Essential Skills for Modern Marketers

Recently I gave a goals, vision, mission presentation internally at our agency and an important part of it centered around the marketing skills needed individually and collectively to reach our goals.

The basic analysis of the published skills of our own team in preparation for my presentation revealed we have a collective 700+ skills listed across nearly 30 marketers. While that is quite a robust array of skills, it is my belief that we can always do better.

The fast pace and changing nature of our industry is not for the faint of heart or for those that subscribe to mediocrity. What seemed advanced in marketing skills a few years ago has become 101 level today.

In fact, a lot of digital marketing is becoming commoditized with experienced practitioners having access to pretty much the same blogs, conferences and training, professional networks, tools and resources. The cost to access some of these resources is a factor, but the ability to plan and execute is an even greater differentiator.

Executing marketing at a competitive level means skills that operate at a high level. What are those skills? What differentiates high performing marketers? What are the differences between client side marketing skills and the skills marketing consultantsshould have?

For marketing consultants, it’s essential to have the right strategic and tactical skills, but soft skills really make the difference in level of service delivered:

1. Speak Agency and Client
2. Goals Focused
3. Understand Strategy vs. Tactics
4. Ability to Listen and Empathize
5. Skilled at Prioritization and Delegation
6. Ability to Work With Cross-Functional Teams
7. Professionalism
8. Effectively Communicate Good News and Bad

Tactical Marketing Skills: I’ve talked a lot at conferences about necessary skills for modern marketers that want to make the most out of the rising tide in content marketing. This is especially a focus as disciplines converge between PR and Marketing, SEO and Social, Content and Advertising.

There will always be a need for strategic generalists and tactical specialists when it comes to marketing skills. From the ability to dig through customer data to identify segments to creating integrated, multi-channel content programs to ongoing performance measurement and optimization, I think the bar is higher for what constitutes essential content marketing skills.

Of course, while content is the kingdom in marketing, there are many other channels and areas of focus from the skills needed for the various marketing technologies and growing areas like predictive analytics to specific channels like mobile.

LinkedIn (client) recently published the results of a new study “What LinkedIn Data Reveals About Modern Marketers” that offers a number of interesting insights about the stated and in-demand skills for modern marketers.

It turns out there’s quite a difference between the most often stated skills and the skills that are in demand by companies hiring marketers:

The five most common skills lists by marketers in 2015 in their LinkedIn profiles are:

1. Social Media Marketing
2. Digital & Online Marketing / Strategy
3. Marketing Event Management
4. Market Research & Insights
5. Database and Direct Marketing

The top five skills that are currently most in-demand are:

1. SEO/SEM Marketing
2. Digital & Online Marketing
3. Marketing Campaign Management
4. Channel Marketing
5. Marketing Demand Generation

I think it’s generally true that most people over-index on “social media” skills since so many people who use social networks consider that as qualification as the ability to market on social networks. What’s remarkable to me is that SEO isn’t anywhere in the top 5 of stated skills, yet it’s the number one skill in demand.

Whether you agree with the specific marketing skills needed or not, there’s no arguing that attention to individual and the collective skills of your marketing organization (internal or agency) need to be optimized on an ongoing basis.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2015/10/modern-digital-marketing-skills/

The 3 steps of email retargeting

Media is the major expense B2C marketers face when acquiring new customers and building email lists. For most, much of that media investment is wasted when they take the low-hanging fruit -- aka immediate conversions -- without properly retargeting the "rest of the media" until it converts.

In short: you've made the media buy and converted a few leads to customers, but the ROI is shaky. That changes when you retarget with email.

Brands should be taking advantage of the most powerful and cost-effective method for retargeting -- email. Using email, profitable conversions occur for a year or more after the media is purchased, and these converters often become top-performing customers. Email retargeting optimizes the ROI of your media budget, generating new converters at two-thirds of the cost using display retargeting, and doubling the number of unique conversions you get from your media spend in six months.

So how do marketers get started?

Start with high-quality leads

The most crucial step of every successful customer acquisition program is starting with high-quality leads. Make sure you are driving traffic to your landing page from lead sources that perform well over time, have few to no complaints, and strong conversions.

Integrate email opt-in to the initial process

Next, integrate an email opt-in during the initial conversion process. This opt-in can be presented in either a light box or a two-page form, but should not interrupt the conversation flow. In addition, it should include key wording of exactly what to expect when people opt-in. Many consumers want your product or service, which is why they clicked in the first place. Trickery to get more email addresses only hurts the overall program.

A benchmark for this step should be that more than 30 percent of the visitors who don't convert, do opt-in for email. Proper nurturing to these email addresses will generate an overall increase in your media conversion rate of 15 percent within the first 10 days of retargeting.

Optimize email flow

There are four main components to optimize email flow in your email retargeting program:

Matching the consumers' expectations
Every component of an email needs to match the consumers' expectations based on the action they took. For example, if a consumer clicked on a banner that advertised your product X, they should not be receiving information on your product Y that provides a different value.

Confirming the consumers' interest
The content and tone of the initial email sequence should always be one to confirm interest, allowing a consumer to opt-out if they are not interested.

Paralleling frequency with the consumers' intent to buy
Similar to the idea of matching the consumers' expectations, emails should be segmented for frequency based on "intent to buy" to parallel the consumers' interest levels. An individual who visited your website, clicked on a banner, and opened an email should receive more frequent nurturing emails through the first 30 days than one who clicked on a banner but took no subsequent actions.

Optimizing send times
Optimizing send times on emails is critical to the success of your email retargeting program. Using technology that can trigger emails when you know the recipient is online, and/or deploy emails based on the last action the consumer took will greatly increase the likelihood that the consumer will take a desired action and convert.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that there is a very long tail on media. When done properly, email retargeting can deliver results for as long as a year or more -- a powerful metric for every B2C marketer looking to convert more consumers and grow its customer base.

Read more at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/39329.asp?imcid=rss#z8OgWPZWLClGmsw3.99http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/39329.asp?imcid=rss