Technology has changed the marketing industry rapidly. Reuters reports that digital marketing costs $ 52 billion in the US and UK alone. This is an increase of 44% over the previous year. And McKinley’s 2020 Marketing Trends report found that all other marketing functions are saturated, yet there is a large gap between 59% with an active supply of 59% in digital marketing demand.
So what does this all mean? Digital marketing is still a brilliant career option, and if you combine the right skill set, you can become one of the most in-demand business professionals in the world. But remember, as technology is changing the industry, so are employment and necessary skills continually changing, especially for staying in the top 1% and shaping your digital marketing skills. So in 2020, what skills do you need to stay on top of your game? Let’s find out!
There are many skills relevant to digital marketers, but this article will focus only on those where we see real increasing demand. The skills we refer to in this article assume that you are adopting a best practice approach to data-driven full-funnel marketing. The skills we describe will power your development strategies.
Here are five skills that will help advance your digital marketing game in 2020 and beyond!
1- Digital Psychology: Humans are complex emotional beings. In fact, according to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of our purchasing decisions, and we make inadvertently. So being able to force and convince the subconscious mind through online touchpoints is very powerful for digital marketers. And this is what a firm understanding of digital psychology is. This relatively new field combines psychology and behavioral economics to examine our behavior better online. As marketers, we usually have a habit of focusing on what our customers do, and sometimes we ignore why they do it. This is digital psychology. Even if you have not actively studied this discipline, you will probably be aware of some of its principles.
For example, Amazon uses price anchoring against the recommended retail price to make its prices relatively cheap and attractive. Despite the fact, most of the competition will sell below RRP. Booking.com, which I consider to be a master of digital psychology, uses the principles of loss spread, social proof, and urgency to increase booking. You will also find the principle of entirely using it on most checkout pages and multi-step forms.
According to DigitalPsychology.io, we humans do not like to leave things incomplete. We are motivated to complete a series of tasks, even with no reward more than the satisfaction of completing them. Do you want to know more about digital psychology and its principles? And do you need some resources to help? For starters, I’ll take a 100% look at DigitalPsychology.io. Curated by Daniel Stefanovic, it is a free library covering the principles of digital psychology with examples to help you improve the customer experience. I will also refer to the book How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Market Mind by Gerald Zaltman. It promises to help you unlock the hidden 95% of your customers’ minds. Finally, we offer advice in Dan Ariely’s book Predictively Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decision. Digital psychology can help you improve the customer experience and is often used by business and marketing professionals.
2- Customer Experience: This is referred to as the only channel that a company has. As markets become increasingly saturated and consumer choice increases, this is a way to differentiate themselves from the competition. As found in this Oracle report, 86% of consumers would pay more for a better customer experience, and 89% of consumers started doing business with competitors after a poor customer experience. In the digital age, marketers need to focus on selling products to selling experiences and ensuring that they are excellent at every touchpoint. Now to clarify, we know that CX looks like UX, right? There is an overlap, but when UX focuses on the user experience with a specific product, service, or device, CX takes a holistic view of all of the user’s interactions with a brand. This means that all areas of your business will affect the customer experience, from online advertising to sales reps, salespeople, delivery, customer service, and more. The customer experience has recently been owned and defended by the marketing department, as it is fundamental to the value of the brand. In fact, according to Accenture, 86% of CMOS B2 / B reported that they consider customer experience to be a significant parameter. Therefore, gaining a solid understanding of customer experience marketing is essential to stay on top of your digital marketing game.
Your customer experience should be as smooth, pleasant, and friction-free as possible at each stage of the buyer’s journey, and it should also be ultra-personal. Hyper-personalization is a technology that combines real-time and behavioral data pulled from multiple channels and touchpoints to provide a highly relevant experience to your end-user. Excellent customer experience will drive your growth engine by helping to increase customer loyalty, repeated purchases, word of mouth, and positive social evidence. Any development strategy you implement can be ruined if it is not an essential part of CX. Want to learn more? Holzer has an excellent guide and statistics report for 2019, along with customer experience. To power your digital customer experience, we recommend that you check out Google’s research at subtle moments. The current battle of hearts, minds, and dollars is won or lost in subtle moments as they are discovered. These decisions are driven by the intention and preference settings that occur during the customer journey. It is described as a moment rich in intentions when a person turns into a tool to act on the need to know, go, do, or buy. You can also check out these books: Embrace Your Enemies: How to Accept Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Bair, and Simple Experiences: Win the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman Rick Delisi.
3- Front-end code: The DIY T-shaped marketer must understand some of the languages that drive our digital world, and an excellent place to start is learning front-end code. Of course, we can get away without knowing how to program with an abundance of code tool options, but it certainly helps. I look at it this way: You can use Google Translate to get to different countries with the same language, but it would be a lot more effective if you know the language. I know this from my own experience, and I’m sure some of you may have faced similar challenges, a significant hurdle for some digital projects, maybe when requests are made with the development team. They are often very busy, and you have small alignment changes or layout changes that will likely be far down the priority list. Having a digital marketing resume is a beautiful skill because you can be more agile and work faster on digital projects. This is great for things like making custom changes to landing pages created with builders, getting a better understanding of how things like pixels and tracking code work, not being a slave to the template; that means you can perform Custom changes to things like email campaigns, and this allows you to start testing faster and explore more tool-based marketing options.
4- Video Marketing: Video marketing is fast becoming the most powerful content marketing format. According to HubSpot, 87% of businesses now use video for marketing. And Social Media Today found that 90% of consumers say that a video will help them make a purchasing decision. To stay on top of your digital marketing game, you need to get a solid understanding of how to use video and implement a solid video marketing strategy. Video marketing is great for increasing social engagement, reach, and actions, building thought leadership and authority, improving and converting SEO, and increasing sales. At Zytal, we use video throughout the funnel. This is the choice to create awareness and value at the top of the funnel. We use product videos on our website to help us get new leads; we use testimonial videos that our sales team often share to help provide and convert social evidence. And the video is also part of our product, part of the blended learning experience that we provide in our courses.
Video marketing tools are becoming more accessible and powerful. Tools like Vidyard, WeMo, and 23 help add powerful features to videos and improve their tracking and analysis. Think about things like built-in forms for direct lead generation, personalization of video content, and interactive videos. HubSpot and Vidyard also have some excellent video marketing guides, and I also highly recommend that you follow 23 and check out their video marketing blogs and resources.
5- Digital analytics: In the era of data-driven marketing, digital marketers will soon become irrelevant without digital analytics expertise. Avinash Kaushik, author and promoter of digital marketing at Google, defines digital analytics as to the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your business and competes with driving continuous improvement of your customers’ online experience and potential customers. On the desired results. . We previously talked about the “why” of customer behavior and the importance of digital psychology. Still, digital analytics is about the “what,” and you need to understand both. It helps you make more effective, data-driven decisions and makes predictions about when and where your customers can appear in the purchase process. Drive continuous improvement. Digital analytics can help you identify which digital touchpoints are useful and can be improved, the cost of customer acquisition achieved for various online channels, and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and content. Now the most common, popular, and powerful tool for digital analytics is Google Analytics, so we’ll start by making sure you get the hang of it. Now there are a million courses on Google Analytics, all promising different things, but perhaps I encourage you to do this from Google. Google Analytics Academy offers 360 courses for Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Data Studio, and all experience levels. And through Cortera, the University of Illinois also offers digital analytics courses for marketers in both theory and practice.