Marketing in the 21st century combines both traditional and digital channels to promote product and services. They focused on mass marketing campaigns to create awareness in the target market and influence customers to make purchasing decisions on the behalf of their preferred choices.
Technology enables marketers to collect, analyze, and interpret vast amounts of data. This information provides insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends, allowing businesses to make informed decisions in which tools to employ in the marketing strategies.
Digital marketing allows businesses to harness social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, now known as X. These platforms enable them to promote services and engage with more people. It also allows them to connect with their audience deeply by showcasing their brand’s personality.
In addition to offering a wider reach, online marketing is cost effective. Digital messaging can be cheaper and more efficient to produce than print. It can duplicate faster, and it can be highly targeted to reach only the most relevant audiences, which means it usually offers a strong ROI, or return on investment.
Online marketing is dramatically changing how consumers gather information, even allowing buyers to be inspired by trends from a continent away. Besides a channel for consumers to engage with one another, the best brands are using social media as a way to reach their own consumers.
Regardless of your goal whether it be to enhance your brand’s presence or generate leads for sales, digital marketing can help you achieve results.  In order to harness social media technology it is critical to have access to personnel or resources with digital marketing skills. Aside from technical skills, social media/digital marketing practitioners need more creativity, empathy and communication management skills to generate the ROI that marketers demand. 
Social media skills are more than technical.  For example TikTok has grown from 500 million to almost a billion in a 12-month period.  It has become a significant marketing channel: therefore being skillful in video technology has become fundamental.  To avoid waste of marketing dollars, businesses need personnel who can select the best platforms, and also understand the market demographics and create targeted social media content. Formstack estimates that 92% of marketers believe that social media is important and two in four new marketing hires will require technical skills to succeed.  So they need to be skillful in writing, social listening, analytics, content strategy, community engagement and media creation. 
Content creation.  Most businesses that use social media are successful because they have useful digital content that is valuable to their targeted customers.  Buyers get their content in their phone,  lap, desktop or other connected devices.  They spend hours a day on one or all of these devices to gather information.  Savvy digital marketers maintain a constant flow of information to their customer base even when they aren’t running a targeted campaign.  The organization’s voice becomes part of buyers’ routine. 
Analytics.  This is a key skill needed by digital marketers since data is the key to growth.  Today is more than just posting advertisements and relying on gut feelings. It is all about data. Campaigns need to be tracked and analyzed as to what worked, what didn’t and what performance data is available to make the next strategic marketing decisions. And, it is more than numbers and what they mean.  Digital marketers need to be able to translate the results into easy-to-understand visuals that can communicate the brand’s penetration. 
Technical marketing skills.  The key to 21^st century marketing success is to employ performance-based marketing campaigns.  Some of those skills are: HTML & CSS and a basic understanding of these tools help you apply them, not necessarily become a developer.  Marketing automation – efficiency and consistency are key.  Marketing automation reduces the tasks on the to-do list and streamlines the processes.  Data analytics – today one needs to collect, interpret and then communicate findings to stakeholders.  SQL database management – being able to use this search function without engaging the technical team is fundamental to 21^st century digital marketing professionals skills set. 
Newsjacking.  Digital marketing professionals need to be able to take advantage of breaking news to marketing their brands. This allows professionals to stay in touch with culture and trends so they can leverage their brand messaging more effectively. 
SEO.  It is essential that digital marketers be able to maintain high levels of search engine optimization to remain competitive in over-saturated communications world.  According to Wrike Blog, 39% of online customers come from searches and 75% of users never go beyond the first page.  That is why SEO (search engine optimization) is so critical.
As a 21^st century digital marketer you have to be a lifelong learner.  Technology is changing and evolving, therefore it is key to stay tuned into every change.  Lifelong learning can take the form of active learning (read articles, study exception digital marketers and take classes) and joining marketing communities.https://buffer.com/
We are already seeing that digital marketing professionals are more than “Mad Men” Madison Avenue marketers.  Buffer recommends that social media management needs to do the following monthly:  Create an analytics report for the previous month’s activities, perform a social media audit, set and reset goals, generate new experiments to test new campaigns, plan ahead for the next month’s activity and make changes in the strategy based on learnings from the previous month. 
Digital marketing is a constantly evolving activity and takes daily evaluation to assure that the tactics that were used yesterday can be relied up to generate the same or better returns tomorrow. 
Contributed by: Marc l. Goldberg, Certified Mentor, SCORE Cape Cod & the Islands, www.score.org/capecod, 508-775-4884.  Need help with your digital marketing contact SCORE to enlist a Mentor.  Sources: Digital Marketing Skills You Need to Succeed, Wrike Blog, Kelechi Udoagwu, The Social Media Manager’s Daily, Weekly, Monthly Checklist, Mitra Mehvar, Buffer, 9/20/23.
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