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The Digital Marketing Skills Gap in 2015

Author's avatar By Susanne Colwyn 10 Feb, 2015
Essential Essential topic

The biggest gap is surprising..

Where are marketers most keen to improve their skills in digital marketing? Since all the tools in our digital marketing library are aimed at helping members improve their digital skills we were interested to know where people felt confident and where they want to top up their skills.

So we asked this question in our recent research looking at how digital marketing is managed in 2015. The chart shows that over half of respondents feel confident in their own skills or they know sufficient although there is still a huge appetite to learn 'across the board' as shown by the red bars:

assessment of digital marketing skills research

We might expect from what's discussed online, that the gap would be social media, content marketing or strategy, but when looking at the highest percentage of those that need to improve their depth of knowledge -  it's in CRM and Big Data. Given that 60% of most Marketers time is spent in digital marketing, it's not surprising that skills development and acquiring knowledge is key. We have seen this interesting in increasing customer knowledge and data before and have developed resources to support this including our Marketing Automation guide by Jordie van Rijn and our Managing Customer data to improve ROI guide by Jim Roberts.

If you're interested in seeing how your skills set matches that of what employers are looking for, or if you're reviewing the skills set in your team, see our templates on Digital Marketing Job Descriptions and Structuring a marketing / digital team.

For a broader view on the skills gap in 2015 see this new report referencing the marketing skills gap from the CMO POV from the Economist.

We think this analysis is too high level since "Digital Engagement" is everything from social media through website design to email marketing!

Free Research Download for members

Author's avatar

By Susanne Colwyn

Susanne is a Marketing Consultant and Trainer, with over 20 years marketing experience in the public and private sector. She's passionate about supporting companies with practical result driven marketing, to help focus companies on evaluating and driving their marketing forward. Experienced in Integrated Strategic Marketing Planning, Data Segmentation, Customer Relationship Management Systems, Customer Insight and reviewing internal systems, data and processes, to maximise conversion strategies and the customer experience. You can connect with her via her LinkedIn or follow her @Qtymarketing.

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Digital Marketing Skills

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