The results from our survey of over 700 marketing professionals are in! The responses have allowed us to develop a picture of the current state of digital marketing skills. They come from across the UK and US, but were predominantly from UK marketers, so help us to accurately understand the digital skills landscape of the UK marketing industry in 2016.
Marketers tend to fancy themselves as fairly skilled in strategy, content marketing and social media marketing. Although interestingly no one area had over 50% ranking themselves as skilled or highly skilled, and a considerable 38% also said they wanted to improve their strategy and planning skills. This was the skill marketers were most likely to say they wanted to improve.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is a real shortage of more technical expertise like coding, mobile marketing and graphic design. A lack of coding and graphic design knowelege may not be an issue in larger businesses with dedicated departments, but for marketers in small organisations it's useful to at least know the basics so things can be tweaked and the operation doesn't grind to a halt when a specialist member of staff is off on his or her holidays.
By Robert Allen
Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.
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