As a creator, growing a business can be a lot of work. There are few resources at your disposal, and perhaps fewer years of experience, all of which could leave you wondering how you would ever succeed. While this stumbling block of a question may stop others from pursuing their goals, it doesn’t have to stop you. With the right digital marketing skills, you can grow a profitable business. 

In this article, you’ll learn about the digital marketing skills you need to grow your creator business. We will discuss everything from analytics to channeling creativity. Read on to discover ten must-have digital marketing skills for creators.

Types of digital marketing skills

When thinking about digital marketing skills, the first thing that usually comes to one’s mind is popular skills like copywriting and search engine optimisation (SEO). While these are great digital marketing skills that are essential for your role as a business owner, there are a lot more you should know about. 

But first, it’s important that you know to truly excel as a digital marketer, you must have a good range of hard and soft skills. 

Hard digital skills are learned after periods of study and experience. You sharpen them with practice, and they usually have to do with the more technical aspects of your role. Copywriting, SEO, data analysis, and other such disciplines are good examples of hard digital marketing skills. 

On the other hand, soft skills relate more to your character and interpersonal relationships. They are the skills that decide if you will be a good entrepreneur or work well in a team. Communication, teachability, and other qualities are examples of soft digital marketing skills. 

Now that we know about hard and soft digital marketing skills, which is more important? Neither. Thinking one is more important than the other is a common trap many fall into. One expression of this is when business owners funnel all their efforts into improving one skill set, leaving the other underdeveloped. This usually has a way of telling in the business. 

For example, you can master all digital marketing skills, but it might be hard to connect with your customers and leave them satisfied with your service if you don’t have patience and good manners. The soft skill of people management can go a long way in helping you navigate entrepreneurship, but it also won’t amount to much if you’re unable to adequately carry out the skills customers are reaching out to you for.  

Now that we understand the importance of hard and soft skills, let’s look at the ten must-have digital marketing skills for creators. 

1. Data analysis and interpretation

Data analysis and interpretation is a critical digital marketing skill to have. This is because as a business owner, you’ll draw insights from your data analysis, which will give you a good idea of how well the digital marketing efforts you are making are performing. Lack of analysis or faulty analysis can ruin your digital marketing campaigns if you’re not careful.

You don’t want this to happen, so you need to know where your data is coming from and how to analyse and interpret it. Sometimes, there may be insights you could draw from a set of data. Other times, the data may not be conclusive. Knowing how to analyse and interpret data correctly will save your business time, resources, and wasted effort.

Here are some resources you can use

• Google Analytics: A powerful tool for tracking and analyzing website traffic and user behaviour.
• Meta Analytics: Another powerful tool used to understand user behavior.
• Excel/Google Sheets: Essential for organizing, analyzing, and visualizing data.
• Online courses: Platforms like Coursera, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning and Treford offer courses on data analysis.

2. User experience

While user experience is typically seen as a design-specific skill, it can be relevant for a creator. Ensuring that your customers have the best user experience will ensure they return and bring other customers with them. Marketing is very interactive, and at the end of the day, you want your prospective buyers to have the best experience possible. This not only improves your brand image, but also creates loyal customers.

User experience can be optimised through all the stages of the buyer’s journey. On social media, it is important to pay attention to user experience signals like engagement rates, direct messages, comments and more as these give us a good idea of how our users find our product and what areas need improvement. This is why acquiring a high-level understanding of user experience is vital to your success when doing digital marketing for your creator business. These user experience signals also play an important role in SEO. 

You can read these books to gain more insight: “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug and “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman.

3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process by which web pages rank on search engine results. For example, you can get your blog or article to show up on the first page of Google if you follow good SEO practices!

Ranking highly on search results, of course, comes with a lot of benefits, the biggest of which is the consistent traffic your web page will get from this level of exposure. This can lead to more sales, which is what every business owner wants, so you’d do well to learn and master this skill. 

Moreover, a good grasp of SEO will help you understand the web and search engines better. You’ll learn about the metrics search engines use to determine the relevancy of web pages to people’s queries, and so other things that will help you better manage your business. 

Some resources that can help you conquer SEO

• Online courses: Get started by taking courses on SEO hosted on Selar, Coursera, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning.
• Google Search Console: Helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. This works best when you have a website.
• SEMrush: Comprehensive SEO tool for keyword research, site audits, and competition analysis.
• Moz: Another robust SEO tool offering keyword research, link building, and site audits.

4. Copywriting

Copywriting is a popular term in the digital marketing space, and for good reason too. Good copywriting is what persuades an audience to take a specific action. The ability to communicate value in a clear and entertaining way is a great way to attract people to your products, and increase sales. 

Copywriting is the building block of most digital businesses. It can be found in blogs, articles, landing pages, email marketing, SEO, paid advertisements, and the list goes on. Wherever a bridge is needed to connect customers to businesses, copywriting can be found there. As such, it is a truly crucial skill for digital marketers to have. 

Copywriting is also one of the highest on-demand digital marketing skills, and it is easy to see why. As a creator, you can learn and master it by taking online courses, but if you’re not all that skilled, you can choose to outsource to a skilled copywriter who will help you write great copy for your business.

Consider the following resources:

• Grammarly: Assists with grammar, punctuation, and style suggestions.
• Copy AI: Helps you write clear, concise, and easy-to-read copy.
• Books: “The Copywriter’s Handbook” by Robert Bly and “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk.

READ: 10 Best Copywriting Tips to Improve Your Ads Performance

5. Paid ads

Learning how to run paid ads across different social media channels is a great skill for running a creator business. As a creator, one of your biggest challenges is getting visibility for your products. Pushing out great content organically on social media or your blogs will create a compounding effect that could translate into sales, but it may not happen as quickly as you’d like. 

This is where paid ads come in. With paid ads, you can streamline your target audience by demographic, location, and other factors that make it a lot easier to connect with the right people for your products. 

Understand how paid ads work with the following courses

• The Complete Facebook And Instagram Ads Course
• How to Run Paid Ads That Converts
• Complete Meta Advertising Course

READ: How to Market a Digital Product in 9 Ways: 2024 Ultimate Guide

6. Communication

Now that we’ve finished looking at the hard skills, it’s time to talk about the soft skills. On top of the list, communication is arguably one of the most important soft digital marketing skills. This is because marketing is essentially a brand’s way of communicating with prospective buyers and customers to drive interest which leads to sales. If you can’t communicate effectively, you won’t be able to market effectively.

Failing to paint the essence of your brand could lead to a poor first impression among potential customers. Worse yet, poor communication can destroy an established brand’s reputation if they are not careful.

As a creator, you have to establish and maintain relationships. Good communication influences every person that comes in contact with your business, from customers to staff, contractors, influences and others. Strong communication skills will help you keep these relationships intact over the years. Overlooking this can lead to hard times in your career. 

7. Problem-solving

For many creators who run businesses, a lot of what your role entails is putting out fires. You will encounter a lot of problems along the way. From dealing with changing social media and SEO algorithms, managing your time, or trying to stay ahead of your competition, many things can threaten the success of your campaign. What do you do then? You can’t expect an outside party to come to solve all your problems for you, you need to have good problem-solving skills. 

Some people are natural problem solvers, while others have to develop their problem-solving muscle. Whichever group you belong to, being proactive with managing chaos will help you prevent burnout, have a smoother business experience and keep customers from leaving. 

In her #FailureStories, Business Owner and Content Creator Pasheda shared how being able to properly manage a chaotic product launch really helped her retain an angry customer.

READ: Failure Stories: Pasheda Talks Failing in Business, Growing a Spine and a Lot More.

To avoid issues around communication, consider using the following tools:

• Trello: A project management tool that helps you organize tasks and collaborate with your team.
• Asana: Another project management tool for tracking and managing team projects.

8. Creativity

When we talk about creativity, your mind may dive head first into images of great artists, poets, and writers, but in the business world, creativity is the ability of an individual to develop unique ideas and solutions to their problems. It’s an essential skill to have that when combined with hard digital marketing skills like graphic design, copywriting, or SEO, and it can yield amazing results for your business.

If you think you’re not creative, don’t be discouraged! Creativity, just like any other skill, can be developed! Our minds are more amazing than we think, and there are creativity exercises that you can perform to find solutions to your problems while also building up your creative muscle.

For example, you could take a problem or goal and write down twenty different ways of achieving your goal. The first five to ten ideas may be easy to think up, but the next ten are going to task you more mentally and will require you to start thinking more creatively. 

9. Self-Motivation

As a creator, you need to be internally motivated. When others settle for doing the bare minimum with their businesses, a self-motivated individual goes the extra mile for the work they have to do. And, it’s not because of the accolades they’ll receive or for higher pay, but simply because they want to put out their best work. 

Self-motivation is a rare skill that’s hard to fake. You either have it or you don’t. This is why it shines so brightly and why self-motivated people can accomplish so much. However, the good thing is that it can be developed with discipline and consistency. 

As a creator, it’s important to look out for people who are self motivated as employees, as they’ll serve as important assets to your company. 

10. Willingness to learn

The final soft skill we’ll be talking about is the quality of an individual who is teachable. Having a learning spirit is so important for many reasons. For one, digital marketing is a collaborative sport. You’ll need to work with different people, teams, and managers, and if you find it difficult to takefeedback, it will be difficult to work with you.

Also, digital marketing as a field is constantly evolving. Staying teachable ensures things run smoothly in your business while you leave a good impression on others. It shows people you are humble, flexible, and want to grow.

However, do not confuse having a teachable spirit with being naive. Having a willingness to learn does not mean that you have to become a “yes man” and accept any and all suggestions that are thrown your way. Honour your intuition, and take the advice you are given with a grain of salt. Stay open to new ideas and the feedback you may receive, but ultimately, make the decisions that are the best for the business. 

Final Thoughts

The digital marketing scene is so vast, that the array of soft and hard skills a person can acquire when trying to run their business is inexhaustive. However, you need a strong selection of both at your fingertips. This may take you anywhere from several weeks to months to even years to learn, but the more you learn and implement, the better your business will be for it. 

Remember that you may not excel at every single skill. This is where hiring people who are better than you can be so important. Someone may be a more persuasive copywriter or a better communicator. In such cases, your work as a creator with a business is to hire those people and bring them into your team. By adding their expertise to yours, you can take your business to new heights!

To gain more access to the skills and resources that will help you grow your creator business, check out this section of our blog. Goodluck!