Just like other avenues of learning, there are many ways you can approach upskilling your marketing team
If you’re reading this post, chances are you know how beneficial upskilling can be to your team’s results.
But how exactly do you go about upskilling your team?
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Just like other avenues of learning, there are many ways you can approach upskilling. For instance, you will need to consider factors such as:
Upskilling budget
Availability of trainers
Proximity of trainers
Your business needs
Your team needs
Your team members’ preferences
Skills to be learned
There are even more factors that may come into consideration once you decide to start upskilling your team.
Fortunately, there are…
What email marketing opportunities do you miss in your transactional emails?
There’s no question that email marketing is one of the key opportunities for almost any marketing team. When thinking about it, newsletters and other promotional emails are usually the first to come to mind.
Few marketing teams give serious attention to transactional emails. Very often, these are even out of their jurisdiction.
Set up by development or customer-facing teams, these emails serve their key purpose in a better or a worse way. The marketing opportunities behind these messages are often overlooked though.
Throughout this article, we’ll give you plenty of reasons why it shouldn’t happen. You’ll learn how to maximize the potential of your transactional emails and which common mistakes you should avoid. Apply these learnings to your emails and you’re likely to see promising results in no time.
What are transactional emails?
First of all, let’s get some definitions of the list.
…
Five approaches to develop your problem-solving and decision-making skills
As marketers, we’re confronted with different types of questions, data, and challenges regularly. Whether it’s reacting to a negative PR story, reviewing the performance of a digital marketing campaign, or weighing up different creative options, we need to make decisions that could impact our organization in both the short and long-term.
Although marketers need to develop a strong set of technical skills, there is an equally important need for a rounded set of softer skills. One of the most crucial skills needed for effective decision-making is critical thinking.
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At its core, critical thinking is about making clear, reasoned judgments. Whilst this in itself sounds straightforward, like many things it’s easier said than done as we’re all susceptible to a wide range of personal assumptions and cognitive biases. When…
Conversational marketing can introduce personalization across the buyer journey, leading to better results
Only 22% of customers are happy with the level of personalization in digital retail. However, conversational marketing could offer true 1:1 personalization at every stage of the customer journey and scale.
Picture this.
You walk into your favorite brick-and-mortar store to find zero sales assistants.
Instead, there’s a small box on the wall. Next to it, a pen and paper.
The sign above reads “Please leave any questions here. We endeavor to get back to you within 24 hours”.
Sounds ridiculous, right?
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But it’s the approach most brands have taken through digital channels for years.
Email has been the go-to support channel. Questions require a full day’s turnaround for, what is often, a vaguely useful response.
It’s…
Social media is one of the best ways to reach your millennial audience, but what should your social media marketing strategy include in order to engage this demographic?
Brands have stopped considering social media to be just like any other medium of communication since millennials have started treating social platforms as one-stop-shops for all of their daily needs.
In other words, with the exponential increase of social media users and shifting consumption patterns, brands have started redefining their social media strategies. Spurred by changes made by the social network platforms, social media has now become a dedicated marketing and sales channel.
Millennials are a particularly important group since their age coincides with peak usage of many social media platforms by age and in particular two of the most popular social networks: Facebook and Instagram. Plus, they are predicted to be the largest target group for 'generational marketing' in future.
What is the age range…
Practical steps marketers can take to enhance their curious instincts
Marketers are a naturally curious bunch and are keen to learn new skills to improve their marketing performance. To work in such a varied, multidisciplinary field, you have to be interested in everything from trends and consumer behavior to analytics and creativity. However, even marketers can get stuck in their ways. Depending on the organization in which you work, the business culture or ways of working, barriers can stifle or prevent curiosity from flourishing, which researchers at Harvard Business School believe prevent organizations and individuals to be at their best.
Merck is one organization that has taken it upon themselves to lead the way in cultivating curiosity. According to Stefan Oschmann, Chairman of the Executive Board and CEO of Merck:
“In the pursuit of human progress, the single most important trait is curiosity – the desire to learn, explore,…
Stay calm, slow down and refocus your marketing priorities to tackle the current COVID-19 challenge
The world of marketing is a busy, hectic and uncertain one at the best of times. From the changing nature of consumer preferences to the evolution of new technologies and digital channels, over recent years marketers have had to adapt to changing circumstances and make the most of new opportunities.
In addition to these micro-challenges, the last ten years since the financial crash of 2008 has posed several macro challenges, too. The nature of work itself has become very different, with a steady rise in contracting and freelancing, remote working and even changes to employment rights. All of these factors have meant that marketers have had to become more resilient and adaptable.
Enter COVID-19...
The recent coronavirus outbreak has tested workers across all sectors in new and unprecedented ways. At the time of writing, the…
Now more than ever it’s essential to amplify the impact of your digital marketing management. Here we show you how to do this by boosting both your operational and leadership effectiveness.
It’s essential to boost your management skills
Now, more than ever, how you prioritize and execute your projects matters for effective digital marketing management. Without operational discipline, you’ll soon find yourself staring at the backs of your competitors.
In another Smart Insights article, I talked about how to boost the productivity of your team ( https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/5-keys-to-work-from-home-success-during-coronavirus-times/ ) during these Coronavirus times. Here I focus on how to improve your productivity and, more importantly, your effectiveness as a leader.
Boosting your impact involves:
Prioritizing your marketing initiatives
Optimizing your marketing workflows
Outsourcing applicable work
Empowering your functional leads
I will drill into each topic below.
…
How to become a better marketer: 6 marketing tactics you need to work on to stay relevant
With the rapid development in technology, many changes occur in the marketing scene within short periods. Therefore, as you're trying to execute the tactics you know, you're also in a constant quest to learn new things.
Otherwise, it becomes difficult to stay relevant and achieve your goals. Even in marketing channels you know, changes are happening with time.
For instance, 17 years ago, you only need to understand how to send blast emails to be a good email marketer. However, today, you need a deep understanding of automated email sequences just to get by.
That said, you'll always stay relevant as a marketer if you keep up with important trends and apply them to your marketing campaigns.
In light of this, here are 6 essential tactics to work on:
1. Creating and designing visual content
Over the years, …
How to navigate a 'squiggly career'
When many of us consider the word ‘career’, we think about climbing a corporate ladder and following a predictable, linear path to promotion. This was certainly my expectation when I entered the workforce after university; the advice was to join a company as a graduate trainee and move through the ranks to a senior role.
But whilst the idea of a traditional career may still be the case for some, the last ten years has transformed many people’s professional working experiences and their expectations for what a career will provide. This is true across most professions, but especially true for marketing, where the rise of the internet, social media and digital channels has disrupted the traditional paradigm.
Navigating the ‘squiggly career’
In spring 2018, whilst I was in between jobs, I discovered a podcast called ‘Squiggly Careers’. Presented by Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper, it covered a huge…
