Soft Skills For Digital Marketers
Now, we’ll share six soft skills that every employer looks for when hiring digital marketers, and we’ll explain why these skills are valuable for almost any digital marketing role. Let’s get started with the Soft skills.
1. Communication
Marketing is essentially a brand’s way to communicate with customers and prospects, so you can drive interest and desire for products and services. So if you’re not able to communicate effectively, your marketing will be ineffective. Now, you might be thinking big WHOOP. However, the repercussions of poor communication can be severe.
It can impact people’s first impressions of your company damage your brand reputation and lead to wasted time for marketers and anyone else involved in a campaign, like developers, designers, and outsourced teams. Beyond that, marketing also involves developing relationships with customers, affiliates, influencers, and brand evangelists. Fail to communicate effectively, and you’ll have a very bumpy road ahead.
2. Problem-Solving
Next up are problem-solving skills. Marketing campaigns rarely go smoothly, and you will run into problems and unexpected bumps along the way. The thing is, nobody wants to hold your hand through every single problem. Companies hire people to fix problems, so your job will often involve finding creative solutions, even if company rules or money limits you. In the SEO world, for instance, some companies buy backlinks, but if yours doesn’t allow it, you need to think of other clever ways to compete.
Another common disadvantage I see in competitive industries is with ad budgets. Leaders in an industry will often have what seems to be an infinite budget. And if you’re working at a bootstrap startup with one 100th of your competitor’s budgets, you’ll have to get extremely creative to have a fighting chance at winning, let alone surviving. The best marketing is when your product and marketing align to solve people’s problems. But that, in and of itself, is a problem that marketers are often tasked with solving.
3. Creativity
The next soft skill on my list is creativity. Creativity is something that’s incredibly difficult to teach. In fact, according to George Land, a famous researcher and scientist, noncreative behavior is learned, meaning we learn to become less creative as we get older.
And this is the same test that was used by NASA to select innovative engineers and scientists. And to his surprise, 98% of five-year-old’s scored in the highly creative range. But when he retested them at ten and 15 years old, there was a dramatic drop in the percentage of people who scored in the highly creative range.
Now, land also tested 280,000 adults with the same test, and only 2% of this group scored in the highly creative range. Meaning, that for those that are creative, it’s going to be one of your greatest assets. When you pair creativity with the hard skills of data analysis, you end up having a very powerful combination of skills that will play in your favor as a digital marketer.
4. Teachability
The next soft skill is teachability. Now, the reason why I think this is a critical soft skill to have is because marketing is collaborative. And if you’re the stubborn type who refuses to hear feedback from your managers and teammates, you will naturally be an awful team player. In my opinion, teachability shows humility, adaptability, and one’s desire for growth.
This is why after doing hundreds of interviews, if a candidate doesn’t seem teachable, it’s a break. It kind of attribute for me. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to be a yes man and make other people feel better about themselves. It’s about being open to other’s opinions and collaboratively coming to the best ideas for your marketing campaigns.
5. Self-Motivation
The next soft skill is self-motivation. This is a skill that I think separates the wheat from the chaff. Naturally, there are going to be people who show up to work and do the bare minimum. After all, we all guts to make money to pay the bills. But there will be a few individuals who have put in the extra time, effort, thought, and focus simply because they want to produce good work.
These are self-motivated people. They’re willing to go the extra mile to make their work great. They don’t define themselves from their salary mentions or accolades, but ironically, self-motivated people with raw talent tend to get paid more and praised publicly. They’re a rare breed, and in my opinion, it’s a skill that’s nearly impossible to fake over the long haul.
6. Dependability
The final soft skill is dependability. Because marketing usually happens in a team setting, you need to be able to depend on your teammates to do their part. It makes marketing operations much smoother, and the result is a highly effective team. A standout example that immediately comes to mind is our academy team.
From the day I started working at Ahrefs, they have not once missed a deadline. But deadlines aren’t a be-all and end-all of dependable people. Our entire academy team is directly impacted by the invasion of Ukraine. Frankly speaking, I have never worked with a team that’s this dependable. It says a lot about character and plays directly into team dynamics.