There are those technical skills needed for marketing if you ever have been nursing the ambition of a marketer in this same line and career path. In recent years, employers are emphasizing skills over pedigree. LinkedIn data from the past year shows a 20% increase in managers who don’t have a traditional four-year degree.
This trend highlights the push toward skills-based hiring, which prioritizes a person’s capabilities over their credentials.
Hiring for skill rather than a degree is a good step forward for all, and it’s wise to leverage your strengths when going after a new role or promotion. That’s why you want to make sure you have the right technical skills for your career path to stay competitive and advance in your career.
Read Also: Professional Skills Needed to Successful in the Workplace
Often known as hard skills, technical skills are easily defined and measured competencies you gain through training or education. They allow you to complete a job-specific task and often vary from one industry to another.
While technical skills are typically required for engineers, business analysts, mathematicians, and scientists, more industries than ever need employees with technical knowledge. In fact, Gartner found that 58% of the workforce needs new skills to successfully do their jobs.
This is largely due to the digital transformation and massive increase in data, which requires people who can use technology to interpret data and take action to drive a company forward.
Technical Skills Needed for Marketing
Here are the technical skills needed for marketing in this modern world of global technology:
Communication
Communication is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term can also refer to the message itself, or the field of inquiry studying these transmissions, also known as communication studies. Marketers must be excellent communicators in a few different ways: with audiences, with team members, and with major stakeholders and companies.
Digital Media and Design
Regardless of your role within the organization, if you work in marketing, then you are bound to run into digital media and design. From graphic design software (Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, etc.) to content management systems (CMS), digital asset management solutions and content curation, it’s best to at least familiarize yourself with digital media and the tools used to create, curate and publish content.
Data Analysis Skills
Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making.
Marketers use data to research and identify trends, develop strategies, analyze purchasing powers, etc. Before scrambling into a data analysis course, it’s important to realize that there are dozens of technical skills that don’t require you to become part of the stress of it or a part marketer, part computer scientist.
Content Creation Skills
Like project management, content creation is not a technical skill in the traditional sense, but critical to the success of any marketing team. You don’t have to be an expert graphic designer to be a marketer, but you do need a basic understanding of content research, creation and planning tools, like SEMRush, Google Trends and Canva.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Skills
If you work in marketing or maintain a website, then you are at least familiar with search engine optimization (SEO). If you are not familiar with SEO, then it’s best that you familiarize yourself with SEO best practices as soon as possible.
SEO is so important because it enables a brand to build awareness, drive traffic to their website and turn prospects into customers. Yet, a recent study by Hubspot showed that only 64 percent of marketers actively invest time into search engine optimization.
We can speculate as to why this disparity exists, but that won’t help you learn SEO, or understand the outsized role it has on your business.
