“There won’t be any Search engine Marketing Experts in the next five years”
Said my manager a few years back.
I didn’t fully agree with it then. But as the future unfolded in the last few years, I can see what he saw then.
We are in the age of automation. And marketing channels are not an exception. Everything is getting simplified. Several Campaign types are removed, and most of the targeting options are reduced.
Going by this trend, running Facebook and Google ads will become so simple in the future that it won't need an expert to run it.
Hence, Digital Marketers, especially Performance Marketers, can’t continue to be doing what they are just doing right now, which is
Campaign Planning
Campaign operation &
Campaign optimization with the inbuild options like budget and bid adjustment
They have to expand their horizon.
Two directions in expansion
You can expand your horizons in two directions
Going deeper into the campaign optimization Or
Expanding broader into the adjacent fields of Digital Marketing
The first one is the high-risk, high-return path. You have to
Keep digging deeper into the campaign data that is not directly available
Keep building hypotheses with partial data you can manage to scrap
Keep trying different hacks from whatever you learn from the data
Lastly, churning out incremental efficiency in campaign optimization that others won’t
However, this is an uncertain path and not for most of us.
Hence, expanding horizontally is the intelligent option.
It is a low-risk, moderate-to-high returns path, and for most Digital marketers, it is the best way forward.
Expanding horizontally
To expand horizontally, you have to learn the tools and techniques that are adjacent to digital marketing, which will enrich your core capability.
I am listing down the top six of them below, which you should expand to, along with the bonus(7th) one suggested by a community of Digital marketers who have already started learning the first six.
Here you go.
1. Google Analytics(4)
It's early days for GA4. Even you can start today and become an expert in it in a year or two.
It helps expand your horizon, not just from marketing but to overall business.
It is an excellent addition to performance marketing skills.
2. Google Tag Manager
Martech is one of the core components of Digital Marketing. GTM is a wonderful tool that helps reduce the tech team's dependency on the martech configuration.
It will have a decent initial learning curve. But once you learn the basics, building on it is very simple.
Controlling Martech will make you super fast and efficient.
3. Basics of Landing Page Design
Today, creating a landing page is very easy. Yet, creating a landing page that converts is tough.
As conversion is the north start metric of Performance Marketing, being hands-on in the Landing page design is a superpower.
4. Conversion Rate Optimization
This is the superset of Landing page optimization.
CRO, as it is commonly called, is the process of optimizing all the pages in the customer conversion funnel, including the Landing page.
It is considered a Product Management domain, but learning it will help you have a great conversation with your adjacent team, leading to faster growth.
5. Excel & Google sheet
I will say a Digital Marketer without Excel skills is like a kiss without a squeeze.
Whatever level you are in currently, you can become the top 25% in digital marketing just by being good at Excel.
6. Creatives
Whether it is creating a simple text ad copy for search ads or putting together a thumb-stopper video for Instagram, creative plays a vital role in digital marketing success today.
They are becoming the targeting methods of performance marketing today.
7.(Bonus)Learning working with AI tools
You can extract more from all the points listed above by using AI tools like chatGPT in your everyday work.
Over the past ten years, knowing how to use Google Search dexterously has been a powerful professional trait. For the current decade it is AI tools.
The idea is don’t get overwhelmed with the hype surrounding it. Just keep it at 10-20% of your attention.
I'm just stopping here without writing a customary conclusion for a long from content as it is not required.
That’s all for this week. I will meet you next week with the next edition of the Digitanomy Newsletter.