Soft Skills That Transfer to Digital Marketing

Considering a career in digital marketing but aren’t sure if your experience matches with our job openings? Hear from some of TopSpot’s Team members about the skills they learned in previous jobs that have helped them be successful here. 

Customer Service Skills

At TopSpot, we pride ourselves on our customer service. A big part of digital marketing is working with Clients to achieve their goals. Understanding how to work with people from various perspectives and with differing needs is a skill that can be picked up from any number of roles.

One of our Team Leads used to work in retail before coming to TopSpot. As she puts it, “I learned a lot about how to interact in challenging situations with Clients and how to alleviate frustrations by my demeanor, confidence, and also how I communicated with them.”

Customer service skills can be learned from many jobs. Whether it’s retail, food service, or other office jobs, having the ability to work with your Clients and communicate with them effectively is a skill that every digital marketer should have.

Work in Retail? When working retail, you have to develop empathy, learn to read body language, and be able to handle a fast-paced environment. These are all easily transferrable to an agency role!

Communication Skills

Related to customer service is the ability to communicate with confidence. This includes communicating with your fellow Team members. Our team approach to driving results means you are working with not just Clients, but other Team members as you navigate through your day.

“Communication and building relationships were the biggest skills I learned between all three roles I had,” says one of our Senior SEO Specialists. She previously worked in retail, too.

Communication comes in many forms, so written communication skills, as well as verbal skills (both in-person and over video), are all helpful when working as a digital marketer. Confidence comes from being able to effectively deliver both good and bad news.

Time Management

Most jobs out there will teach you about time management, but this is something that can also be demonstrated in your personal life. Understanding the importance of punctuality and updating people on changes in deadlines are all a part of time management. If you can manage your time wisely, it will help you in every future role you take on.

“Project management: how to define a timeline, communicate it to executives, and how to lead diverse project teams towards one goal,” are some of the skills a Client Services Manager learned while working for a shipping and logistics company.

Whether you learned project management skills at a previous job or simply from going to college and having to submit schoolwork on time, this is something that will translate well to a digital marketing role.

Teamwork & Leadership

Ever been in the military? Been a teacher? Maybe played a group sport in school? These things all help develop your skills for working on a team.

One of our Team Leads was previously a teacher and coach. “I greatly think that my experience as a teacher/coach has contributed to my ability to effectively teach and communicate to Team Members and Clients. Understanding that every relationship is going to look different and understanding who it is that I am working to teach or coach is something that I apply daily… A lot of parallels to agency work. Grateful for the opportunity to transfer these skills to work here at TopSpot!” 

Leadership is a part of every role. Ever taken someone under your wing to help them develop their skills or achieve a goal? Then you have leadership skills!

Attention to Detail

One thing that sets TopSpot apart from other agencies is our transparent reporting. To be able to communicate the details of what makes a Client’s marketing plan work is an important ability to have and can be gained from all sorts of backgrounds.

When this SEO Specialist was in her previous role, “Creating/organizing reports was a huge part of each role. Being organized with the way I did my reporting was really important because we dealt with a lot of products, across several departments… It helped me to reach my goals in a way that was less stressful and created clear visuals of how I can obtain my goals in a realistic way.” 

If you love to follow action plans and set procedures, don’t like grey areas, have high standards, and can stay focused on a task for a long period of time, you likely have great attention to detail.

What This Means for You

We know that transitioning into a new field can seem daunting at first. Having a firm footing in these types of non-technical skills can help make you an attractive candidate for a digital marketing role.

Looking for a new role? TopSpot is hiring!