Nowadays business and web marketing are almost inseparable. To have a successful business in 2022, you must have an effective online campaign no matter what niche you work in.

The modern web is far more advanced than 10 or even 5 years ago. To keep up with the competition, marketers, SEOs, SMBs, and anyone in digital business should constantly develop themselves as professionals. In this article, we will cover the fundamental digital skills that are essential for anyone related to digital marketing.

What are digital skills?

The term is very broad. It refers to the essential digital skills related to content creation, web development, and/or marketing. And each of those categories contains various subcategories: for example, content creation derivatives are copywriting, video creation, illustration, and so on. Web development consists of web design, programming, system administration, etc. Marketing is SEO, SMM, data analysis, and much more.

Most people work as professionals in one of the categories, but the branches of each category always work side-by-side. You can develop a website, but you need to fill it with content. You can create content, but it needs marketing to get traffic. You can get traffic, but you need good design for an effective UX strategy.

No matter who you are, you need to know the essentials of each branch and efficiently collaborate with others.

SEO

SEO is not dead, and won’t be anytime soon. Now the majority of users who are looking for products or services prefer to search for them via search engines like Google or Bing. Also, organic search is the most cost-efficient channel of traffic, so you shouldn’t overlook it.

SEO is pretty easy to get into but you need to have a lot of practice to make the optimization effective. To get started, visit Google’s Search Engine Optimisation Fundamentals course, where you will learn the basics of SEO like keyword research and on-page optimization. It’s a free course from the creators of the #1 search engine – it’s a must for everyone.

This course provides a general understanding of SEO, yet it’s recommended to learn more advanced topics. For example, the Google course does not cover technical optimization, off-page optimization, analytics, etc. There is a more comprehensive course from SE Ranking SEO Academy to fill those gaps and learn search engine optimization. It will show you how SEO works and give you an idea of where to start increasing your website’s organic visibility.

SMM

Social media are internet platforms where users create and share information. Industry leaders (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) have over 1B active users. It’s no surprise social media is the second most efficient traffic channel.

To get traffic from social media, you need to know the essential SMM digital skills. The goal of SMM – create engaging and shareable content since social media algorithms focus on signals from users.

Besides traffic, social media also works as social proof: a strong social presence lets companies gain more trust. And trust is an important decision-making factor when your potential client is thinking about whether he/she should order from you or not.

To successfully launch an SMM campaign, you need to understand how to perform competitive analysis to determine what content is popular, make an efficient content strategy, and analyze the performance of the campaign to tweak it. There is an “Introduction to Social Media Marketing” course to cover all of it. The course is created by Meta – the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, so you will learn from the niche leading experts.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of high-quality content. The goal of this process is to provide users with relevant answers in the most convenient way.

Content marketing deserves its own place because it’s a complex process that involves research, creation, and analysis of content performance. Basically, the creation of content is an essential skill in digital marketing, so you must learn it.

Oftentimes, content marketing related to SEO and SMM complement each other. Quality content is a primary parameter of how Google rates pages and the main factor for the success of SMM campaigns.

Besides that, content that gives users the value he/she came for has a positive influence on conversions.

To learn how to create outstanding content, complete Hubspot’s content marketing course.

Email marketing

Earlier we were speaking about getting traffic, but now let’s talk about user acquisition and retention. Email marketing may sometimes be underestimated – many people think it’s an outdated strategy. But it’s not true. Firstly, there are over 4.6 billion email users, which is bigger than the audience of any social network. Secondly, users love emails: welcome emails show an 82% open rate and 49% of users would like to receive weekly promo emails.

Personalization is key for a successful email campaign. To get started with email marketing sign up for Hubspot’s course. Hubspot is a leading CRM system, so they surely know how to work with clients. Once you’ve gotten familiar with the fundamentals, those email templates will come in handy.

Web Design

At first glance, design has very little influence on the performance of the website. But in reality, positive UX increases conversions, makes your brand trustworthy and improves SEO.

• Increased conversions

When users have rough times navigating through your website, you should forget about a somewhat decent conversion rate. If your “Buy” button is very small and has a low contrast ratio, chances are likely no one will click it.

• Brand trust

What do you think when you visit a beautiful website? What do you think of its owner? Most likely you think that the website is worth your attention. Others think the same way.

• SEO

If the user entered your site from search, stayed there for a couple of seconds, and went back to search, it’s a strong sign for Google that users don’t like your page. So why would Google rank it high?

Enroll in an Ultimate web design course from Webflow to cover all topics in one place.

Video

Video creation is a part of content marketing. Videos are the most convenient way to consume content because they are more saturated and entertaining than images or text. This is confirmed by statistics: a big part of the most visited social media provides users with video content. This is YouTube (2.6 billion users), Instagram (1.5 billion users), and TikTok (1 billion users). So there is a large audience waiting for your videos.

Besides traffic potential, videos are a great tool to generate leads: in a short time, you can show all the benefits to users who become your client. This is confirmed by a survey: 86% of video marketers say video has been effective for generating leads.

To get started, take this 1-hour course to get a full picture of video marketing. After that, it’s recommended to learn video editing. If you’re not planning to make any difficult editing but rather short and simple videos, it’s better to use this free video maker so you don’t have to buy additional desktop software.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

PPC (or display advertising) is a faster way to get traffic from organic search than SEO. But as its name states, you need to pay for each click you receive. So the first thing you should know in order to create a successful PPC campaign is what keywords to use.

The second thing is conversion optimization. You must have analytic tools to calculate and improve the performance of your campaign. To achieve positive ROI, you need to track conversions from PPC users and make changes to your campaign from the analysis of their behavior.

Before doing PPC it’s recommended to set up event tracking on your website via Google Analytics, which we covered in the data analysis block.

To get started with PPC visit PPC University. If you want to learn it in-depth, take this Google Ads Masterclass course.

Analytics

In the 20th century, Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it”. This is still valid in 2022. In our case, if you want to improve the performance of your website, you need to measure it first. We’ll speak about website analytics since all social media provide their own analytic tools, which are enough in most cases.

The most popular website tracking tool is Google Analytics. To get started we recommend seeing this video on GA4 to help you install and configure it. After it’s done, move forward to Analytics Academy Courses from Google. It covers more advanced topics and introduces related tools such as Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio.

Programming

If your working tool is a computer, programming knowledge will greatly help you. It’s not necessarily about writing programs. Let’s see some examples:

• Frontend: HTML, CSS, JS

HTML and CSS aren’t actually programming languages, yet anyone working on the web should be familiar with them. The whole web consists of HTML pages, and knowing what each page is made of will greatly increase your level of web marketing as a whole. Think of it as the alphabet of the web. Imagine yourself trying to recreate words without knowing letters – it’s possible, but it would be imitation, not understanding.

To get started, take Codecademy HTML and CSS courses.

JS makes your pages dynamic. It’sprimarily used for the frontend in combination with HTML and CSS. You may stay with HTML and CSS only, but the majority of pages use JS too. Don’t worry, it’s not too difficult. You may watch this course and essentially strengthen your digital skills at the Codecademy JS course.

• PHP/WordPress

PHP is a popular language for website development. The world’s #1 CMS WordPress uses it. You may not have a WordPress website, but this skill combined with general PHP knowledge + HTML/CSS will let you create beautiful websites in no time.

Firstly learn PHP at Codecademy, then go to learning WordPress after. Hint: the best learning is practice, so host your WordPress site and train on it.

• Python

Python is a versatile yet simple programming language. Knowing it will enable you to create websites or scripts. But where Python shines: it makes building web parsers super easy and efficient.

Codecademy is a great platform to learn and practice programming, Python course is no exception – go for it.

Wrapping up

To be an expert in digital marketing you must excel in your specialization, have knowledge in other IT-related branches, and of the essential digital skills. This will help you collaborate with others, understand all the processes to clearly understand what’s going on, and develop as a professional, which will surely have an impact on your career.