Recently with a little more time on my hands, I was curious to find out what companies/recruiters are looking for in Digital Marketers. But going through the many job descriptions on LinkedIn, it seemed to be a mammoth of a task, an especially menial one.
So, I decided instead to use some simple text analytics to mine out the keywords used in these job descriptions. First, using “digital marketing” as a keyword on LinkedIn, I took 30 job descriptions as the raw data. After that, I used a text mining package on R to analyse it for keyword frequency and associations.
Here’s what I found out.
Taking together the keyword frequencies and associations, provided me with a list of skills I believe would be important for Digital Marketers to have now.
1. Teamwork and Team Management
While Digital Marketing may oftentimes be thought of as an individual contributor, this is hardly the case. To run an effective digital marketing campaign, multiple cross-functional teams need to work hand-in-hand.
I will say the critical teams here would be the Performance Marketing, Creative, Data and Product Teams. Effective digital campaigns require these four teams to work together to produce data-driven potent ads that are successful in driving users to convert in the product conversion funnel.
As such, a Digital Marketer in 2023 needs to be able to work well with cross-functional teams, and/or be able to manage such teams.
2. Media Campaigns
Needless to say as digital marketers, we need to have the right technical skills to run media campaigns. However, I will go a step further here to highlight two points – the breadth of media campaigns and hands-on experience.
As we move towards a world powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Digital Marketers need to be more than single ad platform specialists. Being able to understand and manage multiple campaigns across different ad platforms will be vital.
In addition, with a looming recession, companies may be forced to tighten their resources and thus more Digital Marketers will be expected to have hands-on experience in managing the campaigns.
3. Drive Customer Growth
A huge part of what Digital Marketers do is to drive user acquisition. However, it is important to note that growing the customer base does not stop at the top of the funnel. It goes way deeper than that.
Digital Marketers need to be able to bring in quality users who will end up as valuable customers. This means focusing on bringing in relevant users, and working closely with Data and Product teams to retain customers.
4. Business Strategy
With increased help from AI, Digital Marketers need to move beyond technical expertise and towards other skill sets such as strategic thinking, creativity and problem-solving.
At the end of the day, digital marketing needs to help the company achieve its business goals. The more strategic Digital Marketers are, the better position they will be in to formulate strategies and tactics to bring success to their company.
At this point, an astute reader might be saying “Hey Mervyn, there are only 4 skills here. What happened to the other 3?”. To that, my answer is that the remaining three are from a book I have read recently – Think Again by Adam Grant.
5. Think Like a Scientist
To level up as Digital Marketers, we need to develop the habit of thinking again. Instead of simply forming opinions based on experience, come up with hypotheses, test them with data and arrive at your conclusions.
When building up our skill set to be more strategic, we Digital Marketers should approach business strategies as experiments.
6. Abandon Best Practices
More often than not, we Digital Marketers resort or fall back to what we think are ‘best practices’. However, in doing so, we are preventing ourselves from further improving our current routines.
What we need to do is to focus not just on results but also on the process. A bad process with a good outcome is luck, and a good process with a bad outcome might be a smart experiment. We need to adopt process accountability and continually pursue better practices.
7. Make Time to Think Again
Last but not least, we need to make time to think again. The world of Digital Marketing and Technology is ever-changing, and thus it is imperative that we set aside time for us to rethink and learn.
Take the time to assess how much you are learning, or how much closer are you moving towards your goals. All this will help you decide on your next steps, your next experiment or your next campaign.
Ultimately, we are rapidly moving towards a world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. Digital Marketers of today need to evolve as well to ensure that we stay relevant and continue to contribute substantially to our companies.
Are you up for the change?