8 Essential Skills Every Social Media Marketing Specialist Should Have

When running a business, a website, or both, there are essential skills that must be conquered in order to truly take advantage of the profession, and in this post, we will detail 8 essential skills that every single social media marketing Specialist needs to have. From being creative and understanding your target audience, to having strong analytical skills and excellent written and verbal communication skills, these 8 skills are valued and needed.

8. Understanding of the target audience

Firstly, a healthy and rich understanding of your target audience is crucial. This is because understanding the way your audience thinks is vital when you want to sell them a product or service or advertise to them. If you know you understand the wants and needs of your target audience, you will be a much better social media Marketing specialist.

Also, if you understand your target audience well, you will be able to perform keyword research with ease and gather all the necessary keywords, keyphrases, and long-tail keywords that you know are relevant to your audience, and you can only do this if you understand your target audience well.

Overall, a social media marketing specialist should grasp their target demographic and how to properly contact them. If you don’t, some of the time you will be shooting off into the dark, and this can lead to problems later on, and of course, be a lot more costly.

7. Creativity and flexibility

Another aspect of being a good social media Marketing specialist and one of the skills that are normally required of you is to be creative and to think outside the box. Understanding the way that consumers think and what their urges are can be a hard task to master.

People are becoming more aware of modern-day advertising and sometimes it means creating content and other means of media that may not be seen as an ad at first. Let’s take a look at a real word example.

Corteiz is a “luxury” streetwear brand that has become quite popular over the last couple of years. Their store operates via a drop system, where you cannot buy clothing from their store unless you know the passcode to their store (this ensures that only “true fans” of the brand can buy from their store).

When a drop is announced, not only do their items almost always sell out, but the demand for them is super high, making reselling of the clothing go for an insane amount.

Now, Corteiz has been making the rounds on TikTok a lot recently, however, their most recent stunt (which took place in Wormwood Scrubs, west London) involved announcing a location for a drop, where they sold their “Cargos” for only £0.99 (about $1.22). It’s unsure how many they sold, although it was rumored to be about 330 units.

At the face of it, it seems really pointless, but when you look into it and understand that Corteiz made various TikToks about the drops and managed to get rid of all of them, and if they were sold separately (as in 1 for each person only) and not given in bundles to people, what happens is you have a number of people wearing their brand who are now walking advertisements.

Additionally, the hype that was generated around the £0.99 drops was of course a ton of mostly free advertisement for them. This was due to the fact that many other people were making TikToks and Instagram videos which all racked up millions of views.

So, instead of paying £5,000 – £10,000 on paid ads, to people who will see them in their feed while they’re watching Instagram or playing a game and ignore them and keep scrolling, they spent £7,000 to make as they made around 330 of them, they reached far more people and created a much bigger hype, but more importantly, they created a demand for them. Wearing Corteiz means a bit more, and this, in itself, even if it was not always was Corteiz intended to do, is a creative piece of marketing, which gained them a ton of coverage and brand awareness/popularity.

This may be a bit of a bold and unconventional example, however, stunts like these are what will make you a good social media Marketing specialist.

6. Knowledge of graphic design and video editing software

A good understanding of graphic design and video editing software is of course really important too. But why is this?

A social media marketing specialist has to be familiar with graphic design and video editing tools in order to develop aesthetically appealing and high-quality material for social media platforms.

When we say material we’re talking about ad creatives, offers, content to increase followers and likes, and of course, a way to increase brand awareness, the professional appearance of your company, and customer trust.

Furthermore, it’s also useful to have a good understanding of graphic design and video editing software due to the fact it will allow you to edit ads, social media postings, and email marketing campaigns, much better and more effectively, which will give your brand a much better look, and boost your expertise in the social media marketing specialist field.

5. Understanding of SEO

If you don’t have much money or resources, then a good understanding of SEO can come in really handy. Understanding SEO is crucial since it will raise your content’s visibility and increase the likelihood that more people will view it.

Relying too much on paid advertising, or other forms of advertising can lead to money problems and can not always be as profitable. So, in times like these, SEO is king. For a social media marketing specialist, understanding SEO is really important.

SEO is a long investment type of advertising, and really, it’s not advertising, it’s a way of driving traffic and therefore customers to your site for free. In the long run, it really pays off and will leave you a steady, (and if you work hard) increasing range of people who find your site through keywords related to your niche. Having an understanding of SEO is vital but taking full advantage of it can be even better.

4. Strong analytical skills

The good thing about most social media platforms is that if you use a business account, you get access to a wide array of analytics tools to use to help you understand your customers more on social media.

They give you access to information such as location, age, sex, how long they spent on a post, how many people liked and commented, and how big the reach of the post was. As a social media marketing professional, you should be able to assess data and metrics to determine campaign efficacy and make data-driven decisions.

Having a strong understanding of strong analytical skills means that you will be one step closer to being a better social media marketing specialist and grasping the basics of being a social media marketing specialist.

3. Adaptability

Another aspect of being a good social media marketing specialist is the ability to adapt to different trends and customer behaviors. A great and simple example of this is TikTok.

For example, when TikTok came out in roughly 2019 it was very different from most social media and media viewing platforms. Without saying if it’s for the bad or good, the way TikTok presented its media to its users meant that content had to be much shorter and much flashier to catch the viewer’s attention since all they had to do was simply scroll and they would give the next video provide by an incredibly aggressive and highly sophisticated algorithm.

This meant content had to grab the reader’s attention straight away, and had to be short and sweet. This was because otherwise, users would lose interest very quickly. This is how a social media marketing specialist would adapt to the new trend set by TikTok.

2. Knowledge of paid social media advertising

Another skill you need to know in regards to a social media marketing specialist is knowledge of paid social media advertising is important for a social media marketing specialist because it allows them to effectively reach and target specific audiences, increase brand visibility and drive website traffic, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Paid advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can be highly targeted and provide access to a large audience. Additionally, paid advertising can help to amplify the reach and impact of organic social media marketing efforts.

Therefore, having knowledge of paid social media advertising is an essential skill for a social media marketing specialist to have in order to be able to create and implement effective campaigns. Really, if paid ads are something you want to use in the future when you have more money, it may be something to understand, so you won’t be totally stupified later on.

1. Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Excellent written and verbal communication skills are very important when talking about a social media marketing specialist because, without them, you lose touch with language and can sometimes be unable to talk to your customers in a persuading, professional, or exciting way, and can sound boring, un-trustworthy or inauthentic as a result.

Therefore, when thinking about social media marketing specialist basics, excellent written and verbal communication skills are very important.

Hopefully from this article, you’ve been able to understand and fully get the processes of what it takes to be a social media marketing specialist, or at least a good one. All of this can be tricky, so why not outsource it to a trusted company such as Virtuoso Digital, which can take care of all your marketing-related problems?

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