5 Digital Marketing Skills You Must Have – 2023

Did you know that 95% of consumers read online reviews before buying a product?

The need of the hour is to go phygital. More and more businesses are leveraging online presence to establish good brand credibility.

However, maintaining an effective digital marketing presence can be difficult – especially if you don’t have the time or resources to do it yourself. That’s where freelancers can come in handy. 

You can outsource the digital marketing tasks to experts, which will further save you time and cost both. The purpose here could be to drive traffic, and reach a wider audience for your brand’s social media platforms. 

But before you jump the gun and start outsourcing your digital marketing tasks, read this to have a look at our suggested list.

Who Is A Freelance Digital Marketer? 

Digital marketing is an umbrella for different types of marketing that includes content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and SEM. 

Freelance digital marketers are professionals who offer freelancing services to promote their clients’ products and services and improve sales using different social media tools for businesses.

These freelance digital marketing experts also use various means such as emails, websites, mobile, video marketing, SEO, and more. 

Most freelancers work remotely, but they stay connected with their clients regularly, or whenever needed, through video collaboration tools

Why Outsource Digital Marketing To A Freelancer?

A recent study shows that 81% of businesses are using freelance talent to support their full-time staff and fill the skills gap due to the economic crises. Here’s a list of how outsourcing freelancers for digital marketing benefits your business in many ways:

  • Outsourcing book marketing services to a freelancer saves you time by minimizing the efforts that would have been utilized in the hiring process (recruiting, hiring, and then onboarding a new employee).
  • Outsourcing freelancers over hiring a new employee will save you 30% of your costs (According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, salaries typically account for about 70% of an employee’s package, while the rest of the 30% is all about taxes and employee benefits)
  • Saves you infrastructure costs, training costs, and utility costs. You wouldn’t need a dedicated workspace as freelancers can work remotely. 
  • Outsourcing freelancers welcome new ideas for the project and prevent in-house employees from overworking in some cases. 
  • You have the option to terminate the contract in case the freelancer doesn’t reach your expectations.
  • You can focus on other important business tasks, hence helping you to improve the quality of your services. 

Digital Marketing Skills

Choosing the right talent from such a vast talent pool is not an easy task. There are factors, such as your project requirements, work details, skills, etc, that you need to look at before choosing a freelancer.

1. Social Media Strategies

Social media marketing is your best friend. It offers a free platform that has many variables that can impact your business revenue to a much higher level. According to statistics, 93% of marketers worldwide are using social media for business. 

Outsourcing this bit to a freelancer with expertise in social media marketing is a turning point for your digital marketing strategy due to its massive built-in audience. This can help you to increase sales and traffic to your company with little to no investment in advertising, just the right strategies and consistency.

2. Graphic Design 

Quality visuals leave a great impact on your customers and help you grab their attention. Statistics reveal Facebook posts with relevant images get 2.3 times more engagement than one without relevant images. 

Hiring freelance graphic designers with expertise in creating professional business cards, posters, flyers, logos, ads, and infographics will help you to increase the reach of your business.

Check out the freelance rates for a graphic designer.

Looking to become a UX designer and start your career off on the right foot? Our blog has got you covered with all the information you need to get started!

3. PPC Marketing 

PPC marketing is another great bucket to outsource. This drives traffic, although it requires paying a certain amount to the advertisers each time one of their ads is clicked. Displaying ads increases website traffic by up to 300%, while statistics show that paid search ads can increase brand awareness by 80%.

Freelancers must have experience with PPC marketing where they can use social media advertising to display ads to Google ads. Consider outsourcing freelancers who have skills to determine bid strategy and analyze Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) rates.

4. Search Engine Optimization

A strong SEO strategy is crucial for your business to grow your online presence and rank your website in the search results by organic means. According to BrightEdge, organic search drives 53.3% of all website traffic, therefore you cannot turn a blind eye to SEO strategies. 

Choose freelancers who can use different techniques, like optimizing your web content to Google’s criteria, to improve website ranking. They must have expertise in sharing and uploading content with effective content marketing strategies, keyword research, SEO audits, and influencer marketing. 

Check out how to become freelance SEO professional.

5. Web Analytics 

Web analytics is an important part of your online digital marketing success, as it focuses on collecting and analyzing relevant data. This data helps you track your customer behavior and activities across different platforms. 

You must check if your outsourced freelancer uses web analytics to fetch granular data and give you valuable information about your business and customer. It can help to determine where the website visitors are coming from—ads or organic search. 

Additionally, it evaluates their stay on the website and the bounce rate. It provides much deeper demographic information for generating personalized recommendations for your potential customers. 

Also Read:
Important Roles as a Freelancer>
Beginner’s guide to web designing>

7 Digital Marketing Tools To Help Manage Your Outsourced Work

While we are talking about outsourcing some of the skills, there are tools that can help you manage your digital marketing. Here are some tools that they can use to make their work easy:

1. SEMrush for SEO

SEMrush is an online marketing tool that covers content marketing, SEO, PPC, competitor research, etc. It offers a massive SERP database of over 106 million keywords and 71 million domains, which freelancers can use to optimize their content for SERPs—making it ideal for SEO marketing. 

Digital marketing freelance professionals can use it to gather information about competitive content analysis, backlink opportunities, and more. With the feature-rich tool SEMrush, they can increase website traffic, get backlinks, and differentiate the brand from the competition.

Although its user interface is complicated, its high-in-demand features overcome its complexity. 

With reliable keyword search results and backlink analysis, it stands out as one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated tools for SEO. It offers comprehensive features, ideal for freelance SEO professionals, such as domain analysis, technical SEO audits, link monitoring, etc. 

2. Hubspot for Customer Relationship Management

Hubspot is great for digital marketing freelancers who manage customer relationships. This CRM software provides information to keep track of interactions, data, and notes about customers or potential leads

It helps freelancers to track and analyze sales activities, marketing efforts, and customer service performance. Moreover, they can streamline accounting and management for companies in real-time with this tool. 

HubSpot evaluates marketing plans for freelancers in terms of sales and general performance when they set up an account and distribute their content. Also, it helps to establish a workflow or process to follow.

3. WordPress for Content Management

WordPress provides a complete suite to content marketing freelancers who need to create actionable content to generate leads

WordPress is ideal for creating blog content for websites. It provides marketers with tools essential to set up a blog or website, as well as a publishing platform that is simple to use for content creation, uploading files, visitor tracking, etc.  

Moreover, WordPress content management system (CMS) offers plugins to help freelancers to optimize their marketing process.

You can also check best tools for a freelance content writer

Nifty is an Asana Alternative that is definitely worth considering for your project management requirements

4. Asana for Project Management

Asana is a well-known project management tool that enables teams to communicate and work together on projects while using a single platform to discuss daily tasks, goals, and objectives. It is great for freelancers to collaborate with the team and the company. 

It has a task board view with a task dependence mechanism that allows freelancers to update the status of tasks. This helps freelancers to manage their work by keeping their clients informed and updated. 

With this, it’s simple to share projects among freelancers and other team members and keep track of overall team performance. And, if you want to learn more about project management, you can use its various resources

You can also check freelancer management tools to supercharge your business.

5. Boomerang for Email Management

Boomerang is a great tool for freelance marketers to stay on top of their email communications. It allows freelancers to schedule and respond to emails according to their feasibility.

In addition to this, Boomerang makes use of artificial intelligence to write more readable and engaging emails. Apart from scheduling emails, freelancers can see opened, clicked, or read emails. It also allows them to set automated follow-ups for easier email management.

They can use its “Inbox pause” feature to pause emails from appearing in their inbox so that they won’t get overwhelmed by overflowing work emails. 

Check out tips to make interactive emails.

6. RingCentral For The Message, Video, And Phone Communication

RingCentral MVP is designed to be a versatile tool for seamless team collaboration. It works great for freelancers to collaborate with their clients.

It’s the most comprehensive online communication platform that allows freelancers to communicate with the company and the team through a single, easy-to-access application interface. Freelancers can schedule or launch video meetings with screen-sharing and live transcription features, engage in group collaboration, and even opt for instant messaging. 

Additionally, freelancers will get a VoIP phone system for the home office. With this, it’s easy to make and receive business calls from everywhere, as long as they have a stable internet connection. 

Freelancers can also use in-app file sharing and task management capabilities to improve day-to-day collaboration. 

You can also check effective client communication skills for freelancers.

7. SproutSocial for Social Media Management 

SproutSocial is one of the top-rated social media management tools that help businesses to grow their online social media presence along with allowing business owners to manage messages from different social platforms. Similarly, it’s great for freelancers to save time and effort, as this tool automatically publishes your posts according to the preset schedule. 

Freelancers using this platform can view all their social media activities which include posting, monitoring, and sharing posts to enhance engagement within different platforms.

This tool allows freelancers to monitor the data of the brand’s customers and who they like to engage with—to give them a detailed picture of the main areas they need to work on to get better results. This will not only help them boost a brand’s user engagement but helps to generate good revenue, too. 

SproutSocial has CRM features that can help freelancers to monitor their client’s active customers and keep track of them to serve them better. 

You can also check social media platforms for freelance businesses

Summary

The digital marketing landscape is extremely competitive and having every single skill available at your firm is quite impossible and pricey. Hiring freelancers has opened ways to have all skills required for a project in a cost-effective way. 

Moreover, it helps business owners to free up their time and plan for strategic decision-making and growth planning. Any type of work, from graphic designing to social media management, can be outsourced. Keep in mind to always check the skills and work portfolio of freelancers before hiring them.