3 Essential Tips for the Modern Marketer
The rapidly expanding and changing landscape of marketing technology means that marketing professionals must maintain a wide skill set in order to remain competitive in the industry. Simply being a gifted writer, or being familiar with the concepts of page design and layout are no longer enough to keep marketers ahead of the competition, or to stay fresh in the minds of their customers.
Creating personalized, relevant content and delivering it to audiences just-in-time is how modern marketers succeed, and in order to accomplish this goal there are several important skills that marketing professionals should develop and strengthen.
1. Keep your technical knowledge up-to-date and relevant.
While marketing managers often aren’t required to get their hands dirty in HTML or JavaScript, having an understanding of how these and other technologies work together with e-marketing systems is essential to providing proper guidance and support to your clients.
Keeping an eye on emerging design trends, understanding how SQL databases work, and knowing the ins-and-outs of your MA system’s API can go a long way not only in gaining the trust and respect of your customers, but it can also be extremely useful for working on the fly with customers during training or screen-sharing sessions.
2. Become and stay proficient with modern marketing tools and applications.
Knowing how to code a beautiful, responsive HTML email is great, but how do you deliver it to your audience? Can you schedule your email blasts to coincide with customers’ birthdays? How do you know what your deliverability rate is and how to improve it? The answer to these and other questions is to make use of marketing automation. Marketing automation platforms are extremely helpful for marketers because they can act on lead actions, offer up customized content based on a variety of factors, and even integrate with other business systems and platforms to help build business intelligence and greater levels of customer awareness.
3. Learn to love data.
Having the knowledge and tools to deliver personalized, cross-platform marketing campaigns to your audience is great. But once the campaign is over, and the dust has settled, what do you do next? It’s important to be able to create and analyze reports from your marketing automation and CRM platforms.
The data that is returned to you is often essential in seeing where existing campaigns are failing, how much value they are creating, and in planning new campaigns for the future. Data analysis, reporting, and the development of custom dashboards are just a few techniques that can be used to discover and analyze trends in your marketing data.
Customized, highly-targeted content is great, and it’s been shown to increase Click-through Rates (CTR) and other important metrics. But just-in-time marketing is better. And knowing when, and how, your audience wants to interact with your brand is essential knowledge that can only be gained through careful collection and analysis of your marketing data.
Knowing how to craft your message, how to get it in front of your audience, and how to time your communications to meet your audiences’ needs will help you to propel your marketing efforts into the big leagues. However, only by constantly evaluating and updating your e-marketing skill set will you be able to maintain the momentum required to truly succeed in the age of digital marketing.