By skyforbes 
Many people ask me what they should do to become good at digital marketing.
What are the most critical skills to acquire?
Learning digital marketing can sometimes become overwhelming because there are so many tools and tactics. But there is a way to simplify it. In this post, let‘’’s look at the three major areas of digital marketing.
Traffic
Traffic is the lifeblood of digital marketing. You can have a great company, product, and team, but you will not survive if you do not get traffic. Internet traffic gives you visibility, eventually leading to leads and sales.
There are two ways to get traffic.
Paid traffic and free traffic. Free traffic is not free because you must try to create content and engagement. But once the content is made, it can keep bringing in traffic for a long time.
Paid traffic can instantly give you high-quality leads but will also cost money. You must convert your ad cost into revenue to keep the cycle going. Many companies have grown just with paid traffic, but it is not sustainable to depend on it.
A careful combination of paid and free traffic will compound your traffic over time. Paid traffic will drive quick discovery, but good content will increase trust and attract new visitors through organic channels.
There are many organic and paid traffic methods, but the major ones are:
- Organic traffic: SEO & Social Media (Including YouTube, Instagram etc.)
- Paid traffic: Google Search & Display Ads (Including YouTube Ads and Meta Ads)
If you master the above four methods, it’s more than enough to bring in enough traffic to keep your company alive and eventually thrive.
However, traffic alone will not convert into revenue if you do not have a marketing funnel. That’s why you need to build trust with the community.
Email Marketing & Community
Traffic is converted into leads, but these leads are cold leads. They do not know you well, don’t trust you much, and are not ready to transact.
Trust building is done with two major methods:
- Email Marketing / Newsletters: Every time people read your content, their relationship gets stronger. You consider me an authority in this subject and might be open to buying high-ticket products in the future.
- Community & Forums: You can have people participate in a community and converse with each other. You are the leader of this community. The platform doesn’t matter. You can add people to a WhatsApp community or an online platform. There can also be offline meetups and events. Your customers and prospects should be in the same community.
A community’s connection and the trust that they have with the leader is an asset that will compound over time. This will make the sales part easier when your leads are ready to buy.
Copywriting & Sales
Having many leads and a community that looks up to you doesn’t mean they are ready to buy from you yet. You need to nudge them. The nudge comes from sales & copywriting.
Copywriting is the art of convincing people using words. A long-form landing page copy can be effective in selling a course. If you are selling an agency service or a mastermind — then you need to convert leads into customers using 1-on-1 sales calls.
Sales is very simple but hard to master. You are taking people from where they are to where they want to go and placing your product as a bridge that helps them reach their destination. Your leads will know if you have a genuine intention to help them.
If you intend to help your customers as the priority and get paid as the second priority, your sales will happen effortlessly.
So master traffic, trust and transaction.
- Social media marketing (YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram)
- Paid advertising (Google Ads, Meta Ads)
- SEO
- Email Marketing
- Community
- Copywriting
- Sales
These seven skills are more than enough to become a digital marketing expert. Yes, there are plenty of tools and other things to get good at, but these seven courses are foundational courses that do not change in methods very fast.
Your Google Ads interface might change a bit over the years, but the idea of cost per click, landing page conversions, and conversion pixels are fundamental concepts that do not change.
If you enjoy this post, please forward it to your friends and colleagues.