Digital Marketing Skills In 2021 To Make Money

It’s no secret that the world of digital marketing skills changes fast, which is why in this blog post, I’m going to be breaking down five of the absolute most important digital marketing skills you need to master if you want to stay on top of your game.

Let’s get to it to learn digital marketing skills very easy way.

Hey there, my name is Athar, marketing strategist, and welcome to The Digital Marketing Skills Blog Post.

All right, so it is no secret that the world of digital marketing skills changes at a crazy fast pace.

And what works today may not work tomorrow, what worked last week might not be working today and, and so on.

This is why it’s incredibly important to make sure to stay on top of your game by consuming content like this engaging in other people’s content, making sure that you’re putting your strategies and your tactics to the task and, and sort of analyzing the data, seeing what works and what doesn’t, so that you can stay ahead of the curve, always getting the best results possible.

It’s funny looking back over my career, and over the last many years of doing all kinds of different digital marketing skills, from web design and SEO, moving through paid ads, and social and content strategy.

And essentially just how different the stuff that we’re using today inside the agency is compared to the stuff that we were doing 10 to 15 years ago, I mean, it’s almost completely different.

Now, attention spans are shorter, there’s a new technology, the way that customers and clients engage with content online, it’s almost completely different.

The stuff that kind of got you to this point isn’t going to be the things that are going to take you forward into the next decade.

Alright, so let’s get things started with what I believe is probably one of the most important digital marketing skills that you need to master, which is marketing fundamentals.

Now, I’ve told you about this before, in my what is a digital marketing skills blog post, if you haven’t seen that yet, you can visit this link.

But essentially, digital marketing skills is just marketing done digitally. No, it’s not profound.

But at the end of the day, that’s really what it is.

This is why it’s really important if you want to succeed with digital marketing skills to make sure that you’re dedicating and allocating a sufficient amount of time to mastering the basics of marketing those fundamental principles like positioning and differentiation and all the points around branding and how to build kind of a solid and likable brand.

For today’s day and age, I really can’t stress this enough, you must understand the basics of digital marketing skills.

And fortunately, once you sort of got these into your system, once you’ve spent some time learning them and trying to master them, here’s the beauty, this time is going to be well spent because of human behavior.

Which is essentially really what digital marketing skill is, is understanding and leveraging different aspects of human behavior, how you can sort of, I want to say manipulate, but essentially influence the direction and the decisions people make?

Well, regardless, human behavior hasn’t changed all that much. At the end of the day, we’re still just people. This means even understanding the basics of how people work and how they make buying decisions.

Well, you’re going to be able to apply this information this year, next year for the next 5 to 10, probably next 100 years.

For example, by spending a little bit of time learning about consumer behavior, marketing fundamentals, you’ll probably come across the fact that consumers make buying decisions emotionally, not logically or rationally.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t want to include logical OR rational elements, it just means that you want to lead with the emotional aspect first, so you can sort of getting that buy-in and get that conviction, and then follow up with the logical and rational elements of your product or service so that you can allow them to justify the decision to themselves and others.

The beauty is is that once you understand that one very simple concept, it’s never going to change. And it’s going to be able to be applied to all of your future marketing, making it all that much more effective moving forward.

If you’d like a bit of a refresh on marketing basics, and essentially foundational marketing principles, I’ll make sure to link up a video on that in the cards and the description box below as well that you can check out right after this one.

All right, the next digital marketing skill that you’re going to want to master moving forward is to focus on conversation generation.

Now, as a diehard proponent of direct response marketing, which is all about generating those leads, and getting them to take action as soon as possible.

Well, a big element or a big switch that we’ve been seeing lately is sort of a transition from straight-up lead gen to conversation Gen, because, at the end of the day, you can generate all the leads you want.

But what you probably want are those conversations that are going to lead to bigger and more essentially buying opportunities for your business.

Now, yes, lead gen is still very much alive and still very much a part of the stuff that I consult on and the stuff that we do inside the agency.

But if you want to take your marketing to the next level, and master it, you’re going to want to focus on that next step, which is essentially turning those leads into conversations.

Lead Generating Services Digital Marketing Skills

But what I want to make sure you understand here is that when you’re structuring your marketing campaigns, you want to think A little bit further down the funnel and concentrate on not just generating that lead, but turning it into a conversation but more on funnel marketing in just a minute here.

Now here’s a bit of a prediction. You see, over the last couple of years, we’ve been seeing a ton of people flood the scenes with lead gen services and all sorts of different agencies and consultants offering traffic generating lead generating services like running Facebook ads, or YouTube ads, or anything to get leads.

But where you’ve got an opportunity to shine, whether it’s as an agency or as a business owner, or entrepreneur, is thinking further than that.

And again, focusing on those conversations, because generating traffic isn’t that hard, it just comes down to finding the right people that you’re trying to get in front of having the right offer message that you can sort of workaround to make sure it’s irresistible.

And then choosing the right media source, whether it’s Facebook ads, or Instagram ads, or YouTube, or whatever.

So traffic is pretty much everywhere. But what isn’t everywhere is the skill of the art, or the ability to take that traffic and convert it into a conversation that gets somebody interested in doing business with you.

Full-Funnel Digital Marketing Skills

All right, so the next digital marketing skill that you’re going to want to master moving forward is something that I alluded to just earlier, which is full-funnel digital marketing skills.

Essentially, what you want to do here is be aware, be cognizant of the entire customer journey, both pre-sale and of course post-sale.

But that’s something entirely different. Rather, what I want you to do is when you’re running your marketing campaigns, think about every step that a customer, prospect, or potential customer is going to have to take to essentially become a paying client or customer with your business.

Now, this is going to involve some element of lead gen, which is that very top of the funnel that cold traffic, the people that have no idea who you are or what you do, or why they should even care.

But I want you to then take it a step further and focus on the warm traffic.

You see, essentially, once you’ve generated that lead, how are you going to take that lead and turn it into a conversation.

And then for bonus marks, take it a step further, how are you going to take that conversation and move it from warm traffic to hot traffic by actually getting them to take their credit card out of their wallet and become a paying customer.

Now I know that’s a lot of stuff to think about. And if you’ve never really come across marketing funnels or sales funnels before, I appreciate it’s a lot to take in. So I’ll make sure to link up a video on marketing funnels, as well as one on sales funnels, again in the cards and the description below.

You’re going to be able to check those out right after this video to the main point that I want to leave you with here though is that really marketing isn’t siloed or isolated.

It’s not just one element of either generating traffic or doing lead gen or even generating conversations.

But rather, I want you to think about the entire marketing funnel from that very first moment that someone gets introduced to you and your business through to the point that they become a paying customer or client.

And then again, if you want even more bonus marks, think about all the touchpoints that are going to happen after they become an actual paying client or customer.

How can you make sure you’re delivering a phenomenal experience that’s going to lead to better retention, better customer loyalty, and more ratings and reviews and referrals for your business.

Alright, so the next digital marketing skills that you’re gonna want to master is probably no surprise and should probably hopefully be pretty obvious.

But it’s worth saying anyway, because still not enough people are dedicating the time, energy, and resources to this phenomenally powerful tool.

Video Digital Marketing Skills

And that is video marketing. You see when it comes to marketing your business and when it comes to building on that know like and trust factor.

Well, nothing beats face to face communication, the ability to sit down, look someone in the eye, have a conversation, understand where they’re coming from and how or if your business is even able to help.

But getting face to face with every single one of your potential prospects or customers well might be hard might even be impossible, which is where video steps in.

And it is the next best thing because it allows you to not only hear someone’s voice, but you can see their face, you can read their facial expressions, you can try to judge whether they’re coming off as authentic or genuine or fake, and sales kind of slimy.

The other thing with video is that it allows you to build a ton of trust very quickly, because again, short of being in person, and able to read the body language and hear the inflections and the tone of voice and the style and all that, well, it is the next best thing and getting all of those messages across.

Plus you’re able to cram in a ton of value, and a ton of information very quickly.

For example, if a picture’s worth 1000 words, and then a video might be worth a million words because you’re able to imply all sorts of different nonverbal cues.

And again, all of those things that come down to style and tone and pace, and so on. Now, here’s the funny thing with video. If you’re not doing it already, you probably know you should be doing it.

And even if you’re already doing it, you probably know you should be doing more. But what is it that stops most people from getting involved and cranking out more video?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. And it comes down to this myth or this mistaken belief that everything with video needs to be perfect.

Now, this is understandable. After all, we’ve sort of been raised and brought up watching polished and productive Videos through TV shows and movies and any kind of media we see on a screen. But things have changed.

And essentially, the barriers to entry to creating a video on the topic of digital marketing skills have come way down.

And we’re kind of tired and almost sick of overly polished and Hollywood-type productions, especially if they’re coming from a business or from somebody that you kind of want to engage with.

In fact, in a lot of cases, we’ve done several different studies testing a highly produced incredibly expensive video against something shot with just an iPhone, that is pretty low budget.

And when it comes to running them as ads against the target market, the low budget one often just absolutely destroys the really expensive high budget one.

Now, this isn’t to say that there’s not a time and a place for a really beautiful, really polished piece of video media.

But it shouldn’t be the obstacle, you shouldn’t let perfectionism get in the way of you just really getting out there filming something, and publishing it. Plus, the other benefit of video is that you can mess up a whole bunch of stuff and then just edit it out. And nobody will ever know.

Automation

All right, and moving on to the digital marketing skill that you need to master is automation.

After all, there is so much to do, and so little time. And this is where automation steps in as a very valuable digital marketing skill both for yourself and for your own business.

But also potentially to offer to clients or customers to help them automate some of their business essentially, automation is the offloading or the delegation or using tools and technology and software to take care of a lot of the repetitive tasks that you don’t need to be doing probably shouldn’t be doing in your business.

That still needs to get done. What this means is that you’re able to get a whole lot more done a whole lot quicker.

And, in some cases, you’re able to get a whole lot more done pretty much instantly because the automation can be set up ahead of time to just run behind the scenes.

And trust me, it’s a lot faster than any human being could ever hope to be.

For example, in one of my marketing agencies, we can generate a lead for a client using Facebook ads, we can take that lead, we can nurture them with SMS, and text and email and voicemail and essentially start the conversation from our end and follow up with a very strategic sort of automated follow-up sequence right up until we get that response.

And then from there, it gets even further automated so that we can nurture them again, and turn that conversation into a full-fledged client. And we can do this all on behalf of the client without the client needing to lift a finger, which is magic. And that’s the power of automation.

It’s essentially like having a full sales team or a full marketing team or a full appointment setting team or whatever you need to do work for you all the time without you needing to do anything once that initial work has been put in and the automation is set up.

But even if you don’t want to get that fancy with automation, it’s still a valuable thing to master and to incorporate into your business.

And you can still use it to do some basic but incredibly important things such as sending out automated email newsletters that go out whenever somebody downloads your guide or buys one of your products automated retargeting and remarketing advertisements that follow someone around like a creepy stalker anytime they visit your website, automated customer management that follows up with customers and makes them feel cared for and looked out for even if it’s a robot doing it.

And people like robots anyway, even automated grocery shopping, which Yes, is not marketing-related, but it still saves me a ton of time.

The point is, is that using technology and automating repetitive and often boring processes can save you a ton of time and make you that much more effective and efficient.

And getting the work was done that needs to be done so you can get back to doing that high-leverage really valuable activities that are going to drive your business forward.

All right, the next thing you’re going to want to do is to check out the digital marketing blog post I have linked up right here on digital marketing skills tactics, which is going to give you a ton more great ideas to drive your marketing forward.

Thanks so much for reading the digital marketing skills blog.