Don’t trust your digital marketing to your niece or some intern thinking that young folks know all they need to know to generate digital marketing success. In today’s world, the number of skills needed for digital marketing success is growing and becoming more technical. Sure, they may have 10K following their YouTube channel where they tape themselves doing crazy stunts, or a bunch of folks following their Instagram of drunken parties at State U, but does that make them a digital marketing genius? NO. It also doesn’t make much sense to hire someone with a degree in journalism, finance (the newest trend I’m learning), or another degree. It takes skills to be a digital marketing success and create ROI for your business. And, marketing majors have those skills. 10 Marketing skills At its heart, digital marketing IS marketing. Sure, you can learn what and target market is or develop personas by reading a few blog posts, but understanding more complex marketing concepts and tools takes more than an hour or 2. Does your digital marketing employee know about all these tools? Digital marketing skills based on marketing Cialdini’s 6 tools of influence Perceptual maps Pricing including yield management and demand pricing Market research (we don’t mean some feeble attempt, but true market research) Group influence Service audits Marketing planning, strategy, and analytics Calculate customer lifetime value and craft strategies for optimization Understand the customer journey and craft strategies for unique stages in the customer journey and much, much more And, that’s just the traditional marketing stuff. Now, add digital marketing. Skills needed for digital marketing success I’ve included the infographic from Premium IT Solutions below. But, this barely scratches the surface when it comes to the skills necessary to drive success in digital marketing. Here’s my take: Analytics Marketing in the future will be all about metrics, analysis, and proving performance (ROI). [Tweet “#marketers NEEDS to be more quantitative and PROVE #ROI #metrics”]That’s the excuse given for hiring finance folks — they understand attribution. The marketers of the future need to surpass their financial brethren when it comes to analyzing market performance. And, they have a leg up. Marketers know better WHAT to measure to understand how to improve market performance, not just attribution. While Google Analytics is a great tool, especially with funnel metrics, cohort analysis, and interest metrics, it’s not enough. Also, marketers know that conversion requires a process of bringing in potential customers, driving them down the funnel, and nurturing them to retain customers (which is 5 times less expensive than bringing in new customers). Simply focusing on conversion reduces market performance compared to focusing on the entire customer journey. Design Gone are the days of spending months using specially trained folks to design your ad or brochure. Now, content is crafted at the moment. Instead of going through layers of scrutiny, content creation requires great writing and editing skills, a little design sense, and the ability to manipulate images and text using some basic HTML/CSS. Strategy Maybe because marketing material is crafted using nearly JIT (just in time) methods, everyone on your digital marketing team needs to understand strategic direction, determine the fit between content and firm goals, and build in performance metrics when creating content for web pages, newsletters, and social media posts. Google has some great tools to help with understanding how different strategies and tactics contribute to market performance, including event tracking and campaign performance tools. Aside from Google, several tools help monitor performance to guide decision-making. Among these are: Marketo – customer engagement metrics Google – UTM building, as well as other metrics Buffer – content curation Kissmetrics – analytics SEO It used to be that IT professionals managed SEO — which relied heavily on meta tags and other technical elements of website design. Today, that’s much different and marketers drive the SEO bus. Crafting valuable content consistently and sharing it effectively with influencers, social, and spider bots now determine most of your SERPs (search engine results page — basically where you show up in a search engine search). SEO also means putting yourself in the minds of prospective buyers to understand how they search for products and services like yours — called keyword planning. Today, searchers use long-tail keywords — keyword phrases — which help them find what they’re looking for with more specificity. So, marketers should think in terms of what keywords (keyword phrases) customers might use to find them. Listening [Tweet “#Listening may be the most important factor in long-term success.”]Listening to customers and prospects may be the biggest factor contributing to the long-term success of your firm and provide the highest ROI. But, listening isn’t easy. OK, so listening might be easy and there are lots of tools out there that’ll turn social comments into sentiment. But interpreting what you hear is very difficult when you go beyond sentiment analysis. Beyond comments about how good or bad you are, social media posts identify unmet needs, new features and functionality they want from your products, evaluations of your support or sales process, and lots of other invaluable information. If you’re not listening carefully to customers and prospects, you can be sure competitors are and they’ll be the ones reaping the benefits from providing products and services that better meet the needs of customers. Learning Digital marketing success relies on continual learning — new techniques, new strategies, new social media platforms, benchmarking against competitors, and identifying new opportunities provided by changing technology and culture. As a digital marketer, you should plan on spending almost as much time reading as writing. Feedly is a great resource for this as it brings in fresh content from top news sources daily. Community building Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing success requires you to build a community around your brand. Community building requires an understanding of the value of members, an ability to engage them, and accurate timing so your posts are seen by influencers and others in your community. Community outreach through email marketing and other tactics helps your message spread, which increases awareness, builds a positive image, and promotes market performance. Buffer and the Buffer blog are great tools for helping build a community of engaged customers and prospects. Need marketing help to support business growth? We welcome the opportunity to show you how we can make your marketing SIZZLE with our data-driven, results-oriented marketing strategies . Sign up for our FREE newsletter, get our FREE guide to creating an awesome website, or contact us for more information on hiring us. Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.
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