The pandemic has been an accelerator for the ecommerce industry as more and more retail businesses were forced to change their strategies and move online. According to a survey conducted by Wesa, around 79% of businesses adapted and made changes to their businesses to respond to the crisis. And around 33% of them added work-from-home policies for their employees. This unprecedented surge in ecommerce and digital transformation has raised the ecommerce share of global trade from 14% to 17%. Even though the world is gearing up to get back to normal, the changes that occurred during the pandemic are here to stay. Businesses will continue to adapt to the omnichannel approach and we will see more and more businesses come online. But how is this information connected to digital marketing?. Well, as more and more businesses turn to online marketplaces and ecommerce, they will effectively compete to create their online presence and brand recognition. This means the competition is going to be tougher. Even though it’s not a zero-sum game, but your customers have limited attention span and mind space for which you need to bring your digital A-game. A properly structured, well-trained and knowledgeable digital marketing team is a must if you want to compete in digital spending. They are the ones communicating your business values, promoting your products, and being the identity of your business.
Role of The Digital Marketing Team
The most important reason why businesses had to shift online is that their customers are online. They are shopping, interacting, ordering their daily essentials and more online. The internet has become an integral part of their lives. Apart from the fact that you get to interact with your customer and learn about their preferences directly from them, there are many other benefits to having a digital marketing team. ● You garner the ability to reach a global audience while operating from the remotest regions. The world literally becomes your oyster. ●Online marketing levels the playing field for everyone as compared to traditional marketing practices. Plus it’s much cheaper to advertise on Google than on a billboard, Tv, or radio. ● With the number of advanced tools available in the digital marketing space, you are equipped to understand your customers, their behaviour and their interactions with your brand in depth. With digital marketing, you are able to cater to your customers’ needs and answer their queries immediately and in ways they prefer. Digital marketing truly reduces the gap between you and your customers. But it’s not an easy feat to undertake. To achieve your digital marketing goals and targets, you need your team to be up to date with all the latest trends in SEO, content, email marketing, Ads, and more.
Importance of Upskilling Your Digital Marketing Team
Here are a few reasons why you need your digital marketing team to be on their best game all the time: ● The digital marketing landscape is ever-changing. One day Google updates its ranking algorithms and the next day Facebook removes certain ad formats from their ad manager. ● Social media platforms are also an integral part of digital marketing strategies and there’s a new trend or a meme or a content format that’s trending every other hour. ● Your customers are changing preferences at a moment’s notice. One day they might prefer to communicate via emails, the next day they might want a quick exchange of tweets. To keep up with your customers, your digital marketing team needs to be in a constant state of learning. And here are a few hacks that can level up your digital marketing team.
5 Hacks to Level Up Your Digital Marketing Team
The fact that around 77% of the employees are ready to learn or even retrain, according to a study by PwC, should give you enough motivation to start your team’s upskilling journey. The one true hack to rightly upskill your digital marketing team is to consider important factors like your business’ needs, your team’s needs, their current skill set, team goals, upskilling budget, and the likes. Once you have these aspects clear on your whiteboard, you will easily be able to create an upskilling plan that works for your team.
Encourage Microlearning
Consuming bite-size content has become a part of our daily lives. We read news on-the-go with less than 100 words covering the topic and we consume articles by skimming through the headlines. So how about using this to your advantage? How about delivering upskilling courses in bite-sized content that your team can consume whenever they get time during or after working hours. On-the-go. This would turn a daunting task like upskilling into an easily consumable format which can garner better results for your team. More importantly, when they learn one small thing daily, you can encourage them to apply the learnings to their day-to-day activities to get a better understanding of the concepts.Provide Online/Professional Training
This is an obvious one. One of the most common ways to upskill is to provide professional training and since we are going through a pandemic, the online platforms have become the acceptable delivery format. Since online training has become the norm, you have a wider pool of professionals, industry experts and trainers to hire from which means your team can be trained at a global level. Still, there are a few reservations regarding its effectiveness of online format which is what we are going to address here. Following are the tips on how to make the most out of online training: Ask for feedback from your team to understand the synergy between the trainer and them. You want to ensure that the trainer is delivering value and in an easy to understand manner. You can also ask for feedback from the trainer about the interactivity level of your team. Ask your trainer to do a refresher quiz of the concepts taught in the last sessions to make sure your team isn’t forgetting anything. Keep proper interval between two sessions for your to practice the learnings and apply the concepts to their work.
Introduce Self-directed Learning
How about giving your employees control of their development? How about giving them the freedom to decide their learning pace? Since you would want to build a continuous learning culture, giving your team the freedom and control over their development would help them learn at their desired pace making the upskilling more fruitful. To make this happen, you can invest in online upskilling platforms like LinkedIn’s learning center, Coursera, Udemy, and the likes. Many professional trainers and industry experts are building their personal brands and hosting their classes on the above-mentioned platforms as well. You can tie-up with them and get their content for your team and they can then learn at their own pace. The point is to empower them to take accountability for their own development.Invest in better tools
Regularly keep assessing the needs of your team when it comes to tools. Outdated tools would only garner outdated results for your company. Investing in the latest tools will help your growth team improve productivity and performance. To keep abreast of the marketing trends and to have a chance at competing with the industry giants, you need to equip your team with the necessary advanced tools they require to perform their jobs. For example, if you still expect your marketing team to onboard your customers manually via emails, offline calls, and customer support, then not only you will have unsatisfied and maybe disappointed customers but you also have a marketing team that’s overworked doing manual work. You can ease their workload and eliminate redundant, manual work related to customer onboarding by investing in digital adoption and customer onboarding tools like WalkMe or any of the WalkMe alternatives. Similarly, you can conduct a quarterly assessment of workflows to detect any redundant processes. Based on the findings and the needs of your team, you can create a budget and invest in tools accordingly.Workflow Training
Once you’ve set up a flow for upskilling, upgraded tools based on your marketing goals and your team’s needs, it’s time to pay attention to the workflows/processes. For your team to be more effective, make sure to have proper workflows for everything like creating content, conducting SEO analysis, keyword research and planning, etc. Make sure all your new marketing members get proper workflow training in the first month of their joining. Moreover, conduct a gap analysis of your workflows based on the regularity of missed deadlines and any bottlenecks you are experiencing. Accordingly, upgrade your workflows to make them more effective and then train your team for the same.Lastly, conduct regular skill assessment
Conducting regular skill assessments is a part of the upskilling process. This process can help you understand the current state of your team, their skills, and the gaps (if any are left). Ideally, you should do such assessments on a quarterly or bi-yearly basis. Moreover, assessing the outcome of your upskilling programs will give you an understanding of the ROI and also might help you plan for future upskilling programs.
Learning is a Continuous Process to Maximize the Effectiveness of your Digital Marketing Team
Digital Marketing is an ever-evolving industry. To perform well and stay ahead of the competition, you will need to cultivate the culture of learning and upskilling in your team. One of the best ways to create such a culture is to align your team members’ personal goals with your company’s goals. This will make them feel you are investing in them and helping them advance in their career which means they will be personally invested in the learning process. At Growth Hackers is a digital transformation agency, we specialize in helping startups, SMBs, organizations and entrepreneurs with digital marketing. So, if you want to take your startup digital marketing strategy to the next level, contact Growth Hackers today! I am sure we're the digital marketing agency you were always looking for.
Hazel Raoult
I am a freelance marketing writer and work with PRmention. I have 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. I love to split my time between writing, editing, and hanging out with my family.
