Digital marketing has evolved far beyond clever ad campaigns and eye-catching banners. Today, this industry has become a more analytical yet still multidisciplinary set of practices that extends into every corner of a business.
In order to market yourself, your products, or your business successfully today, you have to understand not only your audience and your industry, but also how to best utilise different platforms to project your messaging, how to finetune that messaging to all of your audience demographics, and arguably most importantly, how to make data-driven decisions.
Developing as a digital marketer means having both the big-picture and the technical skills that allow you to run successful campaigns. You need to be well-versed in strategic and psychological components like branding and human behaviour, as well as in all of today’s many marketing tools and platforms.
And for entrepreneurs looking to hone their own digital marketing skills, all of the above is essential for your skills-building as well – alongside absorbing the reality that in any campaign you manage for your business, you aren’t just marketing a product but instead building the identity of your enterprise.
With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at the core digital marketing skills you should develop to strengthen your startup marketing strategy, and how you can use these skills to engage your audiences and drive results over the long term.
As a business owner, it’s sometimes tempting to do a deep dive into a new, revolutionary marketing concept that you’ve just read about in an article. However, before going down all of these rabbit holes, you should first make sure that you have a good foundational understanding of the fundamentals of marketing. To do so, you’ll definitely want to complete a digital marketing course or two to start engaging with basic principles, and also to begin collecting some learning resources (i.e., books, online tutorials, seminars, etc).
Some concepts you absolutely need to master include audience segmentation, brand building, and demand-based pricing. You should also equip yourself with a foundational understanding of all the different marketing channels out there and how they may interconnect.
This includes paid channels like PPC, social media advertising, and affiliate marketing, as well as organic channels like socials, Google My Business, earned media strategies, and web SEO. While you might want to focus on one that piques your interest later on, as an entrepreneur, you’ll need at least a working knowledge of all the channels that you use.
By mastering the basics, you can cut out the vast majority of marketing mistakes that lots of entrepreneurs make and make sensible decisions when running your business.
Once you have your basics down pat, you can start to broaden your digital marketing skillset. A great way to drive your upskilling here is to focus on facets of digital marketing that:
If you’re an ecommerce business, for example, you’ll almost always use some combination of paid ads and SEO. With ads, make sure to learn about the difference between search and social media ads, and about the distinctions between ads on different social platforms. With SEO, you should learn the basics of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO to ensure that you’re doing all you can to rank on Google.
Besides paid ads and SEO, some other common channels include email marketing, organic social media, and SMS marketing. All of these can help promote your business over the long term, with some channels being more suited to some audience demographics over others.
For instance, email marketing can be a great way of remarketing to converted customers for ecommerce enterprises. And if any of them have already piqued your interest, then it’s a bonus that you can just indulge your curiosity for those facets of marketing and upskill in that direction.
Artificial intelligence has sparked a lot of controversy in the marketing landscape, but there’s no denying that it’s a useful tool that can speed up many different kinds of tasks. As an entrepreneur, learning about AI’s digital marketing applications can help make your business more efficient as a whole.
Today, one of AI’s most significant uses in the context of digital marketing is content creation. LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT can write ad or website copy in a fraction of the time it takes a human to do the same tasks.
Of course, human oversight is still crucial since AI can’t create content to the same standard as a good human copywriter, and certain tasks like writing specialised blog posts require a human hand. However, incorporating AI into your workflows can tremendously speed up many writing tasks.
Another use of AI in digital marketing is its ability to analyse large swathes of data and pick out trends that a human might have missed. Using AI in data analytics can help you generate insights, such as what commonalities your customers might have and which sort of content appeals to certain demographics.
Whether it’s for data analytics, content generation, or another task, there’s no doubt that learning how to use AI in the right manner can skyrocket your efficiency.
Not everything can be learned from books or online courses. If you want to improve your skills as a digital marketer, one of the best ways is to learn from those with more experience than you. As an entrepreneur, this may include a cofounder with a marketing background, a professional mentor, or even a member of your marketing team.
In a startup, a great way to encourage peer-to-peer learning is to set up knowledge shares. For instance, you can get your in-house social media manager to give a quick presentation of the uses of social media in ecommerce. Or, if you’re lucky enough to have an SEO expert on staff, you can ask them to teach the rest of the team how to write content that ranks. Setting up an ecosystem that encourages learning from others will not only benefit you but also allow the rest of your team to upskill.
As an entrepreneur, you’re likely juggling client catch-ups, internal team meetings, and urgent business priorities. But if you want to grow in your role (and make sure your startup thrives long-term), it’s important to block out time for learning and skill development.
Investing in your own growth is also an investment in your business’s future. Start with small, consistent actions and implement the strategies we’ve shared here to gain confidence in your marketing skills.
Over time, those skills will compound and become one of your greatest competitive advantages.
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