At first incredibly new, perhaps even a little threatening, to reasonably attainable and finally being experimented, tried and tested – digital marketing was a lingering question mark that soon took over the entirety of the Internet. Infiltrating multiple industries, and constantly gaining momentum, it’s easy to buy a ticket to get on the train but earning your spot is a test of time, skill and patience.

If you’ve taken the plunge and believe you’re a digital marketing expert, it can’t hurt to take those skills for a spin:

Your website is your identity. Establishing legitimacy for your brand is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. From showcasing products, services, to advertising, marketing, and enhancing transparency and reach, it is a one-stop-shop for all things digital marketing.

Be it building awareness, driving traffic, SEO or generating leads, all efforts are ultimately linked to your website and the transparency it provides. From accessibility to sales and credibility, a well-optimized website is key to executing a robust digital marketing strategy.

So you’ve got your campaign up and running, but do you have what it takes to see it all the way through?

With data-driven marketing rapidly affording personalized content, higher engagement, omnichannel marketing and targeted reach, mastering third-party data management platforms such as Google Analytics are essential for successfully setting KPIs and tracking performance against them.

Today’s modern and sophisticated digital marketing strategies often require more than one supplementary tool that provides the data needed for tracking patterns, measuring your performance, and improving your campaign in real-time. Monitoring and measuring the performance is a must for optimization, scalability, and for deriving greater ROAS, making you an agile modern marketer.

To hone in on which aspects of your campaign are really working for you, or even not working for you, A/B testing, which is checking the impact of an independent variable on dependent ones, is a skill that tests your mettle as a digital marketing expert. Your website, UI/UX any aspect of your campaign must be tested continuously to weed out any weaknesses and arrive at data-backed decisions tailored to better facilitate growth

By eliminating the speculation involved, A/B testing essentially narrows down the elements of your diverse strategy to understand the unique optimizations, variants or features that work for your campaign and thereby help you increase ROI.

With the right knowledge and strategy, organic marketing can be used to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and engage with your audience via best practices performed across channels. While paid marketing focuses on driving specific actions, organic practices can be used to meet larger awareness and customer engagement goals.

Building your audience and results organically also translates to deeper integrations and more value derived for your brand. Optimizing content, SEO and mobile-friendly UI/UX are just the bottom rung of the ladder in climbing the organic best practices ladder. Boosting legitimacy, conversion, and retention, it is important to master the art of coupling paid practices with organic best ones.

If your website establishes legitimacy for your brand, your certifications perform the same duty for you as a digital marketer. With the skill being greatly in-demand, taking and renewing certifications help you stay relevant, informed, and maintain your presence as an authority on the subject if not helping you acquire the same.

To understand a platform in all its entirety, the certifications are a ready-to-consult booklet on all nuances relating to requirements, performance, budgets, measurement, unique offerings of the platforms, and how to optimize them. Be it Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, or even Apple Ads, completing these courses is bound to help you scale the wall more easily.

With consumers staggering backward against the force of content constantly pouring in, digital marketing skills, tips, and tricks are only truly effective when coupled with grammar, brevity, and SEO-friendly content that hooks your customer in.

For storytelling, building trust, conveying your key messaging, and inciting users to click on relevant CTAs, well-informed and astute copywriting skills come into play for carrying your customer through from the start to the end of your campaign.

With consumers already fully saturated with the content circulating the web, your creatives become compelling advertisements that set the tone for successful user acquisition. Be it aesthetic visuals, animated illustrations, or short-form videos narrating the value of your product/ service, smart content can inspire your user to give their attention.

With thumb-stopping creatives that offer users personalized messaging, these non-textual content assets ensure that the customer follows you from point A to Z in delivering a successful campaign.

Managing large budgets is an essential milestone in your digital marketing journey. With these funds enabling access to a wider variety of features and services on various platforms, strategic management of large budgets for campaigns helps you develop a 360-degree understanding of the landscape.

Strategizing and successfully executing campaigns of all shapes and sizes, ensures that you can cater to any brief given and deliver the desired outcome with well-managed resources.

Like a train that never arrives at the station, modern-marketers, by nature, have to be life-long learners that never stop studying, upskilling and experimenting. Competitive, data-driven, and constantly influenced by new platforms, tools and developments, it is crucial to have a strong foundation allowing you to stay relevant in an ever-changing industry.