In this fast-paced world, how are digital marketers able to compete and stay on the game? While hard skills are very important in getting things done, soft skills are equally important to succeed in the challenging and ever-changing world of business.
Hard Skills vs soft skills
Before we identify the soft skills that digital marketers need to have today, let us first learn what hard skills and soft skills are.
Hard skills are technical skills that are teachable and measurable. In digital marketing, hard skills include knowledge and expertise in content marketing, SEO, email, digital marketing tools, and more.
Soft skills, on the other hand, are your traits or your attitude that make you good at what you do. These skills, such as your work etiquette and communication skills, complement your technical skills to help you achieve more.
Top 8 soft skills digital marketers need to have today
Here are the top 8 soft skills digital marketers need to have right now in order to keep up and even lead the competition:
1. Interest and curiosity
Curiosity fuels growth. If you want to grow and succeed in digital marketing, you need to be always hungry for new information and new trends. Be curious and always have the passion to learn what you do not know. You just cannot remain still in an ever-changing digital marketing world. Being interested and curious can help you discover new platforms, new tools, and new strategies that help you improve and keep up with the changes.
2. Adaptability
The ability to adapt is a very important soft skill for any employee or team member. In digital marketing, where the world of business is constantly evolving, you need to able to adapt to changes in order to keep up and grow. Customer trends change over time and so should your strategies. You need to update yourself with the current trends and adapt to what is new. You may need to let go of some marketing practices and beliefs that helped you succeed in the past and learn new ones.
Adaptability also means being flexible enough to embrace changes and advancements in technology, whether hardware or software.
3. Persuasive skills
Being a digital marketer, your aim would be to convince your audience to visit your website, to subscribe to your newsletter, to follow your social media page, and ultimately to buy. You need to be persuasive enough to convince them to take action through your marketing strategies and platforms.
Aside from being persuasive to your target market, you also need to be persuasive and convincing enough to your superiors with your proposals. You must be able to come up with the right and logical reasons why you should try a new software, a new tool, a new strategy, or invest in a new technology, for instance.
4. Creativity and ingenuity
Most digital marketers probably know similar things. What will set you apart from them would be your creativity and ingenuity. These skills are responsible for coming up with smart campaigns, unique ads, and viral content. More than that, your ingenuity will make you that resourceful digital marketer who can reach out to your target audience and convince them to take action without spending too much time, effort, and money.
5. Multitasking and prioritization skills
Digital marketing is definitely a lot of responsibility. You need to be a multitasker to get things done on time and in the right way. If you have a team, you need to manage your team members who handle different tasks and have to look at the bigger picture at the same time. You also need to be able to prioritize marketing tasks well and determine which ones are urgent and which ones can wait.
6. Social Skills
Social skills are very important whether we are talking about dealing with your team or with your audience. Digital marketing needs a team that can work together and cooperate with each other. Without good social skills, differences in perceptions or ideas might result in conflict. On the other hand, good social skills can turn differences into a brainstorming opportunity.
When it comes to your audience, social skills are also very important. Without it, you would not know how to reach out, communicate, and interact well with your audience. Social skills can help you make engaging content, which is very important in digital marketing.
7. Cultural intelligence
You may be surprised to see cultural intelligence included in our soft skill list needed by digital marketers. Well, this is because it is a very important part of marketing today. Especially now that businesses are going global and countries are getting more intercultural, you really need to develop cultural intelligence to make sure you get your message across different platforms with a little risk (or none at all) of being misinterpreted or labeled as discriminating. Cultural intelligence can also help you be aware of your implicit or unconscious biases that may cause trouble with your marketing campaigns.
8. Insightful thinking
Finally, you need to have insightful thinking when you are a digital marketer. Sometimes, it takes more than knowledge to make the right marketing decisions. You need to have good insight and go beyond what the numbers say.
Insightful thinking is your ability to “recognize new connections across existing knowledge” with your deep thinking, understanding, and creativity. The data could be right in your face, but you need to be able to interpret and analyze them in a way that connects that data with other marketing factors and information.
There you go. We hope we have somehow helped you understand that more than technical skills, soft skills are also important in being a digital marketer. If you are worried that you do not possess all of the mentioned skills, there is always room for development. As long as you have the dedication and the will, you will possess these important skills in no time.