With the average South African spending over eight hours a day on the Internet, it's clear that people's habits are increasingly moving online. This means that in order for businesses to succeed in this digital age, it's vital for them to have a digital marketing strategy that is backed by people with a solid digital marketing education.

Here are three skills that marketers can implement into their strategy in 2020:

1. Social media marketing

With 2.65 billion social media users in 2018 — a number that is predicted to rise to 3.1 billion in 2021— most businesses will find their target audience on social media.

"This means every single business out there will either need to have a social media marketer on staff, outsource their social media marketing to an agency or the business owner must know what they're doing on social media," says Lisa Schneider, managing director of the Digital School of Marketing.

"This is so that they can accurately pinpoint where the business's audience is so that they can adequately market to them," adds Schneider. 

2. Search engine optimisation

With Google having become the Yellow Pages of the 21st century, if you want your company to be found by potential customers, you need to be found on the search engine giant.

This means that you need to have a solid SEO strategy, which you continuously review and update, in order to make sure that the people who you want to find you, do. "The practice of SEO will, in the coming year, be made more complex thanks to voice search," says Schneider. "This means that SEO professionals will need a good grounding in the basics so that they can determine how to handle the added complexity that voice search brings."

3. Email marketing

Whoever thought that email marketing is dead is sorely mistaken. This medium of communication is still widely used among B2B marketers as they find that this channel is the highest converter of leads.

However, to make proper use of email as a marketing method, one needs to sensitively construct each email so that it doesn't focus too heavily on marketing and that people feel they are being spammed.

Yes, reading articles on the Internet about the various facets of digital marketing is indeed a beneficial practice. However, if you don't have the required digital marketing training, you're dead in the water.

The Digital School of Marketing is an online provider of accredited social media courses and digital marketing education.

For more information, visit www.digitalschoolofmarketing.co.za or contact [email protected]. You can also follow the Digital School of Marketing on Facebook, Twitter or on Instagram.