This post is inspired by the brilliant CRAP or CARE model by Mikko Piippo (this acronym is much poorer but have to start somewhere :). Transferrable skills are beneficial across different digital marketing roles, regardless of the specialization.
Analytics
The skill needed in every area of digital marketing, whether advertising, PPC, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, conversion optimization, and so on. The ability to choose the right metrics for a given use case, understand their relevance to broader goals, apply absolute and relative metrics where needed, and draw actionable conclusions from data.
Automation
The ability to design analytics requirements, build marketing product feeds, configure email marketing workflows. Understanding what can and should be automated and what not.
Communication
The ability to write short, concise emails that contain the right amount of information in an actionable and unambiguous format. Non-actionable emails = I receive it, I don’t know what to do. Ambiguous = this sentence; it can mean A or B, not clearly stated which one.
The ability to sell your ideas. Even with the right data, you can fail at selling your conclusions. You need to make people care about the problem, create a story they can understand and are willing to listen to, and present the conclusions confidently. Wrong data and conclusions can easily trump correct data if they are presented better, so data without communication will get you nowhere.
Optimization
The ability to use the combination of data, intuition, and expertise to make changes in the real world and then observe how those changes performed.
The ability to take a given account, channel, or campaign and come up with a plan to improve it.