Key Skills of a Social Media Marketer

In an increasingly competitive marketing landscape, small businesses have to learn to invest in the right teams. Our previous article discussed whether you should be hiring a marketing agency or an employee based on budget, timing, and expertise. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and sometimes it all boils down to preference.

Above all else, however, it's important that whoever you hire has the right skills for social media marketing. Examining their credentials can help. In a heavily digitized industry, today’s marketing degrees focus on digital skills such as search engine marketing (SEM) and data analytics. Diverse topics like consumer behavior and product development are also essential to equip trained marketers with the right tools to face any challenges ahead.

How do these tools manifest in practice? Well, here are the skills that social media marketers need to work in the field.

Traditional and digital marketing

Digital advertising is certainly the current trend. However, social media marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and is a combination of a lot of techniques. That's why marketers need to be holistically skilled in social media marketing, alongside traditional and digital marketing.

Using a blended campaign will allow you to set yourselves apart from other marketers who only focus on social media marketing. By reviewing and incorporating other strategies such as email, lead generation, public relations, live or online events, and more, you'll be able to establish a clearer brand and improve sales accordingly.

Time management

A multifaceted campaign is the key to ensuring success in social media marketing. However, this can take months to plan, meaning social media marketers need to be duly skilled at micro and macro planning. This will allow them to see both the short and long term pictures of how the campaign will be rolled out. At the same time, this allows social media managers to efficiently manage the labor force to maximize output while minimizing risks for backlogs.

Here, it can help if social media managers are equally skilled in using technology such as project management tools. Marketers who record their activities are more likely to complete tasks on time, and assure smoother operations on a proper schedule.

Agility and flexibility

Dealing with deadlines and multiple projects means that marketers need to be agile and constantly ready for strategic changes. This will allow them to tactically respond as changes occur. For modern marketers, agility therefore means using marketing data to consistently evaluate campaign performance, find new opportunities, identify problems and make changes in real time, enabling them to stay on top of new trends and technology.

Every good marketer is thus familiar with the dynamic nature of the industry. There's a back-up plan to every campaign, and social media marketers are able to adapt when abrupt changes occur. This is done through an analytical approach to every situation and can only be trained through practice.

Customer care

In the digital age, customer care is also a social media skill. In fact, 33% of consumers prefer to reach out to brands on social media with a customer service issue or question. In recent years, many businesses have sought to reduce personnel costs by automating certain processes, but human interaction still creates a competitive advantage.

This is where social media marketers step in. Not only must they listen to and understand the concerns of the customer, but they must also be proactive about what future customers might say. Centering future marketing campaigns around this data is then the key to garnering sales and loyal customers.

Social media marketing is expected to continuously evolve. By being equipped with the key skills, social media marketers can ensure that they not only survive the changing marketing landscape, but also lead and stand out from the competition.

Written by Regina Jesse
Article submitted to Digitally Driven