Brandon GrimesCareers and Digital Marketing
Having a career in digital marketing can be fun, hectic, stressful, rewarding, and gratifying all rolled into one. Some days you wake up ready and willing to conquer the world with your new tech client that needs help bringing visibility to their new product. Other days you want to stay in bed and cry because you just remembered you have a client call with the director of marketing at a company that wants to rank #1 for every keyword in life. All factors remaining the same, a career in digital marketing requires certain skills that you’ll need in every scenario in your growing career. Here are some skills that I think are very usable for your digital marketing career.
Communication Skills
Communication skills are one of the most important skills in digital marketing. Whether you are employed in an agency setting or corporate in-house position; you will be dealing with clients, directors, and CEO’s that require you to effectively communicate. You must be able to speak in a language that not only is high level, but also technical in respects to the industry. If you lack in this area, you might want to start attending networking events. Toast masters is another organization that can help. Practice makes perfect right?
Innovation Skills
Innovation works in just about every industry. However in the digital marketing industry, it is extremely important and rewarding to have this skill. Many do not like to tamper with innovation because it requires risk. Venturing into the unknown. However, the point with digital marketing is to try new things and to experiment to find the best possible strategy. It is like all the cliché quotes and one liners state; if you have not failed you have not tried.
Project Management Skills
Agency or In-house, you will be in charge of projects galore. Acquiring project management skills will save you time and increase efficiency. Not only will your lead or supervisor enjoy the organization of a campaign, but your clients will as well too. Check out the many project management tools out there to help develop your skills.
Writing Skills
Writing skills; another extremely important skill that runs parallel with communication skills. Creating client deliverables, blogging, end of the month reports; they all require excellent writing skills. We live in a world where what we say and write could mean the beginning or end of a client or managers’ relationship. One thing I have had to learn early on in my career is to double check client deliverables for grammatical errors, and have fellow colleagues check for any errors as well. Trust me it will save you in the long run.
Creativity Skills
Lastly creativity; digital marketing is a science and an art. Creativity is important to digital marketing not for the obvious content driven strategies, but creativity in getting in the users head to understand how they think. This not only will help your content strategies, but once you start developing your creativity skill-set you will begin to create strategies where your users hunt you. Rather than you hunting for your users.
You do not need to have all of these skills mastered, however getting better a little at a time will do you and your career well in the long run.
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