Businesses will always need specialist digital skills
So, Mark Ritson believes it’s time to shut down digital marketing teams for good. I disagree. Why? For the simple reason that for businesses to compete, digital marketing demands excellence in specific digital skills, which are integrated throughout marketing.
For me, larger businesses need a core digital team or Digital Marketing Centre of Excellence to ensure that digital marketing investments are prioritized and the latest techniques are used to ensure businesses can compete through digital marketing platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn, which influence so many purchases today.
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I'm not saying that marketing roles aren't important, far-from-it. Marketing directors, brand, product, and campaign managers are at least as important to…
Opinion: A writer writes, a marketer reports? - The lazy day approach to not knowing how your role is integrated with the full marketing mix
How many digital marketing skills do you think you have?
Do you think you're employable if you only have one specialized marketing skill?
You're really good at it, you get results and you know that channel or tactic like the back of your hand. But you don't know how it integrates with what your colleagues are working on, the bigger business goals, how it contributes or improves the full customer lifecycle, or even how to do the most basic reporting.
Every marketer should be able to do the most basic of reporting on their work. You don't need to report on all business finances, all channels of marketing and map these together to produce a beautifully formatted customer lifecycle map with every touchpoint and metric of performance on there,…
Which digital marketing activities you should keep in-house or outsource?
The companies that continue to move to a more integrated digital model while managing their Digital Transformation process, may be left wondering which activities are best to be outsourced and which are preferable to keep in-house. It is very common for companies to outsource at least part of their digital capability, but this is likely to affect how well they can move to an integrated model. But what are the particular disciplines most suited to outsourcing and what is preferable to keep in-house?
The ‘Slow Burners’ vs. Campaign Based
When we think of digital marketing activities, there are many that need to be managed, but let’s consider the following eight key disciplines covering paid-owned and earned media and managing the customer experience should sit within an organisation:
1. Email marketing
2. Social Media
3. Paid Search
4. SEO
5. Display advertising and retargeting
6.…
Which marketing skills are most sought after by CMOs?
This week, we're launching a survey on Digital Marketing Skills - we'd appreciate it if you could take a couple of minutes to give your personal views on digital skills development and you'll receive a free copy of the report.
We've designed the research to be quick to complete, but useful and the survey should take less than 3 minutes.
If you complete the survey you will get a copy of the report recommendations with advice to develop your career in marketing.
Take our skills survey.
Since we're covering demand for skills for digital media and technology, I thought it would be interesting to look at the demand for the broader marketing skills-set. Recruitment specialists Spencer-Stuart have recently published their 2016 CMO Summit Survey Marketing Skills…
What are employers looking for from digital marketers?
A 2016 marketing salary survey from Marketing Week is interesting reading since it sheds light on some of the issues marketers face in their roles, and highlights issues that are important for managers and HR departments to consider if they want to hang on to their marketing talent. It also highlights the demand for keeping digital skills up to date with the latest marketing trends, and a general willingness among marketers to invest their time and effort into developing their skills, which is always great to see.
The survey uses results from 4,300 marketing professionals. So although there may be some selection bias in the sample, it is plenty for inferring trends in the industry.
At Smart Insights, we're keen to support the development of digital skills as shown by our Managing Digital Skills survey. So, for us, a key finding was that only 16%…
and if not, why not?
There is only ever one pot of money for investments in marketing, so it can seem it is spread more thinly each year as you need to engage customers across more digital touchpoints. Worse still, the size of the pot may shrink as budgets are cut.
So, it's a challenging decision as to where to invest wisely. In our Managing Digital Marketing 2015 we did ask about investments in different types of media and developing digital experiences, but we also thought we would turn the question on its head by asking where the frustrations were with investment in time or budget. We asked respondents where they felt there was insufficient investment which highlighted some common frustrations.
You can see that respondents naturally felt there were a number of areas of underinvestment. That's…
5 core elements for your content marketing strategy and best practices for content outsourcing
According to Content Marketing Institute, more than 80% of B2B marketers and more than 70% of B2C marketers used content marketing for their online businesses last year. The results of this investigation have been published in B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends ? North America and proved the fact content marketing tactics become a significant part of successful marketing strategy.
More than 50% of B2B marketers plan to increase content marketing spending in 2015; they are ready to accept the challenge and start awesome content creation, distribution, optimization, analyzing and managing. It often happens that content creation and development is not a core skill for a marketer, and it can be quite difficult to cope with. The…
Alternatives for managing marketing technology systems
This new, independent research from the IAB and Winterberry Group reveals that Marketers are still divided over which technology will solve their key challenges - how to gather, merge and manipulate cross-channel data.
'Marketers are on a journey to unlock the power of their data by unifying it across desktop, mobile, CRM, email, point-of-sale and more.
Their vision is to create a seamless experience for customers, but many brands are stuck in first gear because of the complex and difficult task of connecting massive amounts of fragmented data,'
Mike Sands, CEO, Signal.
In this report executive-level marketers and key experts mainly from North America, working in the advertising, marketing, media and technology industries gave their views and goals for cross-channel marketing, and how to extract the value of data along with the challenges of technology.
Which systems do marketers prefer?
There was no clear preference of 'Integrated (stack-approach)' which manages…
An interactive map for your new digital marketing job role
Do you know where your digital skills and passions lie, but aren't sure which digital marketing role to target? NeoMam Studios have produced a fun infographic to help you map out your skills with suggested roles. Although it references apprenticeships it also prompts thoughts about the right type of role for more experienced digital marketers
This will be a useful tool to use in conjunction with our recently updated Digital Marketing Job Descriptions and Roles Template to guide you through the digital jobs maze to find what is right for you or to build up a role specification for a new digital specialist in your team.
As you clickthrough you will have the chance to click onto the 4 skills at the end of your mapping and be…
Do We Need a Digital Department At All?
When I began working on the Smart Insights Digital Transformation guide, I believed that the days of the digital department were numbered. After all, if digital integration was a true goal of a business, shouldn’t this department simply be merged into marketing and other ‘non-digital’ departments? I felt that we’d only created digital departments as a bolt on reaction to the changing landscape, and that over time different skills would simply be ‘absorbed’ into the rest of the business.
While this sentiment may run true amongst some readers, I soon found that this ideal has seldom been reached, and may never occur in many verticals. After all, it often seems that there will always be requirements for specific skills that need to sit within a specialist team. Rather than saying whether we ‘should’ or ‘should not’ have a digital department, there are varying ‘phases’…
