Technology has significantly transformed the marketing industry. But remember, as technology transforms industries, the jobs that need to be done and the skills needed to do them are constantly changing.

There are many skills that are essential for digital marketing professionals, but here we will focus only on the ones that we see realistically growing demand. Another important note: the skills mentioned here are mentioned with the assumption that you are using a best practices approach and that you have created a complete marketing funnel, based on detailed research. In that case, they can significantly help the growth and development of your business. 

What five skills can help you perfect your digital marketing?

1. Digital psychology

Humans are complex, emotional beings. According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, We make 95% of our purchasing decisions subconsciously. So if you learn how to successfully influence the human subconscious through the Internet, digital marketing will be a very powerful tool for you. And that's what a good understanding of digital psychology can really do. This relatively new field combines psychology and behavioral economics to better examine our online behavior.

As marketers, we usually have a habit of focusing on what our customers are doing, and sometimes we overlook it why doing it. This is the essence of digital psychology. Even if you haven't actively studied the discipline, you've probably been exposed to some of its principles.

For example. Amazon always shows you the recommended retail price, so that their prices looked like cheaper and more attractive. In fact, most of Amazon's competitors also sell at prices lower than the retail price, but this is not emphasized anywhere and therefore people do not notice it. 

Then, for example, the Booking site uses principles loss aversion ("The dates you are viewing are popular! Don't miss out on booking now!"), social evidence (user reviews and ratings) i principle of urgency ("Same date booked 5 times in the last 6 hours. 4 other people viewed this page in the last 10 minutes.") to increase the number of bookings.

You must also have encountered the use of the human principle completion needs started, used on most payment pages and multi-step forms. As humans, we don't like to leave things unfinished. We are motivated to complete a set of tasks, even with no reward other than the satisfaction of completing it.

Want to learn more about digital psychology and its principles? Visit the site digitalpsychology.io which functions as free library with content from the field of digital psychology, with various principles and examples that will help you improve the consumer experience of your customers.

Some of the books I recommend are: How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market Gerald Zaltman and Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. 

2. CX (eng. customer experience)

Some would say CX is the only sales channel a business really owns. As the market becomes more saturated and consumers have more choice, CX is really becoming the only way to stand out from the competition. According to Oracle's findings, 86% consumers will pay more for a better consumer experience, and 89% consumers switched to competitors due to a poor experience.

Marketers in the digital age must shift their focus from selling products to selling experiences, where those experiences must be of high quality at every point of contact between the consumer and the company.

I know that CX (consumer experience) sounds very similar to UX (user experience) and it is true that there is an overlap. The difference is that while UX focuses on the experience a user has with a particular product, service or tool, CX takes a holistic view of all interactions that the user has with your brand.

This means that every area of your business will affect the customer experience. From online ads, through retailers, suppliers, shipping, customer service, etc. Although, since recently the marketing sector plays an increasingly important role in that. Clear insight into marketing-related CX is critical to running successful campaigns as a digital marketing specialist.

Your customer's experience must flow beautifully, smoothly and be consistent within each stage, from need to sale (the so-called customer journey), and it should also be hyper-personalized. Hyper-personalization is based on the data you collect about a specific customer in real time, through multiple channels. Which ad he clicked, when he contacted you, with whom he spoke from your team... All these data enable you to provide him with a service that is relevant to him and aimed at him personally.

An excellent user experience will boost your company's growth, because stronger loyalty customers, encourages repeat purchases, spread of recommendations and provides positive social proof of your quality. Any growth strategy you put in place can be doomed to failure if CX is not an essential part of it. 

Want to know more? I recommend that you take a look at Google research and micro-moments. Today's market struggles they win or lose in micro-moments.

These are moments of decision-making guided by intention and preferences that occur throughout the entire customer journey. These are moments in which a person intends to find out, visit, do or buy something. 

3. Front-End code

Now we are moving on to technical matters. Any well-rounded marketing professional will make an effort understands the work of his associates, which includes learning the front-end code. Of course, we can get by without it with all the available code-free tools, but still knowing the code can be useful.

Look at it this way: you can use Google Translate and get by in a foreign country, but you'll be much better off if you actually know how to speak that foreign language.

A frequent obstacle in the implementation of digital projects can be when you have to send requests to the development team. They happen to be too busy, and your requests for minor changes in text alignment or form design will most likely be at the bottom of their priority list. That's why this skill would be highly desirable to have on your CV, because it means you can more dexterously and quickly work on digital projects.

It's great to know the code to change details on the landing page, to better understand how things like tracking codes and pixels work, you don't have to be a slave to the template and you can make custom changes e.g. within the email campaign, and it will also enable you to test faster, as well as work with more technical marketing tools.

You can also use a little competitive trickery with the inspect tool on Google Chrome. See settings on websites of your competitors, and that way you can also sniff out their keywords with meta data inspection.

There are various online resources for learning to code, and some I recommend are W3Schools, Code Academy, and Treehouse.

4. Video Marketing

Video marketing is rapidly becoming the most powerful format content marketing. According to HubSpot, 87% businesses now use video for marketing. Social Media Today revealed that 90% consumers claim that im video helps in making a purchase decision. That's why for the best results in digital marketing, you need to implement a solid video marketing strategy.

Video marketing it encourages people to interact more with your content, increases the reach and sharing of content, builds the authority and thought leadership of your brand, improves SEO, and thus increases the number of conversions and sales. You can use video content to spread brand awareness, to showcase products, customer experiences, etc.

Video marketing tools are becoming more accessible and powerful. For example. Vidiard, Vimeo and 23 help add many great features to videos that improve monitoring and analysis. There are forms embedded in the video for direct lead generation, personalization of video content and interactive videos.

HubSpot and Vidiard have very nice video marketing guides, and I also highly recommend following 23 and checking out their video marketing blogs and resources.

5. Digital analytics

In the age of research-based marketing, marketers without experience in digital analytics will lose their relevance completely. It is necessary to analyze your own business, as well as the business of your competitors, in order to improve the online experience for your (potential) clients and achieve the desired results.

In the digital psychology segment, there was a lot of talk about how important it is to understand why customers do something, while digital analytics is about that what they do, and you really need to understand both. Based on that data, you will make more effective decisions and make clearer predictions about your customers.

That way you are constantly improving. Digital analytics can help you identify e.g. which digital touch points are effective in your case, how much you invest per customer within different online channels and how effective is your marketing campaign and content you create.

The most widespread, but also the most powerful tool for digital analytics is certainly Google Analytics and I advise you to master it well. Now there are a million and one courses on the topic of Google Analytics, but I would encourage you to go beyond the ones offered by Google itself. Google offers courses on Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Data Studio & 360, for a complete experience.

I wish you the best of luck learning digital marketing and I hope you found this information helpful. To read more about how Tourmaline works, visit this link.

Source: youtube.com/GrowthTribe