Digital Marketing Skills to Master for 2020 & Beyond

Technology has changed the marketing industry rapidly. Reuters reports that digital marketing spends in India alone is 52 billion. This is an increase of 44% over the previous year. And the 2019 Marketing Trends report by TimesNow found that while all other marketing functions are saturated, there is still a large gap between digital marketing demand at 55% with active supply at 21%. So what does this mean? Digital marketing is still a very good career option and if you combine the right set of skills you can become one of the most in-demand business professionals in the world. But remember, as technology is making changes in the industry, jobs and essential skills are constantly changing. Especially for staying in the top 1% and really shaping your digital marketing skills. So, what skills do you really need to stay on top of your game in 2020?

Let's know? Over the head, there are a ton of skills relevant to digital marketers, but this blog is only going to focus on those where we see a real growing demand. The skills I mentioned in this blog assume that you are adopting a best practice approach to data-driven full-funnel marketing. As a skill, I have underlined that is really going to empower your growth strategies.  However, I will include a bonus section in the resource list around development hacking and rapid experimentation. Here are five skills that will really help you up to your digital marketing game until 2020 and beyond!

Skill 1: Digital Psychology

Man is complex in emotional beings. In fact, according to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of our purchases were made decisions and subconsciously. So being able to force and persuade the subconscious mind through online touchpoints is a superpower for digital marketers. And this is what one can understand about digital psychology. This relatively new field concats psychology and behavioral economics to better examine our online behaviors. As marketers, we usually have a habit of focusing on what our customers are doing, and sometimes ignoring why they are doing it. This is digital psychology. Even if you have not actively studied this discipline, you will probably be aware of some of its principles. For example, Amazon uses price anchoring against the recommended retail price to make its prices relatively cheap and attractive. Despite the fact that most of the competition will, in fact, sell less than RRP. Booking.com, which I see as a master of digital psychology, uses the principles of the spread of loss, social proof, and urgency to enhance bookings. You will also find the principle of needing to be fully used on most checkout pages and multi-step forms. According to DigitalPsychology.io, we, as humans, do not like to leave things incomplete. We are also motivated to finish a set of tasks with no other reward other than the satisfaction of completing them. Looking to learn more about digital psychology and its principles? And need some resources to help? As a beginner, I will 100% checkout DigitalPsychology.io. Curated by Daniel Stefanovic, it is a free library covering digital psychology principles that help you enhance the customer experience. I will also examine Gerald theories 'How Customers Think: Essential Insights in the Mind of the Market'. It promises to help you unlock 95% of your customer's hidden brains. Finally, I would recommend a dive into Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Force That Shape Our Decisions.

Digital psychology can help you enhance the customer experience and is a term that is being used more often by business and marketing professionals and brings me well to skill number 2.

Skill 2: CustomerExperience or CX  Abbreviation. 

It is referred to as the only channel that is actually a business. As markets become more and more saturated and consumer choice increases, this is actually a way to differentiate themselves from the competition. As found in the Oracle report, 86% of consumers would pay more for better customer experience, and 89% of consumers started doing business with a competitor after a poor customer experience. In the digital age, marketers need to focus on selling products, selling experiences, and ensuring that those experiences are the best for every touchpoint. Now, just to clarify, I know that CXhounds like UX are correct? There is overlap, but when UX focuses on the user experience with a specific product, service, or device, CX takes a holistic view of all interactions that a user has with a brand. This means that each area of ​​your business will affect the customer experience. From online advertisements to sales representatives, suppliers, to delivery, customer service, and more. But recently the customer experience is being more owned and championed by the marketing department as it is very important for brand equity. In fact, according to Accenture 86% of B2B CMOS, they stated that they consider customer experience to be a very important parameter. So gaining a solid understanding of customer experience marketing is important to stay on top of your digital marketing game. Your customer experience at each stage of the buyer journey should be consistent, as enjoyable and as friction-free as possible, and also highly personalized. Hyper-personalization is a technology that combines behavior and real-time data extracted from multiple channels and touchpoints to provide a highly relevant experience to your end-user.

I have included some resources around hyper-personalization in the resource list below. Great customer experience is going to fuel your growth engine as it helps increase customer loyalty, repeated purchases, word-of-mouth, and positive social evidence. Not being a major part of CX can fail any development strategy you do. Want to learn more? Hotjar is actually a very good guide on customer experience, as well as trends and statistics reports for 2019. To empower your digital customer experience, I would also encourage you to investigate Google's research into micro-moments. As they found out, today's heart, mind, and dollar battles are won or lost in subtle moments. These are moments with the intention of making and preference-shaping decisions that occur throughout the customer journey. Described as an intention-enriched moment, when a person visits a device for a need-to-know, go, do or buy. You can also check out these books: Hug Your Haters: How to Hate: How to Hug and Direct Your Customers by Jay Baird, and The Importless Experience: New Battlegrounds for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nickomon, and Rick Delici win. Time to get a bit more technical with skills.

Skill 3: Front-end code

 The DIY T-shaped marketer must really understand some of the languages ​​that drive our digital world and a great place to start is learning front-end code. Sure, we can get away without knowing the code with the abundance of codeless tooling options, but it certainly helps. I look at it a bit like this: You can use Google Translate to get along with the language in different languages, but it would be a lot more effective if you really know the language. I know from my own experience, and I am sure some of you may have faced similar challenges, a big blocker for some digital projects maybe when a request is made with the development team. They are often super busy and the changes you ask to make small alignment changes or designs will probably be down the priority list. This is a very attractive skill for a digital marketing resume as it means you can be more agile and work faster on digital projects.

This is great for things like making Bespoke changes to landing pages built with builders, getting a better understanding of how tracking code and pixels work, not being a slave to the template, means you can make custom changes to things like email campaigns Can. , And it's going to allow you to start testing faster and explore more tool-based marketing options. Take our recent T-shaped quiz for example. Here, I was able to embed the Typeform tool on the page for better UX without losing tracking data. how? By manipulating the code snippet provided by the Typeform to ensure that the correct URL parameters pass through the form upon completion. You can also have a little competitive intelligence with the inspection tool on Google Chrome. You can see how your competitors' websites are set up and even do a little keyword snooping by running metadata inspection. Coding schools are abundant, but some of my favorites are W3Schools, Code Academy, and Treehouse, which is actually where I learned front-end code, myself. 

Skill 4: Video Marketing

Video marketing is fast becoming the most vital content marketing format. According to HubSpot, 87% of businesses are now using video for marketing. And Social Media Today found that 88% of consumers claim that a video will help them make a purchasing decision. To stay on top of your digital marketing game you really must gain a solid understanding of how to use video and implement a solid video marketing strategy. Video marketing is great for things like social engagement, increasing reach and shares, increasing authority and thought leadership, improving SEO, and increasing conversions and sales. In Growth Tribe, we use video throughout the funnel. This one of a kind for awareness and value creation at the top of the funnel. We also use product videos on our website to help us get new leads, we use testimonial videos that are often shared by our sales team in providing and converting social evidence. And the video is also part of our product, part of the blended learning experience that we offer in our courses. Video marketing tools are becoming increasingly accessible and powerful. Tools like Vidyard, WeMo, and 23 helped improve the powerful features of video and your tracking and analysis. Consider things like direct lead-general, personalization of video content, and embedded forms for interactive video. So, to get a head start, I would definitely recommend following your own head of video Paolo is an experienced video strategy and production expert with a deep understanding of development marketing principles. You can also watch many of his videos on video marketing by following the Growth Tribe channel.

Skill 5: Making an Affair with Digital Analytics

In the era of data-driven marketing, digital marketers without the experience of digital analytics will soon become irrelevant. Avinash Kaushik, author, and digital marketing evangelist for Google defines digital analytics as the competition to analyze qualitative and quantitative data from your business and drive continuous improvement of the online experience that your customers and potential customers have in your wants. Has translated. Results. We previously talked about the "why" of customer behavior and the importance of digital psychology, but digital analytics is about the "what", and you really need to understand both. It helps you make more effective and data-driven decisions and can predict when and where your customers are in the buying journey. This accelerates continuous improvement. Digital analytics can help you identify the things that digital touchpoints are effective at and can be improved, the customer acquisition costs achieved for various online channels, and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and content. Now, the most common, popular, and powerful tool for digital analytics Google Analytics so that I can get you started is to make sure you are the master. Now there are a million and one courses on Google Analytics, all promising different things, but I would probably encourage you to do it yourself by Google.And through Cortera, the University of Illinois is also offering courses in digital analytics for marketing professionals, both in theory and practice. 

So there you have it, five digital skills you must learn in 2020 and beyond to stay top of your digital marketing game. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below and remember that you can find information about the resources we have spoken in this blog and some bonus resources on hyper-personalization, growth marketing, and rapid experimentation. Happy learning!