Marketing Skills and How to Build Them

Udemy Editor

Web marketers are a dime a dozen, but the marketers that actually manage and deploy successful campaigns have a core set of skills that help them turn their big picture vision into reality. There’s a key distinction between understanding the basics of core marketing skills, and building them into powerful tools that help you achieve your goals on a daily basis. Honing your core marketing skills means moving marketing tasks and ideas from the realm of the theoretical into the world of the practical.

Let’s talk about some of these skills and how you can use them in your everyday marketing processes.

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Five Essential Marketing Skills

1. Communication

Communication is at the heart of every marketing process or skill you will ever learn. All successful marketers have one thing in common – they can communicate clearly, effectively and persuasively. It’s tempting to assume that every web marketer has an innate ability to deliver their marketing messages clearly. But ask any marketer and they’ll regale you with stories about times their own ineffective communication muddied their message. Simply put, honing your communication skills involves a lot of trial and error. In other words, understanding what makes effective communication involves understanding what absolutely does not work.

2. Persuasive Writing

As a web marketer, you will be writing – a lot. However, it’s not enough that you know how to string a few words together in a sentence. Good marketers know good writing, and good writing persuades. When a reader happens upon your content, they should be moved to take action when they’re done reading. According to Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, there are 10 essential ingredients to persuasive writing: 1) Repetition 2) Demonstrated Value 3) Consistency 4) Social Proof 5) Comparisons 6) Solve Problems 7) Prognostication (peer into the future) 8) Write to tribes or specific groups of people 9) Answer objections 10) Utilize narrative storytelling

3. Search Engine Marketing

While search engine marketing (SEM) is not inherently difficult to learn, it’s not always easy to keep track of. That is, SEM is always evolving and changing on almost a daily basis. In other words, it’s important to lay a solid foundation in search marketing, but from there you’ll need to watch up and coming trends on a daily basis to make sure you are informed to major changes in search marketing.

4. Web Content

Web content is diverse, and becoming increasingly sophisticated. In other words, web content is not just limited to text on a web page. As a marketer, you must know the ins and outs of all types of web content. This includes everything from podcasts to promotional video to infographics to photo sharing to blogs to social media updates, and so on.

5. Social Media

Nearly everything on the web is linked or can be linked to a social network of some kind. In fact, as a marketer you’ll find that the majority of your target market or audience is engaged on a social network of some sort. As a result, you’ll spend a great deal of time understanding these social media tools, and the types of conversations your target audience are having. This provides insight that you can leverage to target your audience with relevant content. Not unlike search engine marketing, social media is always changing. Staying current on up and coming social media trends is crucial to your survival as a marketer.

Conclusion: Get Some Help!

While many of these marketing skills can be easily self taught, others may require the help of a professional. Talk to a professional, hire a marketing or copywriting consultant, or better yet, take a FREE marketing class.