The demand for successful digital marketing leaders is rising because digital is thriving as one of the most lucrative and fastest-growing industries in the past half-decade.
Whether you aspire to enter the digital marketing field or are already in the business with a digital marketing career, there are endless opportunities to improve yourself as a digital marketer and digital marketing leader.
Below, we’ll discuss the top 7 essential traits of a successful digital marketing leader. Learning how to improve yourself in these areas can help grow your digital marketing career and leadership and move forward in the lucrative digital marketing field.
1. Analytical Thinking
Modern digital marketing now demands data-driven approaches. A successful digital marketer in 2021 should always analyze and compare data, insights, statistics, and trends to ensure the business can always stay ahead of its competition.
Digital mediums and channels allow marketers to measure the ROI of different marketing campaigns. Digital marketers should leverage this to track the progress of campaigns according to the marketing objectives, generate more leads and revenue, and secure the commitment from stakeholders and executives for future marketing budgets.
It’s not enough for digital marketers to develop great campaign ideas. Still, they should also take the scientific approach to back creativity with data, ensuring the objectiveness of the campaigns, aggregating and analyzing data to provide more informed decisions, and more effective communication of the marketing strategy to their team.
2. Creative Problem Solving
On the one hand, modern digital marketers must be data-driven. Still, on the other hand, creativity is another essential quality that must be possessed by any digital marketing role, not only for creators and strategists but also for marketing managers and other leadership roles.
Marketing won’t be effective; it’s not engaging and interesting, and it takes creative ideas to develop engaging marketing campaigns that can attract your target audience.
We can always expect something new virtually every day in digital marketing: new Google algorithms affecting your website’s SEO, new competitor’s ad or campaign, negative customer reviews, and so on. New challenges and situations that demand quick decision-making are the norms in digital marketing, and digital marketers are always expected to be creative and stay on top of their game in solving these problems.
3. Cybersecurity Awareness
In this day and age, where data is now the world’s most valuable asset, digital marketers are not only required to possess the technical skills and knowledge related to marketing, but awareness regarding data privacy and cybersecurity threats is also critical.
There’s no value in successfully generating many leads and other marketing successes when hackers and cybercriminals steal our valuable and sensitive data. Even worse, the protection of customers’ sensitive data is heavily regulated in many countries. Thus, being affected by data breaches and other cyber attack vectors may result in expensive legal fines besides loss in revenue and profits. Also, it can ruin the business’s reputation on a long-term or even permanent basis.
Cybersecurity can also directly affect the performance of some marketing campaigns. For example, a successful digital marketer must have sufficient knowledge to protect the website from web scraping bots, which can ruin our site’s SEO performance by creating duplicate content issues.
4. Communication Skills
At the core, digital marketing is about communicating personalized and targeted messages to a target prospect/customer. Thus, adequate communication skills are essential for any successful digital marketer.
On the one hand, digital marketers must use these communication skills to craft engaging product stories and brand messages that can effectively engage audiences on an emotional level. On the other hand, communicating the marketing strategy, insights, and data to the rest of the marketing team and other stakeholders is crucial.
5. The Ability To Stay Motivated and Disciplined
Digital marketing is often a field that allows flexibility in time and overall professional freedom. So, if digital marketers can’t stay motivated and push themselves to follow through in finishing their tasks and jobs, they’ll never succeed.
With remote working becoming more common, digital marketing is presented with more autonomy. While it can be a good thing in many cases, it will also mean you alone will be responsible for managing your own time, deciding which tasks to prioritize, and so on.
Unless you can maintain a high level of discipline and stay motivated, it will be challenging, if not impossible, to succeed in digital marketing.
6. Curiosity and Desire To Learn
Digital marketing, as we know, is a rapidly evolving field. There will always be new marketing channels to adopt, new technologies to implement, and new strategies from competitors we can adapt against and imitate.
Passion for lifelong learning is a must-have quality for anybody who wants to be successful in digital marketing, and there are many activities you can do to stay up-to-date with the latest trends, information, best practices, and knowledge, including:
● Taking digital marketing certifications and credible courses can be valuable
● Attending online/offline events and conferences
● Staying up-to-date with current industry news like SEO algorithm changes, new social channels, new apps and technologies to pay attention to, etc.
● Take refresher courses on essential topics to update your knowledge
● Learn new relevant skills (copywriting, graphic design, etc. )
Curiosity is critical and arguably one of the essential traits of being a successful digital marketing leader.
7. Leadership
Digital marketing is a field that involves a lot of different people with different roles, skills, and requirements.
It’s challenging, if not impossible, to do everything by yourself in digital marketing, and it’s more productive for marketers to work with others with different skills and backgrounds to achieve the same goal, in short, having a good marketing team.
Strong leadership and management are required to ensure tasks get done on time and accurately: assigning roles and responsibilities, delegating projects, and motivating everyone to stay focused and on track. This is extremely difficult and will only become more difficult the more prominent your marketing team grows.
This also means that a successful digital marketing leader must collaborate and work together in a team: prioritizing team efforts rather than individual agendas is very important in achieving digital marketing success.
Related Articles
Conclusion
As you can see, digital marketing isn’t exactly rocket science. Still, by having the traits we’ve discussed above, you can develop yourself further as a digital marketer and digital marketing leader and stay on top of this competitive but highly lucrative industry.
Above all, successful digital marketers must always stay up-to-date with the latest trends and have the curiosity and passion for accommodating lifelong learning. With today’s cybersecurity threats on the rise, awareness of data privacy and cybersecurity best practices is also an essential trait.
Would you like to contribute a post?
Thank you for sharing such a nice and interesting blog and really very helpful article.