It’s 2020, and we are fully cemented in the gilded age of Digital Marketing.
The once lofty “Mad Men” style suites overlooking Times Square are being ditched for scrappy digital marketing firms that operate on a largely remote basis.
As marketing budgets are increasingly geared toward Internet-centric means of business development, the demand for skilled digital markets is also increasing.
You no doubt have seen the product of these digital marketers: the social media ads you see as you scroll through your Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds, the websites that are pinned to the top of seemingly every google search these days, and even those placed right below those paid for positions are there because of savvy digital marketers.
So, who are these marketing-savvy tech professionals that are leading the way in the age of online marketing?
And how did they learn the skills that helped them succeed in digital marketing? Also, what are the top marketing skills in 2020?
You may be tempted to assume that they must have gone to a four-year university and earned a degree in a field like a computer science, information technology, or even just graphic design or marketing.
And while many of these tech professionals probably did earn a four-year or even a two-year degree through their local community or technical college, many of them likely did not.
These days, you certainly do not need to earn a computer science or similar degree to break into a new career in the tech industry.
Instead, many aspiring Digital Marketers are opting for short-term, intensive coding boot camps to prepare for their new careers in the tech industry.
Bootcamps are an excellent route to gaining all of the necessary programming skills you will need as a Digital Marketer, all in less than a year.
Some schools host these boot camps through in-person classes, but almost all of them offer online class schedules as well, and many even offer self-paced programs.
Many of these schools also offer flexible tuition payment options like deferred tuition payments, and several of them provide income-sharing agreements, which allow you to enroll and finish your boot camp program, with a signed agreement that you will repay your tuition costs after you have obtained employment as a Digital Marketer.
Now that you know how you can finally make that career switch into digital marketing, let’s discuss what the top marketing skills for Digital Marketers din 2020.
This way you will know what to expect once you get there.SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Perhaps one of the top marketing skills for digital marketing specialists is social media.
All of the seemingly random ads you see pop up when you are scrolling through your news feeds were strategically placed there by Digital Marketers.
However, they are anything but random.
Next time you are scrolling through your newsfeed on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, take a closer look at some of those ads you see.
You will probably notice that they advertise something you have posted about or even something you have searched for through a search engine like Google.
How do these digital marketers know that you are interested—or at least were interested at some point—in whatever they are advertising for?
That is through the work of skilled Data Scientists, which we will talk about next.DATA SCIENCE
Every time that you are on the Internet, you leave a trail of breadcrumbs that are scooped and tracked through automated systems that Digital Marketers can use to better advertise their products to the people they know are already interested.
The tech professionals responsible for building these automated systems and processors are Data Scientists, and these days they work closely with Digital Marketers.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, is a tech-savvy Digital Marketer’s best friend and one of the top marketing skills for digital marketing in 2020.
Where marketing professionals used to spend countless hours and thousands upon thousands of dollars to figure out who exactly is their target audience, and what is the best way to reach them, all of that can be done by tracking what their customers, or even their potential customers, do online.
Have you ever received an email from that shoe store you went to sometime last year?
Maybe they were offering a promotion that if you enrolled in their free membership program you got an immediate 25 percent off your first purchase.
Well, if you take a closer look at that email you probably see those new flip flops or winter boots you keep searching for online, hunting for the best possible deal.
This shoe store knows what you are looking for because it picks up that bread crumb of data through automated systems and processes built by Data Scientists.
