having to hire someone for help making them more valuable.
Some programming languages that are popular and useful to have a basic understanding of are HTML and CSS. These are front-end languages that are used to create visitor-facing parts of the website.
To make a great website or application , though, the back-end of the product needs to be strong and this is where programming languages like Python, PHP, Ruby are used. These are the ‘language of data’ for websites that store information and produce dynamic content. A back-end developer is someone who is skilled in these languages and it is vital that digital marketers collaborate with them even if they know how to code using HTML and CSS themselves.
When a digital marketer understands how to code, they can work in a variety of different areas. They would be able to better instruct programmers on their needs which would make them achieve their goals more efficiently.
4. Content Management Systems
If a digital marketer knows how to use content management systems (CMS), then that person has a major advantage when it comes to content creation and management. And we all know how important content is when it comes to marketing.
Content management systems are online platforms where web content is stored, managed, published, updated and tracked for rapid deployment.
The CMS is the heart of every site. This allows you, the marketer, to control every facet of your site and what’s posted on it – without having any technical knowledge or web design experience.
The most popular CMS platforms are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. A marketer should choose the platform that best suits their needs in terms of SEO, plug-in capabilities and platform compatibility.
WordPress is the most popular CMS on the internet because it’s free to use for everyone. It’s also compatible with the most plug-ins, making it very user friendly for digital marketers.
Being familiar with WordPress or other CMS means spending less time building web pages from scratch and more time adding content and engaging with your audience which is a major plus for digital marketers.
5. UI/UX Design principles
Most of the time, digital marketers are usually great at copywriting, but less savvy about User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design.
If you really want to make a splash online, you need to know what works and what doesn’t with UI and UX design.
UI and UX design are incredibly important because they greatly impact user acquisition, engagement, and customer retention which then translates to how much revenue your business can generate.
A digital marketer with UI/UX design knowledge will have a competitive edge over the competition because they know how to elicit an emotional response from the visitor.
Some of the most important principles to know when designing for digital includes:
- The Laws of Proximity – Show the user what they are looking for by placing it in close proximity to other related items.
- The Law of Contrast – Show the user what they are looking for by placing it in contrast to other related items.
- Negative Space – Give the user something to look at by leaving negative space.
Additionally, digital marketers need to know about the importance of color schemes, fonts, buttons and other aspects that can create a happy or unhappy customer.
Your job is to make the content easy for customers to access and navigate in order to generate a higher conversion rate.
The bottom line is this: UI and UX design are key in digital marketing because they create the first impression for your website and they account for 80% of the experience.
