Marketers must learn baseline digital skills to generate more revenue and positive career paths.
To stay relevant and be media savvy in this day and age, marketers need to make digital skills part of their DNA.
A recent study by Millward Brown, a market research organization, pointed out that marketers are adding digital skill sets to their resume in order to make marketing more personalized. The report titled "What do Digital Marketers Really Want in 2015" shows the importance of digital skills such as social, analytics and mobile.
In September 2014, Mei Lee, vice president of Marketing-Digital for Conde Nast Entertainment, wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review suggesting that to be a successful digital marketing organization, departments should be organized by functional expertise rather than by brand or platform.
It is common today for a digital department to be a separate team within a marketing division, often seen as the resident experts who know how to perform "techie" tasks.
Many marketers may excuse the need to understand and adopt digital skill sets simply because a special digital team exists to perform these tasks. Unfortunately, this thinking reduces the ability for marketing to become more integrated, provides less marketable skills for the marketing professional and limits creativity.
All marketers should have a basic level of understanding digital platforms. The chart below, from Kentico, shows four digital skills marketers should learn..
Most of the marketing skills sets above are digital in nature. The most successful marketers perform above average in each of these five key skills. However, many marketers who are not members of a digital team may not be up to speed to knowledgeably talk about topics such as Marketing Automation (vendors: Marketo, Pardot, Silverpop).
This video from Stan Ventures highlights five buckets (Data Analytics, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and Content Marketing), which are all digital and require special skills sets by marketers to generate additional revenue.
Create Digital Marketing 101 Certifications In-house
In an effort to educate marketing team members, organizations should consider creating their own Digital Marketing 101 courses, which are written and delivered by senior digital leaders in-house.
Each marketing and public relations team should require attendance in these courses and certify completion of the program. By making digital skills part of their DNA, the chief marketing officer can expect better integration of a wider set of skills, an enhanced understanding of marketing, and additional revenue and an increase in leads through more tightly integrated marketing efforts.
An example of a Digital Marketing 101 certification course that digital professionals could deliver to marketers might look like this:
Session 1: The new consumer buying cycle
Course discuss how the marketing funnel has changed and why buyer personas must be linked to digital experiences.
Session 2: Online branding and advertising
Course covers platforms and digital media types (i.e. banners ads, video) that perform best in specific situations and how to measure the effectiveness of traditional media with digital.
Session 3: Web development principles
Course would talk about how pages are architected and how navigation, page naming and design all play a role in driving marketing results. It would be optimal to train marketers to set up their own personal site, using WordPress, to better understand these principles.
Session 4: Search engine marketing/optimization
Course will covers SEM and SEO, how they work differently and together. Myths and current trends will also be covered.
Session 5: Email marketing
Course will focus on list management concerns, subject line testing, trusted sender, CAN SPAM language, along with how to best gauge the best performance metrics. The marketing automation section will cover setting up emails to be part of triggered campaigns.
Session 6: Social media marketing
Course will cover how each social property is different, what works better on which sight, the 30/30/30 rule and how to leverage others to your benefit (and why).
Session 7: Mobile and new devices
Course will discuss how marketing messaging and experiences need to be rebuilt for those engaging with the company via mobile device. The course will also include mobile advertising and app messaging as tools to marketers.
Session 8: Web analytics
Course would cover a basic understanding of web analytics Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and which should be used for measurement when. The course would also cover how to tie web analytics into traditional tracking KPIs and how to interpret buzzwords.
Session 9: Marketing automation
Course will cover the most bleeding edge in the marketing, marketing automation. Definitions of marketing automation would be touched upon and how it integrates Big Data and omni-channel marketing touchpoints.
Each session above should include an exam to confirm understanding before a marketer to proceed to the next session.
Images: CMO.com http://www.cmo.com/articles/2015/2/4/Kentico_Millward_Brown_Study.html