Marketers are, if nothing else,
very very busy. We’ve got a lot on our plate, yet we still need to take time to
develop and hone our marketing skills if we’re going to be successful.
But as with any marketing
initiative, you’ve got to prioritize where to focus your efforts on the long
(and ever-growing) list of skills needed to excel in modern digital marketing.
Here’s a list of seven vital
education areas that will reward your time investment by making your life
easier every day.
Technical Marketing
Skills:
1. Coding, specifically HTML
and CSS
You’ll see this on pretty much any
list of skills for marketers these days, and that’s because it’s pretty much a
non-negotiable. The world of computer code has seeped out of programming and
into just about every profession that involves a computer.
Sure, you can do marketing work
without knowing these programming languages, but being able to tweak existing
code (at the very least) will dramatically reduce the required time for
everything from A/B testing on email campaigns to setting up a social media
profile.
With increasing demands for agility
and flexibility in marketing, you’ll decrease your own headaches and increase
your value if you can add a new landing page to your website, make adjustments
to calls to action, or troubleshoot a formatting issue without calling in a
developer.
Where to Learn CSS and
HTML for Marketing
As with just about anything, you
could just wander around the internet searching for random HTML terms and
cobble together a free programming education. But seriously, who has the time
for that?
For a more efficient learning
experience you can check out CodeAcademy,
whose introductory courses on HTML and CSS take just 7 hours to complete. If
you’re looking for something more in depth, you can try Lynda.com,
where 16 hours will get you through both an HTML and CSS class.
For the super ambitious or those
wanting a higher level of skill, try Treehouse’s Web
Design Track. It incorporates Photoshop, Illustrator (more on those later),
CSS, HTML, UX (User Experience), SEO, and Branding. But it takes 58 hours.
2. Graphic Manipulation
Software
As with programming, graphic
creation has become a huge value-add skill in many professions that would once
have needed nothing to do with making images.
Marketers need expertise in design
software to create and edit logos, infographics, ebooks, brochures,
header/icon images, and innumerable other graphic bits and pieces.
Once again, the ability to produce
high-quality, professional creatives will streamline your workflow, allow you
to adapt more readily to breaking news opportunities, and improve your
marketing department’s overall agility.
People who can check these items of
their marketing skills list will quickly get ahead, because they don’t
need anybody else to help implement their ideas; they can be their own little
factory churning out marketing initiatives at an amazing rate.
How to Get Graphic
Editing Skills for Marketing
You’ll need a working knowledge of
3 key programs, all of which are in the Adobe Suite. There are cheaper (and
even free) alternatives out there, but these are the standards:
- Photoshop: As the
name implies, this program is designed to edit photos, as well as create
and edit pixel-based art. Pixel-based art is, as you might suspect, made
of pixels, meaning it will degrade in quality as you scale it in size.
- Illustrator: This
program creates vector-based graphics, which do not lose quality when they
are made larger or smaller. Logos and other items intended for non-web use
should be made in Illustrator.
- InDesign: The
images you make in Photoshop and Illustrator can be combined into a single
layout using InDesign, but it’s intended for use with print materials
only. Brochures and posters, for example, are best made with InDesign.
If you have a particular task you
want to accomplish with any of this software, you can nearly always find a
video tutorial covering it and accumulate your software knowledge bit by bit.
Lynda.com also has courses in all
three programs; each one will take 3-4 hours to complete.
3. Video Production as a
Marketing Skill
From screencasts to customer
success stories, videos are a huge part of modern marketing. If you can produce
premium quality videos on a deadline, you’ll be able to exploit this medium to
the fullest.
The most
commonly used video type for marketers is the screencast, in which
you take a video of your screen and (often) a recording of your voice.
Options for creating these kinds of
videos are many and varied; your choice will depend on your budget, how often
you plan to use it, how you want to share the videos, and the level of quality
you’ll be satisfied with.
You can also record live videos,
but to get anything approaching a professional appearance you’ll need to invest
in both high quality hardware (mics, noise cancellation, cameras, etc.) and
software (for editing).
Most video software, whether it’s
for screencasts or live video, will come with some introductory guidance.
Definitely take the time to review it.
After the introduction it’s going
to be up to you to get in there and play with it. Record, edit, and repeat until
you can efficiently put out professional videos on demand.
4. Embrace Data Collection,
Analysis and Visualization as Key Marketing Skills
Marketing may be strictly defined
as “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services,” but
the rise of digital marketing has meant an ever-increasing focus on specific
data points to measure success.
Your marketing skills list absolutely
must include proficiency not just in knowing what data is important, but also
how to collect, analyze and report on it.
- Data
Collection: Whether it’s everybody’s frenemy Google
Analytics, Hubspot, or some other tool, try to be involved in its setup
and implementation. It’s a lot easier to understand the idiosyncrasies of
a software when you’re the one putting it through its paces.
- Data
Analysis: Regardless of whether you set up your data
collection or not, a working knowledge of the numbers that it spits out is
a non-negotiable marketing skill. You’ve got to know what it means when
the numbers take a dive, and how to reverse it. You also need to know what
a meaningful change is; a .75% increase in website traffic isn’t worth
mentioning, but increase your Adwords CTR by that much in a week and you
might want to bring it up.
- Data
Visualization: Understanding
data is a big step, but an equally crucial marketing skill is clearly
communicating that data’s value to others. Whether it’s clients or
supervisors, you need to be able to convert numbers into visually
meaningful charts, reports, and/or infographics.
Where to Learn Data
Analysis
Google offers classes in Analytics,
as does Lynda.com. If you use third party software they should provide
training, either one-on-one or in the form of videos and documentation. Take
the time to learn it; you’ll be glad you did.
Bonus Marketing Skills
Mastered the basic marketing data
skills? Bonus points for being able to efficiently research and report on the
following:
- Predictive Modeling
- Customer Segmentation and Sales Funnel
Mapping
- Competitive Analysis
- Market Trends
- Consumer Behavior
- Media Consumption
- Consumer Path to Purchase
5. Writing: A Traditional
Marketing Skills That Isn’t Going Away
This one is fairly obvious:
successful marketers need writing skills. Of course, you can’t just be an
expert at one kind of writing. Marketers must write across the full spectrum of
content types, media, and audiences.
Tweets, blog posts, press releases,
reports to the C-suite, white papers…the list goes on and on.
Many people find that the best way
to get better at writing is simply to write. Set aside an hour a day, sit down
in a quiet place, and crank out as many words as you can. It might be hard at
first, but eventually your brain will click right into writing mode and churn.
For those who want a little more
specific guidance, try Everybody Writes by Ann Handley, the outstanding
articles on TheCopyBot, or the Marketing Writing Course on Lynda.com.
Soft Skills that Marketers Need to
Cultivate
6. General Professional
Skills, and Seeing the Big Picture
Even if you’ve got stellar coding,
video, graphic, and writing skills, you’re going to hit road blocks if you’re
tough to work with or if you can’t navigate a tricky professional relationship.
For starters, check out these
books:
- Managing
Oneself, by
Peter Ferdinand Drucker
- The Hard
Truth About Soft Skills: Workplace Lessons Smart People Wish They’d
Learned Sooner by
Peggy Klaus
- 10 Things
Employers Expect Employees to Know: A Soft Skills Training Workbook by Frederick H. Wentz
You can also do some personality
tests and analyses to identify your own personal areas of weakness and focus
some personal development time on those in particular.
These soft skills are harder to
justifiably devote working hours to, but they will go far in helping you sell
your marketing initiatives to supervisors, colleagues, and clients.
Time Management: The Hardest
Marketing Skill of All?
Yes, marketers are all busy. But do
we have to be quite so frantic? Marketers in general need to learn to
prioritize projects, identify the easy win, and abandon time-sucking tasks with
little ROI.
This is a lot harder than it seems
when you’ve got a Twitter feed that needs babysitting, well-meaning colleagues
who “stop by to chat” when you’re in the middle of a blog post, and an email
campaign that’s getting too many bounces, all in the same morning.
Then there’s every marketer’s
downfall: the rabbit hole of knowledge. You look up information on a new change
to Google algorithm, and the next thing you know you’ve spent an hour reading
up on semantic search and the future of SEO.
That information is probably
valuable, but did it get you any closer to achieving your objectives for the
day? Probably not.
Some daily distractions are
unavoidable, but we can always manage our days more effectively. Check out the Getting
Things Done system, one
of my favorites, or browse Life Hacker for
tons of productivity ideas. If nothing in these sites jumps out at you, find
your own system.
Above all, take a few hours or a day and get yourself organized.
Do it right and stick to it, and the hours you save in a single week will more
than make up for the time investment.
Bonus Marketing Skill
Stay in touch with your company’s
broad goals and objectives. It’s easy for marketers to get bogged down in
retweets and conversions and lose site of where their company as a whole is
going.
Take a minute to come up for air,
chat with people from other departments, and join in on some high level
planning meetings. Contribute ideas, or just listen, without worrying about how
much work they might make for you in the long run.
Be a part of the
vision, not just its mouthpiece, and you’ll be more satisfied and more
successful.
http://www.business2community.com/marketing/7-marketing-skills-will-make-life-easier-01311048#L4wesGR8FssAEGfK.99
