Master These Eight Tech Skills to Advance Your Marketing Career
Life and work in the post-Covid world are drastically different from what they were just a few years ago. From AEC and real estate to marketing and education, every sector has either embraced digital transformation or realized the necessity.
Today’s hybrid workforce is reliant on a set of valuable technical skills that enable employees to work, navigate and thrive in a digital environment. Yet, 74 percent of marketing executives believe their organization faces a critical talent shortage due to a lack of digital skills.
The ongoing labor shortage not only exacerbates the digital skills gap, but it also creates a mismatch between available employees and necessary skills. Fortunately, this guide to marketing technical skills has everything you need to improve your digital skills and advance your marketing career.
Technical Skills Every Marketer Needs to Succeed
Traditional marketing emphasized creative thinking over technical skills, but creative thinking will only get you so far in the digital world. To succeed in marketing (traditional and digital), you need to apply your creativity in a way that resonates with today’s digital audience.
In other words, you need more than a degree in advertising, business, or design. To truly succeed at marketing today, marketers must have the technical skills that enable seamless movement between physical and digital environments.
Types of Technical Skills
Technical skills are earned by experience or traditional education (data analysis, project management, computer programming, etc.), but also through practice and collaboration with other digital professionals.
In fact, LinkedIn data from the past year shows a 20% increase in managers who don’t have a traditional four-year degree. This emphasis on skills over pedigree is beneficial to employers building their brand, but also to marketers looking to advance their careers and leverage their technical skills. Here are eight technical skills you will need to succeed in the marketing world.
Digital Media and Design
Regardless of your role within the organization, if you work in marketing, then you are bound to run into digital media and design. From graphic design software (Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, etc.) to content management systems (CMS), digital asset management solutions, and content curation, it’s best to at least familiarize yourself with digital media and the tools used to create, curate and publish content.
MarTech Platform Experience
The growing popularity of martech platforms throughout the industry makes fluency with the various marketing software, platforms, and tools a necessity for any marketer looking to advance their digital capabilities, as the below CMO Survey makes clear.
Content Creation
Like project management, content creation is not a technical skill in the traditional sense, but critical to the success of any marketing team. You don’t have to be an expert graphic designer to be a marketer, but you do need a basic understanding of content research, creation, and planning tools, like SEMRush, Google Trends, and Canva.
Data Analytics
Data is the leading force behind every marketing effort. As such, every marketer needs a working understanding of data analytics and the various tools, plug-ins, and integrations that provide insight, and enable brands to set goals, evaluate their performance and adjust their marketing strategy accordingly.
With so many analytic tools and plug-ins available, no one can master them all, but most executives agree that an understanding of Google Analytics and at least one social media analytics tool like HootSuite is incredibly valuable to their team.
More importantly, marketers need to know how to leverage the insights provided, i.e., find patterns, adjust targeting and fine-tune messaging to optimize results from current and future campaigns.
Despite the necessity of data analytics, a recent study by the Harvard Business Review found that less than 2 percent of marketing leaders believe their teams know how to leverage their data.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you work in marketing or maintain a website, then you are at least familiar with search engine optimization (SEO). If you are not familiar with SEO, then it’s best that you familiarize yourself with SEO best practices as soon as possible.
SEO is so important because it enables a brand to build awareness, drive traffic to their website and turn prospects into customers. Yet, a recent study by Hubspot showed that only 64 percent of marketers actively invest time in search engine optimization.
We can speculate as to why this disparity exists, but that won’t help you learn SEO, or understand the outsized role it has on your business. Fortunately, there are hundreds of reputable sources that explore this topic in tremendous detail. Here are three two get you started:
If you feel overwhelmed by SEO, don’t worry. It’s a complicated subject, and there is a lot of material on the topic. Thankfully, you don’t have to be an expert at search engine optimization to be an expert marketer. You just need a basic understanding and the willingness to learn.
Social Media Marketing
Most marketing positions have a social media component. If you apply for a job as a marketing director, marketing coordinator, or marketing manager, it’s likely that you’ll need at least a basic understanding of how social media works as part of an overall marketing strategy.
Social media marketing is also one of the best ways to meet your customers where they are, on their devices scrolling through social media. Recent studies have shown that over half of Americans use social media to find and read news stories that interest them. Social media marketing campaigns are also one of the more affordable ways to attract attention, drive engagement with a brand and draw traffic to a website.
Marketing Automation Tools
Automation removes many repetitive marketing tasks and provides powerful tools that help marketers convert website visitors into customers. Some marketing automation platforms can even track customers through the marketing funnel, and create a more rewarding customer experience with customized texts, emails, and pop-ups.
As such, most marketing teams and marketing executives now expect their employees to be at least familiar with automation platforms like Marketo or MailChimp. Here is a great resource to get you started with marketing automation.
Digital Asset Management
Digital assets like images, videos, and brand material are critically important to the success of a marketing team, but they are especially important to marketers in visual industries like architecture, engineering, and construction.
In fact, a recent survey conducted by OpenAsset found that U.S. construction firms manage somewhere between 5,000 and upwards of 100,000 images. 81 percent of firms expect to manage even more images next year.
The marketer who knows how to manage these disparate digital assets and make them easily accessible will become an invaluable asset to their team, especially as digital transformation becomes a priority in the years to come.
Fortunately, there is a tech solution that helps marketers manage their digital assets. Digital Asset Management solution (DAM) enables marketers to not only store and organize their digital assets, but also make them accessible to anyone who needs them.
A project-based DAM solution like OpenAsset will even organize your digital assets by specific projects and/or properties, which makes it easy to showcase your work and create more impactful bids and proposals. And there is no better way to advance your marketing career than to help your team win more business.
Follow the link for more marketing insights or schedule a demo of OpenAsset with one of our solution experts. Don’t forget to follow OpenAsset on social media for exclusive offers and valuable insight for AEC and Real Estate firms.
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