The reality is, people spend twice as much time online as they used to 12 years ago. And while we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed, meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means that you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

Enter digital marketing — in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.

We talk a lot about inbound marketing as a really effective way to attract, convert, close, and delight customers online. But we still get a lot of questions from people all around the world about digital marketing.

Whilst a seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually the same thing, there are some minor differences. And after having conversations with marketers and business owners in the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I’ve learned a lot about how those small differences are being observed across the world.

So What Exactly is Digital Marketing?

From your website itself to your online branding assets — digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond — there’s a huge spectrum of tactics and assets that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. And the best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each asset or tactic supports their overarching goals.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most common assets and tactics:

Assets

• Your website
• Blog posts
• Ebooks and whitepapers
• Infographics
• Interactive tools
• Social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
• Earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
• Online brochures and lookbooks
• Branding assets (logos, fonts, etc.)

Tactics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of optimizing your website to ‘rank’ higher in search engine results pages, therefore increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic that your website receives.

Content Marketing

The creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, or customers.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to the ‘full-funnel’ approach to attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers using online content.

Social Media Marketing

The practice of promoting your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

A method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords.

Affiliate Marketing

A type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website.

Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be ‘native’  — for example, Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.

Email Marketing

Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people towards the business’ website.

Online PR

Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space.

What’s the Difference Between Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing?

On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online, and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. So what’s the difference?

The term ‘digital marketing’ doesn’t differentiate between push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might now refer to as ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ methods). Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.

Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space — regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready to receive it.

On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.

Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, convert, close, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.

Does Digital Marketing Work for All Businesses? B2B and B2C?

Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs, and creating valuable online content. However, that’s not to say that all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.

For B2B

If your company is B2B, your digital marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.

Beyond your website, you’ll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online.

For B2C

If your company is B2C, depending on the price point of your products, it’s likely that the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.

For that reason, you’re probably less likely to focus on ‘leads’ in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated buyer’s journey, from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).

For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.

What Are the Main Benefits of Digital Marketing?

Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever put an advert in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.

Here are some examples:

Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software. You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.

This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.

With offline marketing, it’s very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.

Content Performance and Lead Generation

Imagine you’ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s letterboxes — that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.

Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you’re also generating qualified leads when people download it.

Attribution Modeling

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business. We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.

Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important — according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer’s’ journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it’s likely to reflect positively on your business’s bottom line.

What Kind of Content Should I Be Creating?

The kind of content you create depends on your audience’s needs at different stages in the buyer’s journey. You should start by creating buyer personas (use these free templates, or try makemypersona.com) to identify what your audience’s goals and challenges are in relation to your business. On a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals, and overcome their challenges.

Then, you’ll need to think about when they’re most likely to be ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they’re at in their buyer’s journey. We call this content mapping.

With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:

1. The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that’s where buyer personas come in).
2. How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage).

In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here are some options we’d recommend using at each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness Stage

• Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.
• Infographics. Very shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social media when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates to get you started.)
• Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.

Consideration Stage

• Ebooks. Great for lead generation as they’re generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it.
• Research reports. Again, this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage though, as they’re often picked-up by the media or industry press.
• Webinars. As they’re a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.

Decision Stage

• Case studies. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively influence their decision.
• Testimonials. If case studies aren’t a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you’re a clothing brand, these might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.

How Long Will It Take to See Results?

With digital marketing, it can often feel like you’re able to see results much faster than you might with offline marketing due to the fact it’s easier to measure ROI. However, it ultimately depends entirely on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.

If you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you’re likely to see strong results within the first six months.

If paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker — but it’s recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content, SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable success.

Digital marketing is one of the most lucrative industries in the modern world. With just a laptop and Internet connection, there is really no limit to what you can accomplish and how much money you can make through digital marketing. Personally, I’ve worked on nearly every continent. You can reach millions of people around the world with your message or product in a matter of hours.

To get an idea of how quickly digital marketing is growing, check out the graphic below:

This puts digital marketing skills in high demand for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

It’s not just entrepreneurs who need digital marketing chops. With the right digital marketing skill set, you can become one of the most valuable members of a company within a very short period of time.

Whether you work in an established business, a startup, or as a solopreneur, digital marketing skills are absolutely essential.

Sure, it’s tough to master every aspect of digital marketing—it’s a big pond.

Thankfully, there are dozens of sub-skills in the digital marketing world. You can choose where you want to go deep.

Whether you are more creative or analytical, a team player or a lone wolf, there are jobs within digital marketing for you.

But what are the most important skills you need to be cultivating if you want to make a living (or a fortune) in digital marketing?

Here is a list of the nine most in demand digital marketing skills :

1. SEO specialist

It should come as little surprise that SEO is the skill at the top of this list.

You’re thinking, “C’mon, Neil. It’s 2016. SEO is kind of defunct, right?”

Some people like to believe that SEO is dead, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

SEO is just as important now as it’s ever been, if not more so.

But there is far more to SEO than just getting your website to show up for certain search queries.

Due to the changes in Google’s search algorithm, SEO practices are changing.

Businesses are beginning to understand the importance of white-hat marketing techniques, such as content marketing and guest blogging, which are becoming a critical part of SEO success.

Because of all of the changes within the world of SEO, hiring a dedicated team of SEO experts has become darn near a necessity.

Companies need a person or a group who can keep up with the rapidly evolving world of SEO.

They need people who understand the importance of providing value to the customer in addition to the technical side of things.

If you want to land a high-paying job within the digital marketing world, learn SEO and watch the offers roll in.

However, I should warn you.

SEO is not easy.

It’s something that evolves on a regular basis and requires a genuine interest to stay on top of the almost constant changes to the search algorithms and best practices.

2. PPC executive/specialist

Another skill that’s currently in high demand is PPC marketing. There are a number of businesses generating high amounts of revenue who want to expand their reach through paid advertising. The problem is, they don’t know how to properly allocate that money to ensure that it generates a high ROI. That’s where PPC marketing comes in.

The ultimate goal of PPC is to help a company’s website reach rank #1 within Google by bringing in high quality, targeted traffic. In theory, this sounds incredibly simple. But in practice, this is one of the most difficult marketing jobs in the world.

You have to have a strong grasp of math, marketing strategy, and analytics.

You also need to know Google Analytics and AdWords like the back of your hand.

And then, you need to be able to develop campaigns that are providing measurable results to your clients, analyze those campaigns, and report on them.

PPC is incredibly complicated, important, and high investment/risk.

Which is why it’s also one of the best paying marketing jobs on the modern market.

If you can effectively show companies that you know how to bring in targeted traffic through PPC for the lowest cost possible, you’ll be able to generate massive amounts of revenue for years to come.

3. Social media expert

Social media is one of the single most powerful tools in the modern marketing world.

Over the past decade, social media has been growing faster than the Internet!

And it isn’t slowing down.

Nearly one-third of the population is currently using some type of social media platform.

It shouldn’t surprise you that companies are looking to capitalize on this unique marketing opportunity.

However, most companies, even many tech companies, simply have no understanding of how to leverage the different social platforms to achieve their goals.

This makes social media marketing an invaluable skill set to learn and cultivate.

And the thing is, there is a lot more to social media marketing than just promoting content on Facebook.

If you want to set yourself apart from the crowd, you need to master each platform.

This means understanding the best times of day to post, the types of posts that generate the most user engagement, and the ways to use each platform to achieve specific goals.

And once you understand the basics of social media marketing, you need to understand how to leverage paid social media marketing.

You need to develop an understanding of copywriting, color psychology, analytics, and visual marketing. This is no easy task.

Because of how difficult it is to master social media marketing, it’s become on of the most sought after and highly paid digital marketing positions in the world.

Prove to clients you can generate measurable results that will grow their businesses through social media, and you will be richly rewarded.

4. Email marketing

There are few things that are more important to online success than email marketing.

If you have a large email list and you know how to leverage it, you can make large amounts of income every month with almost no work.

If you want to be someone who has employers knocking down your door, instead of spending hours and hours every day searching for new clients, learn email marketing.

And I don’t just mean writing emails that convert.

I mean the whole process.

You see, most businesses have no problem hiring someone who can write high quality emails that will generate a few conversions.

But there is more to email marketing than simply writing some fancy emails.

Companies need people who can help them build huge lists from scratch and then use those lists to achieve a variety of goals.

Building an email list of tens of thousands without an existing client base is an extremely challenging task.

And if you know how to do it, you possess an extremely valuable skill.

Beyond that, companies also need people who can use those lists to grow their social media following, promote new products, and drive new sales.

If you can learn how to master the email marketing process from start to finish, you will have clients begging to work with you.

5. Mobile marketing

One of the most sought after, and yet most overlooked, skills is the art of mobile marketing.

While there are plenty of similarities between desktop and mobile marketing, there are also enough differences to make this an essential standalone skill.

To add real value to the company, you need to understand these differences and why they are important to the rest of the business.

You also need to be able to talk intelligently about the more complicated aspects of mobile marketing such as SMS and responsive design.

One of the great things about mobile marketing jobs is that they are significantly less competitive than SEO or social media marketing jobs but are still a huge need for most businesses.

It seems like everyone and their brother is a self-proclaimed “Facebook Guru” or SEO consultant.

But how often do you hear about mobile marketing managers?

Mobile marketing is a challenging field to master.

But if you can do it, you’ll set yourself apart from the herd of other digital marketers.

This will all but guarantee high paying jobs for years to come.

6. Analytics

One of the single most important parts of digital marketing is analytics.

You can learn all the previously mentioned skills, but without the power of analytics, you’ll always be fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

In any marketing campaign, it is essential to run tests, track data, and then analyze that data to determine how you can improve and overcome marketing plateaus.

To become the best digital marketer you can be, you need to be able to analyze your other marketing efforts and make improvements based on what you learn.

This is the only way to truly put your marketing skills in the fast lane and achieve real success.

7. Content management/marketing

Content marketing is king.

We live in the age of information.

If you don’t have some sort of content that’s bringing viewers and keeping them hooked, you’ll fall behind.

This makes content management and marketing a highly valuable skill, especially for startups.

If you can learn how to curate and create incredible content for companies and then market that content to the point of it going viral, you’ll become one of the most valuable assets for those companies.

The cool thing about content marketing is that it goes hand in hand with many other skills listed in this article.

If you can learn how to improve your social media skills, you’ll improve your content marketing skills.

If you improve your abilities as an SEO, you’ll improve your ability to create viral content.

Basically, any digital marketing skill you develop will improve your skills with content marketing.

Because of the crossover between skills, mastering content marketing will give you invaluable leverage whether you are looking for clients or growing your own business.

If you can get a couple of viral articles or videos under your belt, the sky’s the limit, and you will be able to take yourself as high as you want.

8. Marketing automation

Companies need marketing automation solutions now more than ever.

Marketing is not an inexpensive endeavor.

Figuring out how to set up technology and software that streamlines the process as much as possible is an invaluable skill set.

However, mastering the art of marketing automation requires a wide knowledge base and an understanding of several different software platforms.

You need to learn the most efficient ways to automate email, social media, and content marketing, all without breaking your client’s budget.

If you can do this, you’ll be able to ask for just about any figure you want.

Most companies have no problem paying a top dollar to individuals who can save them money, make them money, and cut back on their workload at the same time.

9. UX design

One of the determining factors in online marketing success is the experience a user has once they’ve found your company.

Potential customers want to be able to navigate through your content as easily as possible, enjoying an aesthetically pleasing and streamlined experience.

In fact, customers will often base the credibility of an entire business on the design of its website alone:

UX designers are responsible for ensuring that products, websites, and other online platforms are easy to use and provide the customer with a pleasant experience.

Unlike most of the skills listed in this article, design is not directly responsible for bringing in new customers or generating leads.

However, it is responsible for ensuring that all of the effort companies put into other online marketing avenues is maximized.

It doesn’t matter if you are incredible at SEO, a social media marketing ninja, and an email marketing master.

If customers can’t easily access, navigate, and use your website and products, all of that effort will be in vain.

And with the growing expectations of the modern consumer, this digital marketing skill set is more crucial now than it’s ever been.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is one of the best industries for the modern freelancer or entrepreneur to be involved in.

There are no commission caps, no ceilings, and no limits.

If you can learn to cultivate marketable skills (no pun intended), there is no limit to how much you can earn and grow.

It doesn’t matter whether you are running your own business, freelancing for a variety of clients, or just looking for a stable job with one company.

Digital marketing is one of the most lucrative and important digital marketing skills you can acquire.