Nowadays, the modern digital marketer is a jack of all trades. They are constantly faced with a variety of responsibilities and require a highly diverse set of skills. Digital marketing has come to encompass more than simple advertising, but rather involves reporting, copywriting, content strategy, creativity, email marketing - the list goes on.

Luckily, the shift towards data has enabled digital marketers to better master their craft. In order to help marketers keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital world in which they operate, we’ve organized a summary of three top skills every successful digital marketer must possess.

1. Forecast using data

According to Statista, 2.46 billion individuals were using social media around the globe last year, and we can expect to see this number rise to 3.02 billion by 2021. For marketers, social data is where they can find key consumer insights. And with the growth of martech solutions like social listening, marketing automation, and community management softwares, digital marketers must decide how to best create value from this data by effectively organizing and leveraging it in their strategies. The challenge is no longer to aggregate data and insights, but rather to efficiently extract value from them.

However, organizing a large volume of data is easier said than done. When done right, marketers can effectively target their audiences and specifically cater to their unique experiences, needs, desires, and expectations. However, in today’s day and age, this can no longer be a manual process. Successful digital marketers need to understand the importance of leveraging social data by choosing a powerful technology.

If your brand is looking to promote a new product, it’s critical to have an understanding of one, who the demographics of your target audience are, two, their digital behaviors, and finally what their preferred marketing channels are. Once you’ve got this information, only then can a digital marketer craft a successful marketing campaign. Furthermore, as a digital marketer, you must be proactive about measuring the success of your campaign, which means it’s important to not only set goals for a campaign early on, but pre-determine key KPIs to report on as well.

2. Content Strategy

Marketing thought leaders across the board agree that content is king and that the responsibility to effectively create and use content should no longer be a siloed responsibility. An effective digital marketer must also be an effective content strategist. Successful marketing content should communicate the value of a company’s products and services through interesting and engaging storytelling. With that said, digital marketers must be highly creative and proactive in how they create content, whether it be through search ads, email marketing, social promotion etc. However, content should not be created without a dictated strategy, so it’s important to remain aligned across your marketing team by collectively asking questions like:

• What is our brand’s voice, tone, and personality?
• What formats of content does our target audience prefer?
• Does this story effectively communicate our value proposition?
• Is this content timely and relevant? Would I find this interesting?

Digital marketers that are also content creators must be experts at blending creativity with science. They must understand the need to track the value of their content and clearly organize results to effectively measure and report performance. Marketers can continually optimize by asking questions like:

• Which titles lead to the highest volume of clicks?
• Which topics were most engaging with customers versus prospects?
• What type of content had the highest ROI?

Furthermore, as a digital marketer, it’s important to collaborate and share feedback on what works. For example, providing your community manager with the best content will only help them to improve client relationships.

3. Listen and adapt to the environment

As a marketer, it is important in today’s fast-paced environment to listen to your environment. Putting target consumers at the center of every strategy is integral. Marketers must make themselves aware of what their customers have to say by listening to feedback at all stages of the customer journey. Pre-sales customer expectations are as significant as post-sale product feedback. That’s why marketing channels should be used for listening and two-way conversations. Among other things, marketers must understand the intentions, behavioral patterns, consumption habits, needs, and expectations of their target customers and integrate the consumer voice into their strategies. A good marketer evolves alongside consumers and with emerging digital technologies. New platforms are constantly pushing their way into the market while existing platforms consistently edit their algorithms. If a marketer strategically operates without flexibility, they will be left behind.

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