Being a confident verbal communicator will establish your credibility as a marketer and make you more persuasive.
If you feel that your writing skills are weak, then you can take a writing course to improve them. The more different audiences and channels you can write for, the more effectively you will be able to market products and services to a variety of demographics.
If you work at a big company, there will often be departments or individuals that take care of the more technical stuff. However, if you know at least a little bit about these kinds of things, it is easier to collaborate across teams or handle small tasks yourself.
Being able to manage your time effectively is essential to being able to create overall marketing strategies and complex marketing campaigns.
For example, maybe your local parks and recreation society needs a community manager to handle their social media. You could volunteer for the task to gain experience in social media marketing. Volunteering doesn’t have to be something formal. For instance, maybe you have a friend who is an entrepreneur launching a product of some kind. You could volunteer to help them out with their paid Internet advertising to help sell the product and gain experience.
This will help guide all of your marketing strategies to reach more of the ideal audience and sell more of the product or service you are marketing.
For example, if you are selling hiking boots, your buyer persona might be something like: Male aged 25-50, lives in the Pacific Northwest, works in a high paying job in the tech industry, loves doing outdoorsy things on the weekends, spends his free time reading blogs about hiking and camping gear, and follows adventure and travel lifestyle accounts on Instagram.
For example, if you are selling a backpack, you need to tell a story about that backpack that will make the customers want to buy it. Try to tell a story about the types of adventures owners of that backpack will have. For instance, perhaps they will be able to set off on rugged backcountry hiking adventures, or maybe they will go on an extended trip to Europe and see and experience all the different cultures and history there.
For example, if you need to provide a stakeholder report at the end of the day, then your first priority could be pulling together all the spreadsheets of data you have, then your next priority could be compiling relevant data into charts and graphs, and the last priority could be putting those charts and graphs into a slide presentation with some bullet points explaining the data. Find a way to help you manage your time and priorities that works best for you. For some people, this can be as simple as manually writing out a list in a notebook, or for others, it can be helpful to use something like project management software to stay organized.
You can use tools like Google Alerts, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and SocialMention to monitor your competition online and on social media so that you don’t miss any important updates or posts.
You can use the same tools you use to monitor the competition online to set up alerts for certain keywords or hashtags so that you get the latest news online. For example, if there is a new social media channel that is gaining traction among the photography community, and you are selling cameras, then you want to start developing a marketing strategy for that network as soon as possible.
For instance, if you see that 1 of your advertising channels is driving 80% of customer engagement, you might decide to allocate more budget there, and get rid of the other channel and replace it with another one to try something new. If you aren’t a numbers person, then find someone who is and work with them to analyze data. People who have backgrounds in statistics, are good with Excel, and know how to use different analytics tools are invaluable on your marketing team.
Every marketing strategy is unique to a certain product or service, situation, and audience. Try to tailor your marketing campaigns to your unique set of circumstances. For example, you can try adding new keywords to your pay-per-click advertising campaigns on Google and see if it increases or decreases the number of clicks you get. If you are only posting on your blog once a week, you could try posting twice a week or on a different day and see if it changes the amount of traffic you are getting.
For example, maybe you didn’t get all the reporting you needed to done one day. In that case, you can change around your list of priorities so that reporting is something you take care of first thing in the morning, then you can move on to strategic planning in the afternoon.
Content can come in the form of articles, social media posts, ads, and other digital marketing channels. Really, everything you do in marketing is content-based. For instance, if you have a blog that is driving a large amount of traffic to your company’s site, then focus on creating quality content there every day. If you are receiving a lot of traffic via Instagram, then you want to make sure to keep publishing quality, engaging content there. Just because you see that you need to focus on 1 area doesn’t mean you should completely ignore others. A well-rounded content strategy is key to a good digital marketing campaign.
Work with a good photographer or graphic designer to develop great visual content for your digital marketing strategies. Content with relevant images receives 94% more views than content without.
You can target potential customers based on general things like age, location, and gender. Then, you can narrow it down even further based on things like what types of accounts they follow, what pages the like, or what posts they interact with. For example, if you are selling basketballs in Canada, you can target people between the ages of 16-35 who live in Canada and have liked posts from the Toronto Raptors’ Facebook page or Instagram account.
For example, if you have a project management software company, you can send a certain email advertising an extra feature to users who have been active on their accounts in the past week who would be more likely to buy the extra feature. You could send a different email out to users who have signed up but have not started using the software to remind them to get started. You can use split testing to test out different emails on a segment. Split testing refers to sending at least 2 different versions of an email to 2 different groups of a segment, and then seeing which one receives a higher open rate and more interactions to determine which email is best to send out to a larger audience of that segment.
Digital-specific things to stay aware of in marketing are algorithm changes in big search engines like Google, changes to social advertising, and the rise of new analytic technologies or digital marketing channels. You can always learn new digital skills. For instance, if you are more of an analytics person, you can focus on learning how to write digital ad copy and blog content. The more different things you can do, the better you will be as an overall marketer.
