Digital marketing and technology are a match made in heaven. 

By acquiring the right IT skills, you’ll be more comfortable with a wide range of digital marketing tools and complete your tasks faster and more professionally.

Above all, you’ll gain your clients’ trust, retain them, and stand out in the competitive digital marketing landscape.

Here are six useful tech skills that will help you become a digital marketing superstar.

1 Applying Cybersecurity Practices

No matter if you are a blogger, a social media manager, or an SEO specialist, understanding cybersecurity risks is an essential part of your marketing career.

Cybercriminals have different goals.  While some want to have fun by vandalizing a client’s website or social channels, others may want to trick your audience and steal their private data.

The recent hack of Twitter accounts belonging to numerous celebrities and popular companies is a perfect example of how easily we can become victims of vicious hackers.

The consequences of cyberattacks are multiple, from impacting your client’s revenue to compromising their brand image. 

As a marketer, you should enroll in a cybersecurity course that will help you learn at least some basic cybersecurity practices, such as performing regular backups, creating strong passwords, using a VPN, encrypting data, etc.

2 Learning the Basics of Web Development

Mastering front-end development skills can take your digital marketing career to a whole new level, helping your employer save lots of money. 

There are two languages you’ll want to learn – HTML and CSS. 

HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language. It is a standard coding language, informing web browsers how well a web page is structured. 

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, go hand in hand with HTML. Their goal is to add styles to web pages.

By getting IT training and learning the basics of HTML and CSS, you’ll be able to perform many tasks independently and efficiently. You’ll be able to customize forms, style and optimize blog posts, improve landing pages, and structure your emails. 

You’ll have full control of your projects without having to wait for developers to perform minor tasks, such as adding a CTA button or formatting your blog article.

3 Mastering Design Skills

The functionality and feel of a website can impact user satisfaction on multiple levels. 

When landing on your client’s site, users expect it to be easily navigable, fast, intuitive, visually appealing, and spam-free. 

Such websites inspire more trust and, therefore, convert fast. Above all, they boost user experiences with your brand and encourage them to come back.

That is why you should have at least some design skills under your belt. That way, you’ll be able to collaborate with designers in your team more efficiently and help them create a consistent and attractive online presence for your employer or client. 

4 Getting Familiar with WordPress

The majority of businesses use a content management system, CMS, to build their online presence. 

Recent statistics say that WordPress, as the most renowned CMS, powers 35% of the internet.

Given that, it is not surprising that, when hiring digital marketing specialists, especially content marketers, companies expect them to know to use CMS platforms.  

That means you should know how to add, format, optimize, publish content, as well as edit forms and build unique product pages. 

To learn to use WordPress, consider creating a free WP site to practice the skills mentioned above. There are many online resources and courses on using WordPress that may help you a lot.

5 Editing Photos and Videos

The digital marketing landscape is vast. No one expects you to be the jack of all trades. However, no matter if you are skilled at SEO, PPC, social media marketing, or content marketing, photo and video editing skills may come in handy.

Visuals make your content more appealing, engaging, and shareable. They make the difference between an article that receives enormous traffic and shares and the one everyone skips.

Sure, you don’t need to be an experienced photo/video editing professional. With many free video or photo editing tools like Headliner, Clipchamp Create and Canva, or all-in-one online graphic design tools like DesignCap, you’ll be able to create and edit amazing visual content in-house, without having to spend money on hiring video editing professionals.

6 Knowing to Analyze Data

If you work at a company that already hires data analysts, you’re lucky. You can use just a few analytics tools specifically related to your area of digital marketing, while the analytics team will do the rest.

However, if you are working at a small company or you are a freelance digital marketer, most of the data analytics work will fall on you.

Now, each digital marketing area (social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, PPC) requires building and using a specific toolset.

However, just purchasing a digital marketing analytics tool is not enough. You need to have the knowledge and skills required to use digital marketing tools.

As a digital marketer, you need to know clients’ needs, set clear goals, and choose what metrics and KPIs you’ll track for each client. Above all, you need to understand the link between different digital marketing channels, identify problems, and predict trends so you can make wiser decisions for each client.

Only this way will you be able to get the most out of your digital marketing tools and track your results.

You could also learn to use reporting software that lets you centralize the data from multiple digital marketing tools and create comprehensive reports for your digital marketing team, employer, or client. 

Over to You 

Digital marketing isn’t for the faint-hearted. To succeed and set yourself apart as a professional, you need to pour your heart into improving your digital marketing skills.

The more tech-savvy you are, the easier it’ll be for you to manage your projects, automate many repetitive tasks, and track your results.