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Master These 7 Tech Skills to Advance Your Digital Marketing Career

Kenvin Long
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Master These 7 Tech Skills to Advance Your Digital Marketing Career
Master These 7 Tech Skills to Advance Your Digital Marketing Career

Digital marketing is an exciting, fast-paced industry that is constantly evolving. To stay competitive and maximize your impact, it's essential to continually upgrade your technical skills. The good news? You don't need to become an expert coder or data scientist.

By focusing on seven key areas, you can significantly increase your value and open up new career opportunities. This article will explore the must-have technical abilities for aspiring digital marketers in 2023 and beyond.

1. HTML and CSS: The Building Blocks of Digital Design

Have you ever peeked under the hood of a website and seen code that looks like <h1>Hello World</h1> or .button {background: blue;}. That is HTML and CSS in action.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) provides the structural framework that browsers use to render content. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) controls the visual styling.

Together, HTML and CSS give you tremendous flexibility to customize the user experience. As a digital marketer, knowing basics like how to:

  • Format text
  • Organize content
  • Style buttons and images
  • Build forms
  • Ensure responsiveness on mobile

Will allow you to iterate quickly and bring your ideas to life without relying on a developer.

Top Resources to Learn HTML and CSS

2. User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) Principles

Memorable digital experiences don't happen by accident. UX design focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations in order to craft intuitive flows.

UI design brings those user journeys to life through layout, visual hierarchy, microinteractions, and more.

While UX and UI designers own this domain, digital marketers should cultivate basic fluency to inform branding, web design, campaigns, and beyond. Consider learning:

  • Core UX concepts like jobs-to-be-done, information architecture, user research methods
  • UI fundamentals like interface elements, color theory, typography, composition

Equipped with this knowledge, you can collaborate more productively with designers, champion the user in business decisions, and occasionally create templated assets yourself using tools like Canva.

Top UX/UI Resources for Marketers

3. Web Analytics: Quantify and Optimize Performance

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

This famous quote has been attributed to department store pioneer John Wanamaker. Fortunately, modern web analytics tools like Google Analytics solve Wanamaker's conundrum.

With deeper visibility into how visitors discover your website, what actions they take, and where they drop off, you gain immense power to diagnose issues and incrementally tune performance.

Baseline analytics fluency for digital marketers requires:

  • Installing Google Analytics and connecting it to sites/apps
  • Leveraging reports to quantify traffic drivers, engagement, conversions
  • Creating custom dashboards tailored to business goals
  • Building segments to analyze subsets of users
  • Implementing event tracking for interactions like downloads or video plays
  • A/B testing headlines, page layouts, calls-to-action, and more

These skills separate strategic digital marketers from those applying guesswork.

Top Analytics Learning Resources

4. Email Marketing Automation: Convert Subscribers into Customers

Collecting email addresses is easy. The real magic happens when you create customized journeys to nurture subscribers into happy customers. That's where email marketing automation platforms like MailChimp and ConvertKit come in.

These tools help streamline repetitive tasks like:

  • Welcome and onboarding sequences
  • Transactional emails (purchase confirmations, password resets, etc.)
  • Triggered campaigns based on user actions
  • Dynamic content customization

With email consuming nearly a quarter of adult media time in the US, proficiency in automation is non-negotiable for digital marketers.

Beyond boosting efficiency, automated journeys often outperform generic batch sends thanks to personalized timing and messaging.

Top Email Marketing Resources

5. Basic Data Analysis with Spreadsheets

At some point, you'll need to sift through raw data to uncover trends and insights. Spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets provide simple, visual tools to organize information and run calculations.

With no fancy data science degree required, digital marketers can leverage spreadsheets for tasks like:

  • Compiling campaign metrics
  • Evaluating marketing performance across channels
  • Importing web analytics data
  • Analyzing survey response patterns
  • Crafting personalised customer profiles
  • Building financial models to guide budget decisions

The capabilities grow exponentially when you layer in functions like VLOOKUP, COUNTIF, and SUMIFS.

Top Spreadsheet Resources

6. Basic Photo and Video Editing

Engaging social media posts, Display ads, Explainer videos... Visual content is rocket fuel for digital marketing campaigns. Yet hiring pro designers and video producers isn't always feasible.

Thankfully, user-friendly apps like Canva, Preview (Mac), iMovie (Mac/iOS) and even Instagram itself provide Marketers with enough creative control to produce quality graphics and videos without breaking the bank.

You won't be ready to spearhead a Hollywood blockbuster, but skills like:

  • Tools for simple image resizing/cropping, filters, text overlay
  • Video trim, speed adjustments, transitions, text/graphics, music
  • Leveraging templates
  • Brand style guides implementation
  • Batch processing for efficiency

Can help you quickly edit photos and videos for common marketing uses like social posts, pre-roll ads, email headers, landing pages, and more.

Top Photo and Video Resources

7. Presentations and Visual Storytelling

Data tells. Stories sell. Mastering basic data visualization and presentation skills will make your recommendations infinitely more compelling.

When showcasing market research findings, campaign post-mortems, or proposals to leadership, tools like PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Excel charts reduce cognitive load an bring core insights to life.

Specifically, digital marketers should be able to build decks that:

  • Follow visual narrative arc best practices
  • Effectively highlight key data
  • Balance text, images, graphics based on use case
  • Respect brand guidelines for colors, fonts, etc
  • Exemplify clean, consistent visual design

With these fundamentals, you can align stakeholders around key priorities and accelerate decision-making.

Top Presentation Resources

Continuously Develop Your Digital Marketing Tech Skills

Hopefully this overview sparks some ideas on how you can expand your technical abilities to thrive in our rapidly changing industry.

The key is focusing your energy based on the specific types of marketing projects and analysis you tackle day-to-day rather than trying to master everything at once.

Build momentum by cross-referencing your role's must-haves against the seven domains highlighted here:

HTML/CSS | UX/UI | Analytics | Automation | Data Analysis | Visuals | Presentations

The more boxes you can confidently check, the bigger your impact will grow over time.

Now I'd love to hear from you in the comments below:

  • Which digital marketing tech skills are highest priority for you in 2023?
  • Have any favorite learning resources or tips to share around leveling up technical abilities?

Let's keep the conversation going!

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Kenvin Long
Posted byKenvin Long My name is Kenvin Long, a 41-year-old blogger passionate about making money online. With years of experience, I share valuable insights and tips on my website, 9TO.org, helping others achieve financial independence through digital ventures. Join me in exploring the endless opportunities the online world offers.

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