The 9 modern marketing skills your organization needs
The digital landscape is changing every day, and marketing is changing with it.
The skills you learned ten years ago? They’re useless now.
Take SEO. Used to be you could stuff a blog post with keywords and Google would love you.
Now? You better be using a checklist for everything the Google algorithm is looking for. And it’s probably going to change again tomorrow.
Or Apple. Just made a huge change that’s affecting how effective your Facebook advertising is.
These days you need to know a lot to have success as a marketer. And you have to keep up with all the changes that affect your success.
Fill the gaps
Here’s the thing: You don’t have to have all of these skills yourself. It depends on how big your company is.
One-man band? You can’t do all these things well, but you can easily find people to fill in the gaps. Depending on your needs (and budget) you could hire freelancers to do every item on this list, and as specialists they’ll probably do a better job (sorry, but it’s true).
Small team of 2-3 people? I hope you hire to fill the gaps. If you’re really good at some of these things, hire complementary people to do the rest.
Big company? You might be lucky enough to have someone for each position. Or two people. Quick career tip: pick their brains. Find out the essentials of what they do. One day you might be looking for a job somewhere else, and with multiple skills you’re much more interesting to a hiring manager.
What follows is a list of the most important tasks in modern-day marketing. Whether you’re an expert in all, or a part of a team, these are the bases you need to cover.
Social Media
You need to know everything about social media.
Just kidding.
The real deal? You need to know how to choose the right social media. And you better not be using all of them.
Start with this: You have to go where your buyers are. Selling B2B? Your buyers aren’t on Instagram. If they’re truly B2B, the business part, LinkedIn might be your best bet.
If you’re selling to consumers, maybe Facebook, maybe Instagram. Probably not Twitter, I don’t know that anyone has figured out how to sell on Twitter.
If you try to cover every social media channel, you’ll end up failing at all of them. Pick one or two and focus on them.
When you know which channels you’re going to use, there’s still a lot to understand.
How to succeed at social media
First, go to their sites and read everything they’ve told you about how to advertise there. Lots of good info, like best practices.
Second, look at similar brands or companies you want to emulate. What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong?
Third, look at your competition. What are they doing, and what can you do to make yourself stand out?
A lot of people want to work in social media. This is probably the only task where you need to know more than the basics. Study as much as possible.
Content Production
Much of what I talk about is content production. Specifically the overall production of content, not the individual parts of it.
How do you get a production line of content going? How do you build a calendar, fill it, and produce it? The overall management of content is critical to the success of anyone trying to market today. And make sure you give it enough lead time. Plan for next quarter, not next week.
Creating the calendar
Before you even begin your calendar, take a step back. Figure out who you’re marketing to, where you’re marketing, and the channels and methods you’ll use.
Once you’ve done that, you can build a calendar. This will become your North Star, so it better be good. You should be updating your calendar quarterly and annually, to know where your focus is going.
Always start with the end date in mind, and work back to where you want to begin. The people doing the work should have input, because they know how long it will take. Don’t approach your writer on Friday and tell them you need 2,000 words by Monday. Remember good/cheap/fast? You just chose fast, so now you only have one choice left.
Ideally you have people who understand your brand and your schedule and they’re working together to reach your goals. If you find them, don’t let them go.
Writing email is an art in itself. Think of a monthly newsletter versus a daily specials list. These are very different things.
An email newsletter can be the most profitable form of marketing for your company, as long as you do it right. If you’re sending random thoughts at random times, you won’t get good results.
As always, you should have a plan for your newsletter. If you’re sending daily, you’re probably trying to get sales right now. Monthly and you might be hoping to stay in mind for when someone decides to buy.
Know your intent
If the goal of your newsletter is to be part of a lengthy buying process, consider every part of your funnel. You don’t usually know where the prospect is unless you work on segmenting your audience. For a general newsletter you should be stepping up and down the funnel to try and get everyone through.
If it is daily, that might be controlled by the sales department rather than marketing, and you need to know what they’re doing so you don’t tread on each other’s toes. A buyer getting mixed messages might be turned off from your company.
Make sure you go through your plan to determine who the newsletter audience is. It’s even possible you might discover that you have more than one, and you’ll need to adjust for that. You might even need multiple newsletters, and you can imagine how difficult it is to coordinate them all.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO used to be easy. Just slap a few keywords into a blog post and Google was guaranteed to put you on the first page, right?
Now it’s a lot more complicated. Google regularly changes the way they rank sites, and you hear the screams from SEO specialists every time they do.
Today it’s about page rank and site rank and a myriad of other things. You can get your pages higher in search rankings, but it’s not just the page you’re writing that matters.
If you’re thinking about making changes to your site to improve your rank, I’d suggest you start with a Site Audit. That way you have a baseline to test yourself against.
The audit should tell you where to begin your SEO process. You might need to look at old pages and bring their SEO up to modern standards, or you might need to improve other parts of your site first.
Your site is old in internet years
Here’s another important question for SEO: how old is your current site design? You should be redesigning your site every three years. That may sound excessive, but how’s your mobile traffic these days? What’s your mobile experience like? A lot different to three years ago, I’d bet. If your site is years out of date you’re guaranteed to have poor results in Google.
SEO is so important you should hire an expert, or have someone on staff dedicated to making sure your site is up to date.
Data Analysis
Many years ago I looked at the site log of a local company I was working with and found something interesting. Their competitor down the street had been looking at their website on a regular basis. I asked the owner if she knew, and she didn’t even know they had visitor data.
Are you aware of where your traffic comes from? Are you aware of all the information your site gathers automatically? Do you examine it on a regular basis?
Free tip: Your logs will almost certainly tell you the exact searches that people used on Google to find you. Those are the long-tail search terms that you should be trying to rank for (hint: SEO).
A map for your customers
There’s a world of data in your logs that somebody should be looking at, and using to guide your customers.
If you know what they’re looking for (the search terms as above) you can build content for those people.
If you know the pages they’re starting at, you can build content around that to attract even more people, or build up other pages to bring in different clients.
If you know the pages they’re exiting from, you know where you have problems in your funnel. Work on content to keep them interested in what you have to say.
This is the realm of data analysis. This is instant value to your company.
Blogging
Cool in the early days, then old, and now cool again. That’s blogging.
A blog is important to have, but a blog isn’t there to sell your products.
Counterintuitive? It should be. A decade ago the idea was to write blog posts to attract customers. Now, it’s to educate those same people.
An educated client is one who will buy. But clients don’t read a post and then go buy. That simply doesn’t happen.
What they do is read your post, then—if they’ve learned something or been entertained—go read another. And maybe another.
Reel them in like a fish
With enough good content to help them do their job, they’ll start following you and looking at your other posts. Eventually they’ll find the reason they need to buy from you. If you have the content to get them there.
It’s the eventually part that is so frustrating. Marketing often can’t show a direct line from reading something to making a purchase. You have to do it indirectly, by showing increasing traffic and ranking.
But it works, and it’s working even more as Google emphasizes quality in their ranking algorithms.
Mobile
Ever gone to a site on your phone and not been able to find your way around? What did you do? I’ll bet you struggled with it for a few moments before giving up and going somewhere else.
I used to visit one site every day. When I switched to going there on my phone, I found that the main image scrolled off both sides of the screen. I had to drag and hold to try and read it all. How often do you think I go there now?
Mobile has increased in importance over the years. People don’t realize that the percentage of mobile searches continues to go up, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
Phones are taking over
We’re using our phones more and more. If you haven’t done your data analysis for a couple of years, you’re in for a big surprise. If you’re not optimizing for mobile devices, you’re throwing away traffic.
Knowing the differences between mobile and desktop presentation can be a huge factor in site performance. What if you could make a 20% boost in sales almost overnight? Believe it or not, it’s possible.
Look at your company’s website on your mobile device today. Compare to the desktop view. See if it all works, if you can navigate, if anything’s cut off. Every problem you find is an opportunities to improve sales.
Video
Of all the different forms of content, video might be the least understood. A lot of business people think it’s just for young people, and that means they’re missing out.
Any brand that wants to sell to young people is making videos these days. Guess where those young people are going to be in five or ten years? Sitting in your office, doing the cool and hip marketing you wish you could do. Unless you learn how video is going to impact everything in the next few years.
Video doesn’t have to be expensive. Don’t hire a crew, just pull out your phone. Interview someone in your office to show the expert’s view.
It’s all about your customers
A quick two-minute video made on your phone can have a bigger impact with your customers than you think. Ten two-minute videos that are fun and quirky will do much more than one twenty minute video where you put people to sleep.
Marketing is about going where the people are. In the case of video, it’s where the people are going to be. If you’re not doing video you’re going to be left behind.
Design
It’s the last item on the list, because most people don’t even think of design as being part of marketing. In some ways they are very wrong.
Ever seen what Apple has done with design? Hugely important to their marketing. And I’m not just talking about the product, but the whole experience. The moment when you crack open the iPhone box for the first time is all marketing. The entire genre of unboxing videos is a tribute to marketing.
Design is everywhere. It helps point your customer’s eyes toward a feature you want to emphasize. It helps them know where to click. It helps them follow along during your PowerPoint presentation.
Simplify, simplify, simplify
If you’ve never heard of Edward Tufte, I’d encourage you to look up his work. As a designer he has hundreds of examples of small changes that make huge differences. Get rid of everything that takes away from your message.
If you can make big impacts with small changes, you’ll find yourself in great demand. And that’s what this is all about, putting yourself in position to make an impact.
And That’s It
This is a list of things your marketing team needs to be doing today. Whether you’re a big group with one person responsible for each item, or an individual doing it all, it’s a whole lot of work. All of it is important in today’s marketing world.
If you’re part of a big group, find where your gaps are, then hire to fill them.
If you’re smaller, look for generalists to add to your team, people who can fill multiple roles. Imagine a three-person team, each handling three of these processes. Or outsource, using contractors or freelancers to help you with your needs.
And as an individual, you might be juggling all the balls. Be true to yourself. Decide which of these items you’re good at and you like doing. Then look for freelance help to plug the holes.
Whatever you do, don’t let these items fall through the cracks. Success in marketing today requires you to succeed in every one of them.
Power Copywriter helps you identify and market to your best prospects. Talk to an expert in the electric power industry when you need help planning and creating content. Contact me for a free consultation at powercopywriter.com.