For many people, digital marketing is a dream job.

With the onset of many technology company perks and telecommuting jobs, digital marketing experts can make a six-figure salary, have unlimited vacation, and enjoy a flexible schedule that allows them to work from home — or even across the world as a digital nomad.

If you’re looking to get a new job as a digital marketer this year or looking to become a digital marketing expert, make a career change, leave a desk job to travel as a remote digital worker, or improve your skills at your current digital marketing job — We’re here to help.

Here are the essential 20 digital marketing skills that will help you advance in your career and push the needle for your company.

1. Writing & Editing

This might be the most important skill set to have as a digital marketer: There’s one job in digital where you don’t have to write and edit. Because of the importance of content marketing, you’ll get very far in your digital marketing career if you know what makes a great blog post, how to source and write great content, and how to turn a bad piece of content into a good one. You should also know how to employ the help of copywriting tools like AP Styleguide.

2. Communication

As a marketer, you have multiple channels and tools to choose from when it comes to conveying your message to your target market. 

Before the rise of inbound marketing, communication in marketing was often one-sided. But today, people are swamped with content. It is no longer enough to reach out to and advertise to customers with one-off messaging. You must also know how to listen to them and deliver valuable content at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

As an inbound marketer, you need to consider the changing needs of your customers and feed this into your communication strategy.

3. Content Creation

Content is at the heart of good marketing. For every stage of the buyer journey, you should nurture your prospects with relevant content that caters to their needs and offers solutions to their problems. 

A great inbound marketer needs to be articulate and innovative when creating content. To become an expert content creator, be sure to research your target audience and their needs and stay on top of the trends and lifestyle changes that impact your prospects.

4. SEO

Organic search results are more likely to be clicked than paid search results, so it is IMPERATIVE to understand and utilize search engine optimization (SEO) in a digital marketing career. Today, “white hat” SEO tactics include content marketing, guest blogging, and link building through social marketing and high-quality content. But, you should also know technical SEO tactics such as updating title tags, H1 and H2 tags, and incorporating keywords.

Speaking of keywords, it’s essential as a digital marketer to know how to research keywords to include within website copy, blogs, and PPC to drive results for the brands you work for.

5. Research

Inbound marketers need to come up with messaging and content that resonates with the target audience’s reality, and this can only be possible with excellent research and data collection skills.

An excellent inbound marketer must be able to source and accurately analyze relevant information and use the collected data to understand the present needs of prospects whilst also predicting future trends. 

Beyond data collection and analysis, you should be able to identify subject matter experts when the need arises. Having internal specialists on your team involved in the process can improve the credibility, value, and trustworthiness of the content you put out for your target audience.

6. Design 

So much of digital marketing today is driven by visuals. Content on all of the social media platforms performs better when accompanied by great images. As a digital marketer, you need to know how to create and edit your own visuals.

If you can whip together a banner ad, email banner, logo, or social media image in tools like Photoshop yourself, that’s one less person you have to go through, one less step to get your digital campaign launched – and one less person your client or employer has to hire. If Photoshop (or another Adobe program isn’t in your arsenal of skills, there are lots of tools like Canva available to help).

7. Social Paid Advertising

The days of social media being “free” are gone. The best way to reach people now on social media sites and ensure your content gets distributed is to use social paid advertising.

Understanding how to write copy — length, and variations — and follow image best practices on each site will be extremely helpful in your career. As well as understanding how to monitor and alter bids to optimize your ads or understand when to get help if you don’t have the time to spend on it every day.

8. Top-Notch Personal Branding

As a digital marketer, you will likely be the face of a brand, whether that’s through social media, content marketing, or a conference presence. It’s important to have a great digital presence online that shows you are active and professional. In addition, by utilizing top content sites, like Medium, to build your personal brand, you’ll ultimately understand them better yourself and how you can leverage them for the brands you work for.

9. Networking

While inbound marketing operates largely in the digital space, networking can be both digital and physical. A successful inbound marketer should be a “people-person” who knows how to connect with the right people in the industry for better brand reach and visibility, both in-person and online.

To be a great networker as an inbound marketer, you should attend industry events, connect with industry experts and thought leaders on social media, and be able to nurture valuable relationships.

10. WordPress

WordPress is probably the most popular CMS. It’s not just a tool that small businesses use to patch together a website because they don’t have a developer.

Chances are brands you work for will use WordPress, or they’ll need to switch to it. Understanding WordPress and all of its features and plugins will be a great skill in your digital marketing career. It’ll even help you set up your own website and blog for your own business.

11. Excel 

Snore. We’ve all seen the Word applications on every resume for the last decade plus. But, now, with the increase in data and the importance of data analytics, it’s more important than ever to be proficient in Excel and understand how to quickly manipulate data and create tables and graphs from the data you’re looking at.

Are you just listing Excel, or are you really an Excel whiz? Make sure it’s the latter.

12. Social Media Marketing

Nearly one-third of the population is currently using some type of social media platform, and 97 percent of the global share of companies use social marketing. This makes social media marketing an invaluable skill set in a digital marketing toolbox.

There is a lot more to social media marketing than just posting on Facebook. You should know how to generate user engagement on all platforms, copywrite, build ads, create visuals, and analyze reach and engagement. You also need to understand all of the rapid changes on each platform and when to utilize different platforms for different internal business goals.

13. Email Marketing & Newsletters

A number of articles on the web will ask the question, “Is email marketing dead?” I’m here to tell you it’s not. Everyone still reads emails. It’s still a very effective way to reach customers. Any brand you’re working for will have content they want to distribute — email newsletters are a great way to tap into an email user base to extend the reach of content.

To get the most out of your email marketing, you should be using email marketing software like Benchmark Email. Benchmark Email has tons of features to help you automate your email marketing, grow your email list, and put together effective and on-brand campaigns that reach and resonate with your audience.

14. Google Ads & PPC

A number of businesses are able to drastically expand their reach and generate high revenue and brand awareness through pay-per-click advertising, otherwise known as PPC. If you’re able to do this for businesses, you’ll snag some of the highest-paying jobs in digital marketing. To do PPC well, you need to be able to think both scientifically and strategically and effectively create, optimize, and report on campaigns using both Google Ads and Google Analytics in conjunction with each other.

15. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

The point of digital marketing should be to drive traffic to a website and convert that traffic to customers. CRO is the art of testing different website pages, copy, and calls-to-action (CTAs) to see what converts the best. It combines the art of website design, copywriting, and user experience. As a digital marketer, you should understand how to do an A/B test and be proficient in tools like Optimizely to aid in your research.

16. Automation

Marketing automation is the art of creating automated tasks for website visitors to save you time as a marketer. It’s important to know how to set up forms, create landing pages, and trigger drip campaigns that will nurture website visitors to become customers. It’s an essential aid in helping your sales team find sales-qualified leads from web traffic.

Having a marketing automation tool that aligns with your business goals is essential. Try BenchmarkONE for free and see how our marketing automation and CRM software can help you capture leads on your website and nurture them toward a sale through the power of effective email marketing.

Speaking of sales-qualified leads — if you know how to score website visitors to determine how important they are to a marketing team or a sales team, you’ll be ahead of a lot of digital marketers out there.

17. Presentation Design

Throughout your career, you’ve probably needed to create more than one presentation. Whether they’re presentations to clients, webinars, or internal presentations, knowing how to put a deck together is critical.

In digital marketing, it’s important to know how to create a PowerPoint or a Google presentation that’s not just text on a slide. You need to thread together a story and clearly state a strategy so you can socialize your project and results across a number of important players — whether that’s to junior-level workers or leadership.

Luckily, there are tools that can help you achieve this easily. Tools like Canva and Simplified can help you create images and graphs that can bring your presentations to life in a clean, professional way.

18. Influencer Marketing

Brands can score big time by connecting with online influencers to raise brand awareness and distribute or co-create content. Understanding how to connect with influencers and move them from unaware to advocate is an important digital marketing skill. If you know how to use a tool like Traackr to find and track online influencers, you’ll be ahead of the game and save time.

19. HTML & CSS

With the need to use WordPress, write copy and update websites, employ marketing automation, and understand CRO, it’ll do you good to know basic HTML and CSS. If you can get into website code for a blog and update a title, this will save you tons of time from going to a custom WordPress developer or a brand’s product team.

20. Creative & Analytical Abilities

Finally, digital marketing is both creative (photography, writing, and design) and analytical (Google Analytics, CRO, marketing automation). To be truly successful at digital marketing, you should be able to bring both art and science to your work and understand how to juggle both of these important skill sets.

Master all of these skills and pull them together with the perfect mix of creative and analytical strategies, and you’ll be the successful digital marketer you’ve always wanted to be.