Success in Digital Arts: an Introduction to the 4 Pillars of Digital Marketing Excellence

Do you regularly wonder what it takes to thrive in the fast-moving world of digital marketing & advertising? You’re not alone. The paid marketing industry has undergone a profound transformation in just the last few years. And if 2024 was any indication, the speed of disruption will not only continue but accelerate in 2025. Regardless of whether you aim to enter or excel in the industry as a digital marketing practitioner, a social media marketer, an SEO specialist, or a marketing analyst, there are a few key skills you’re going to need, and a few new ones becoming more relevant. If you are exploring becoming or improving as a digital marketer or channel ad specialist in 2025, this post is for you.

The good news: there is still plenty of demand for digital marketing professionals, and still lots of value in human-led channel advertisers working “hands-on-keyboard” to manage and optimize an ad platform’s daily media investment. According to GroupM, global advertising revenues are projected to surpass $1 trillion for the first time in 2024, with demand for skilled marketers continuing, despite advances in machine learning, automation, and AI. According to Robert Half, skills in data analysis, AI tools, and content marketing are anticipated to be among the most sought after skills in the digital marketing field in 2025.

The Digital Marketing Skills Sought by Brands

While companies vary in how they employ digital marketing professionals, their objective is often uniform. Some brands build their marketing programs by finding and hiring individuals with specific channel skills to operate a variety of outbound advertising efforts. Other brands partner with agencies to oversee the execution of either channel-specific or omnichannel digital marketing and advertising efforts. Some brands employ a hybrid, filling in support through a combination of in-house and external teams. While the method may vary, builders and buyers alike seek a cost-effective solution for turning the complex, expensive-to-operate marketing cost center into an efficient profit center. More recently, the advent of LLMs and AI tools introduced fresh questions about what role individuals play in managing and growing a digital marketing program. 

So, what skills should aspiring or advancing marketing practitioners prioritize developing, and what processes may soon be automated? To answer this question, we’ll share a framework used by Udemy to guide you on the key “pillars of excellence” necessary in a high-performing paid marketing program, and how you can upskill in one or more of these pillars to pivot or advance in this career in 2025.

The S.T.E.M. Framework: Which Marketing Skills to Learn

At Udemy, we’ve developed a framework that represents what we believe are the 4 “pillars” of process excellence required to run a high-performing digital marketing and advertising program. We refer to this framework as the STEM framework, which stands for Signals, Targeting, Experience, and Messaging. Each STEM pillar in the framework represents a set of practices that we believe are crucial to success in today’s digital marketing industry. Udemy has used the STEM framework to evaluate and enhance the ongoing deployment of an 8-figure annual marketing budget, and this framework is broadly applicable to numerous digital marketing channels commonly in use today. 

We’ll start with an overview of each pillar, then articulate the skills inherent to each, and consider how these pillars can guide what skills you prioritize developing to enter or advance in a digital marketing career.

Signals

In the Signals pillar, we focus on both the inbound data collected from user interactions and as well as the outbound signals sent to platforms like Google, Meta, and LinkedIn to guide actions like allocating media dollars. Signals are vital inputs necessary to make data-driven decisions, increasingly the baseline expectation for advertisers responsible for deploying media on real-time ad auction platforms like Google Search Ads, Meta, YouTube, etc. 

Marketing Skills Required: Skills in this pillar relate to the ability to set up, enhance, analyze, interpret, or report on various performance metrics. 

Which Skills Are Likely to Be More Important in 2025?

• Privacy-First Analytics: As privacy regulations expand, expect to work more with tools like GA4, server-side tagging, 1st party CRM audience data collection and usage, and the development of statistical methods of measurement like MMM and incrementality testing.
• AI-Powered Insights: Dedicated analytics platforms like Looker and Tableau will likely continue to integrate deeper machine learning capabilities for predictive analytics. Popular spreadsheet tools like Excel and Google Sheets will also likely see AI enhancements, enabling the easier analysis and collection of insights of ever-expanding datasets.

Popular Udemy Courses to Start Developing Signal Skills

1. Google Analytics Course with Examples – Learn the basics of GA4, setting up tracking, and analyzing key metrics for actionable insights.
2. Data Science Bootcamp – A hands-on course to explore data visualization, Python-based analytics, and machine learning techniques.
3. SQL for Data Analytics – Learn how to use SQL to query and manipulate data, extract insights, and prepare data for visualization tools.

Targeting

In the Targeting pillar, we focus on identifying the most relevant buyers of our product or service and reaching them in the most appropriate channel in a given market. Effective targeting entails a deep understanding of your brand’s ideal customer profile, where they can be found online, and how to compete and win on the channels you select. 

Marketing Skills Required: Skills in this pillar relate to the ability to manage paid or owned channels, develop ideal customer profiles (ICPs), guide product development around key audiences, and leverage 1st and 3rd party data to augment the capabilities and level of personalization in your marketing.

Starting Career Titles: Campaign Specialist, Paid Media Associate

Intermediate Career Titles: Growth Marketer, Audience Development Manager

Which Skills Are Likely to Be More Important in 2025?

• First-Party Data Strategies: With third-party cookies on the decline, mastering CRM tools and leveraging 1st party audience data will become more critical.
• Omnichannel Personalization: Leveraging tools like CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) to unify customer data for cohesive ad targeting or ad personalizations on marketing platforms.

Popular Udemy Courses to Start Developing Skills in Targeting

1. Google Ads Masterclass – Dive deep into Google Ads strategies, including advanced audience segmentation and smart bidding techniques.
2. 2025 Facebook Ads & Marketing – Master Facebook ads, including audience targeting, and implementing tracking strategies.
3. Programmatic Advertising Essentials – An overview of DSPs, RTB, and how to plan effective programmatic campaigns.

Experience

In the Experience pillar, we focus on the interactions users have with your brand post-ad interaction across various touchpoints. This encompasses everything that follows a user’s initial ad engagement: their initial visit, their subsequent review of your landing page, and their exploration and attempt to purchase or engage with specific offerings on your site. A well-designed user experience is focused on ensuring that each interaction is intuitive, engaging, relevant, and aligned with their expectations, increasing the likelihood to convert and your ability to monetize the traffic to direct to your site. 

Marketing Skills Required: Skills in this pillar relate to the ability to design online experiences, test those experiences, draw conclusions about test results, and improve the degree of personalization of the experience to your target audience. 

Starting Career Titles: UX Research Assistant, Web Optimization Specialist
Intermediate Career Titles: UX Designer, Conversion Rate Optimization Manager

Which Skills Are Likely to Be More Important in 2025?

• AI-Driven Personalization: Tools like Dynamic Yield, VWO, and Optimizely are already paving the way for hyper-relevant, ultra-personalized, highly testable user experiences. Expect site experiences to be further personalized around your known intent, and the continued adoption of AI-centric experience enhancements, not limited to more advanced chatbots, increased AI-driven site personalization, and increased use and prominence of AI capabilities into product offerings or core services.
• Seamless Omnichannel Expectations: As consumers see and interact with your brand across ever more diverse platforms, they’ll increasingly expect a more cohesive, tailored experience across digital marketing touchpoints. This will be true even as hardware and legislative changes are implemented to increase user privacy and increase the challenge of delivering on cohesion between touchpoints.

Popular Udemy Courses to Start Developing Skills in Experience

1. Landing Page & Conversion Rate Optimization – A focused course on designing and optimizing landing pages to increase conversion rates.
2. UX Design Fundamentals – Explore principles of user-centered design and best practices for web and app interfaces.
3. The Complete Conversion Rate Optimization Course – Learn the art of designing, testing, and refining user journeys for maximum conversions.

Messaging

In the Messaging pillar, we focus on the art of conveying your brand’s value proposition through various mediums—be it through text or copy, graphic design, or video. Effective messaging is centered on the ability to communicate a problem an individual may have, the solution you offer, why your solution is valuable, who it is best suited for, and why they should take action. 

Marketing Skills Required: Skills in this pillar relate to the ability to write, design, or produce advertising or marketing material like text ads, image or animated ads, or video ads, and tailor them to the unique environment of each marketing channel.

Starting Career Titles: Copywriter, Content Creator

Intermediate Career Titles: Creative Strategist, Marketing Content Manager

Which Skills Are Likely to Be More Important in 2025?

• Short-Form Video Content: Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts will drive the demand for increasingly concise, fast-paced, short-form video creative. 
• AI-Assisted Content Creation: Tools like Jasper and Canva will streamline creative processes while leaving space for human creativity, without requiring the need for advanced copywriting or graphics design skills.

Popular Udemy Courses to Start Developing Skills in Messaging

1. Master Storytelling for Business Communication Success – Master the art of storytelling to create compelling narratives that resonate with your audience.
2. Copywriting Secrets – How to Write Copy That Sells – A step-by-step guide to crafting persuasive and engaging marketing copy.
3. Video Editing Masterclass – Learn the technical and creative skills needed to produce high-quality video content.

Suggestions for Learning Digital Marketing Skills

The digital marketing landscape will continue to see major evolutions in 2025. Expect to see evolutions in the best practices and the skills required across every pillar of excellence in the STEM framework. Advances in LLM’s ability to generate text, image, and video will change the demands placed on marketers, and the ability for skilled marketers to accomplish more in less time. 

If you are aspiring to break into digital marketing, my recommendation would be to both establish a baseline of familiarity with each pillar as well as concentrate the development of skills in at least one pillar you believe best aligns with your inate talents and interests. A baseline on the broader STEM pillars, and the skills in each, coupled with a concentration in one pillar will make it easy to apply to specialized roles that allow you to build upon and gain exposure to related digital marketing disciplines.

If you are advancing in your digital marketing career, my recommendation would be to evaluate and rank your skills in each pillar, and identify which additional pillar of excellence would best complement your aspiring future role. Advancing in your career may entail taking on more channel under management, managing larger channel program budgets or advertising more products, or it could mean increasing the sophistication of your marketing efforts, for example through more advanced signal enrichment in platform, improvements to targeting sophistication with custom tools, increasingly personalized site experiences, or new or more diverse advertising creative and offers. 

No matter where you are in your digital marketing journey, Udemy has the courses to prepare you with the digital marketing skills you need to reach your goals and drive real outcomes. Browse our digital marketing catalog here.