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Many a times, companies make mistakes of keeping various marketing operations in silo and, yet at the same time, expecting good result in all the departments and fetching in leads without any collaboration. A unique voice and consistent brand are taken as the first steps to effectively reach all the customers. The recipe for sure-shot success includes how various aspects of marketing are in sync with the media. This actually regulates how marketers do their jobs.
Digital marketing requires marketing skills and expertise in different areas – outside the known periphery – that are directly or indirectly related to the online marketing efforts.
The Noted Confluence Affecting All Marketers
The search, social, and content are crashed to create a new dimension. Google, though, has already indicated the search algorithm does not directly consider any kind of social signals through social media platform. If you want to drive your content marketing strategy, it has to be very specific, relevant, and precise.
And well-thought and clear content will first form the building blocks of your campaign. Social media is very vital to know what is popular. That can actually help focus on the customer interest and build pieces that perhaps vibrate with your anticipated audience. This would finally help gain the social signals. Nevertheless, only way to increase this impact is to meticulously connect the topic and leave your readers sensing as if they have learned something.
By advertising the product in the social media you will actually increase the audience, and all these would fetch traffic towards your content advertised leading to more readers and back links.
On the other hand, social media’s help to drive the audience for your content would increase the search rankings in the SERP (search engine result page). When Google finally monitor the readership base or the engagement data on a particular text, it would, in turn, review the back link profiles. It is clear the social media is beyond search in respect of creating back links.
As your content enhances in the SERP, its exposure will also increase for those entering keywords or queries. High quality keywords would be most likely shared once again on the social media. So, search engine, social media, and content are coordinated like three-prong wheel to increase the exposure for the content.
On the other hand, a similar trend is found in the right convergence among paid, owned, and earned media.
Paid media - Advertising on the social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn could effectively help improve your content as well as your website.
Owned media - Owned media is any web possessions that you can rule and is exceptional to your brand. Website, blog sites, and social media channels are the perfect examples of owned media properties. Through more owned media you have, you can extend your brand presence digitally.
Earned media - Online word of mouth, ‘viral’ tendencies, mentions, repositioning, shares, reviews, recommendations, or content taken up by 3rd party sites are examples of earned media that help guide the target prospects to the destined owned media. Strong organic rankings on the Search Engines and content segregated by the brand do effectively drive the earned media (e.g., first page rankings in the SERP, etc). The first page rankings would bring more traffic and this would help your owned media sites and content links get higher engagement and shares. Therefore, a good SEO strategy is very much required.
Fig 1: Social Media Trifecta
Content strategy coming in all shapes and sizes is to be worked properly in the form of blog, Infographics, video, press release, webinar or e-book, article, site content, newsletter, directory submissions, Meta tags, and ALT tags. The valuable, relevant, and consistent content should be created and distributed in order to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience, and finally, to make profitable customer actions. One must not forget one thing what is use of owned media if no one is interacting with it! So, a defined strategy of content marketing and SEO in connection with the earned media exercise is needed.
The owned, earned, and paid media are quintessentially important for the success of digital marketing initiatives. All you need to do is to determine where to distribute your resources to make the most sense for your brand. As an extension of your brand, owned media sites help people interact with your brand. And here you can use earned and paid media to direct towards the owned media sites and boost number of visits and brand reach. When you build your owned media sites keeping in view of the user advantages, and with a heed to the SEO and content strategies, your site popularity would subsequently enhance bringing more traffic and generating sales.
The Impact of Convergence of Different Marketing Functions on the Job Roles
With the advent of confluence of different marketing activities, there is a resultant change on the job roles. Even the highly specialized marketers face this challenge of integrating various tasks with equal élan. Universities start handling this situation and make way for the marketing graduates to learn new demand of modern, evolving marketing. Out of 40 percent of marketers, only 14 percent knows how to attain hybrid marketing skills in the backdrop of this holistic environment. And they call this integrated marketing endeavour.
Five Important Integrated Marketing Skills
Some particular marketing skills are instrumental to ease the new industry needs – the marketers begin to focus on reorganizing themselves into integrated or hybrid marketers.
The Knowledge of Different Channels
Having an understanding on cross-channels working would ultimately help marketers guide their teams to gain confidence. The in-depth knowledge on different digital channels would be responsible for creating integrated marketing strategies and campaigns. Finally, the brand image, and identity, on various platforms would be more reliable and successful.
A perfect marketer needs to resort to build an effective culture among different marketing silos. Host ‘lunch n’ learn’, ‘OTB (outside team building)’, ‘COP (community of practices)’, ‘Knowledge Cafes’, and ‘Weekly Inter-Team Party’ with different teams, including PR and Social media teams. Encourage communications among inter-team members, and welcome everyone to present their views on how to create a steady and ever-yielding branding and digital marketing strategies. Perhaps, employees from different teams can share their experience to reach their goals and objectives.
In this connection, it would be relevant to say that ‘Peer Assist Program’ is very useful drive. This is basically a process where a team of people who are working on a project or activity call a meeting or workshop to seek knowledge and insights from people in other teams. While seeking help from peers is certainly not new, the formal use of this process as a knowledge management tool and the coining of the term ‘peer assist’ were pioneered by British Petroleum (BP).
Marketing and Business Intelligence
A proper marketing intelligence is required to build brand image in front of the target prospects. Through effective marketing skills, they can help solve their problems. These professional will not only be able to create favourable business environment and make valuable employees, but also how what is going on the marketing department will have straight impact on the rest of the company as
a whole.
Their primary objective is to understand the business drive, along with the business acumen, that stirs the business forward. They should attend department meetings that discuss future of the company – to discover how positive ROI regulates the business, while at the same time, finding how the latest marketing effort have improved the ROI. In this initiative, they should try finding how increased revenue has positively impacted the growth within the company and mix marketing with the rest of the brand. And honing the digital marketing skills to develop a constructive online aura is what is needed. This surely talks about a detailed internet marketing plan, married with business acumen, which follows a step-by-step five important marketing skills known to be the utmost marketing drives.
Fig 1: Five Exclusive Digital Marketing Skills
Step 1- Defining Your Customer:
Things would be easier once you have defined your customer that is as good as defining your products and business. You need to include a marketing plan within your business plan by doing the following actions:
Actions: These questions should be honestly answered by you as much as possible.
What is your perfect solid customer really like?
Is your perfect customer male or female?
Do they work from home or from outside home?
What is the job profile of your perfect customer – an executive, manager, worker, entrepreneur, stay-at-home parent, etc?
What is the net customer income?
What is their education level?
Does their budget permit spending on your product or services and on what basis – one time, occasional, or on constant basis?
Who do they buy your product – for themselves or for someone as gifts?
Do they spend much on the internet?
Where do they seek information about your product – showroom or on the net?
After writing down all these necessary information about the target prospects, you can then focus on creating the relevant ad message to be used in the right channels to reach them.
Step 2 – Choosing the Targets:
This step basically deals with posing the ad messages for your target audience – the more the reach and frequency of your messages regarding your products/services the better would be your visibility. While using the ad messages, you need to think over some important factors, such as traffic, search engine placement, external linking, quality of the current ads, and kinds of messages being shown in the present ads. Also, you need to check about the competitors (if any) of your product category while carefully being aware of the relevance of your ad message to the product and to the expected traffic or the site. Only then you can say your message is the best fit to the traffic of the site.
Like in case of PPC (Pay per Click) advertising, you need to stick to places that permit us to set limits on the daily expenditures. And Google is an all-time good example. It gives us an ample scope of research on the right keywords by paying close attention to the statistics of PPC campaign.
For example, the conversion rates are a significant measuring tool. You need to ensure what exactly you need to assess for your marketing campaign. In this case, Conversion Rates are very much important to see how many numbers of clicks your ads can generate to make effective sale(s). For instance, your webpage may have 1000 hits, 14 clicks, and 1 sale in a day. So, the conversion rate is 1:14 or 7.1% or alternatively, 7.1% of the clicks are generating a sale during this period. And close monitoring of this conversion rate will finally guide us take decision to change, tweak, or amend your ads, if required. This is a constant exercise until you find the right ad message applicable to all the places as you should not forget an ad may work well in one place but may not create any mark in other channel.
Action: In your campaign agenda, create a spreadsheet to document all the sites and venues that are in consideration of your digital marketing plan.
Step 3 – Budget:
You can better create the budget once you have enough idea of cost involved, and that is possible only when you know your targets involved. You already have a figure in mind of how much you are going to spend. Therefore, total all the costs in the marketing campaign to check the ad spots you would like to do. Chances could be the total might exceed your overall spending limit.
Action: As per your existing budget, you can always put the effective ad messages that are going fetch much exposure in your priority lists and hold back other messages. You can anytime broaden your marketing campaign from that holding list depending on if the ads start pouring in results.
Step 4 – Create Ad Content:
Instead of focusing on many things at a time, it is always recommendable to concentrate on one or two things to reap high advantage. From your range of products, zero on in one or two best saleable ones that have solid appeal to the target prospects. Next big thing is to ask, “What am I selling?” You are not selling a product, but the benefits you need to understand this and accordingly set your intended ad message.
The successful ads relate to the customers – The uses of “you” or “yours” instead of “we, yours, me, mine, or my” always works well. Use of emotional words, including fun, comforting, relaxing, stimulating, and addictive, in the ad should always be preferred.
Action: In your digital marketing campaign, ensure using at least one or two important keywords in text ads that particularly run 60 characters wide by 3, 5, 7, or 10 lines long. Once the text ad is done, the next step is to focus on the banner used in the site – check if you need to change the ALT Tags
in the images with the changed keywords or put the ALT Tags in the images that do not have any? Is the graphic properly optimized in the sense that it should be within 20-50 Kb and resolution is 72 dpi? Or does your banner need a Holiday specific image and message?
Step 5 – Tracking and Monitoring Your Ads:
Always track and monitor the success of your marketing campaign. From website to your PPC statistics, there are many ways to determine what is working and what is not. And by doing that actually you are able to sharpen them for the best results.
Action: On a daily basis for the first two weeks review the results of the various ads. Record them in the marketing campaign spreadsheet and look for any trends and pattern. See what is working -where and why? For those that are not working, try to change them as soon as possible from your hold list. Once you know the pattern of review, you would be able to know how often you need to monitor your marketing campaigns.
Technical Marketing Skills
Technical expertise could prove really valuable as a marketer having technical marketing skills (such as coding) can easily make basic changes in the company website without having to wait for the IT department. If your site is updated through a specific content management system (CMS), you can update the site by following the ready manual; in some cases, you bring about changes without needing it also.
When you knowledge analytics are leaps and bounds, you can judge the progress of your marketing campaigns. You can show more productivity and efficacy as you possess this technical know-how. You will be capable of producing more insight and date to back your decisions. You should always need to look out to improve your technical knowledge as part of your self-interest. Take a deep dive into a plethora of information in the web regarding HTML, SEO, Digital Marketing, Basic Coding Functionality, Content Marketing, Web Analytics, ORM (online reputation management), and
so forth.
Communication Skills
The success of any organization depends on the holistic marketing efforts of that company, and this, in turn, is dependent on the effective integration of all the departments working for a common business goal. The interpersonal communication skills will empower you to learn the psychographic detailing of the employees who are the back bones of business success. The more you will closely understand them in your interaction, the better you can influence them and get their cooperation. You need to get rid of the silos and different other barriers that were traditionally imposed on different departments to liaise with each other.
Fig 3: Convergence of Different Marketing Skills
Doing team-building exercises, one can progress the interpersonal and communication skills. Welcome people from different departments to come together in respect various projects. The policy of preparing different company literature in a consistent language would also help build a common platform where everyone can understand each other leading to an apt interpersonal communication.
Get Obsessed with the Product, Market, and Industry
You would not be able to taste success in creating brand identity and brand personality in the way it could if your marketing expertise is in silo and not combined with an indomitable passion for the product and brand. Also, your emotional intelligence should positively affect your passionate drive. Then only you can funnel it towards making your work successful.
To instil your passion the first task is to accept the product the way a your customer would – feel every aspect of it, get intimate with all the attributes, use it like a customer, and then review the case studies to sense the problems (if any). And you would understand how it caters to the customer. Unless you do make a research of it without getting close to the products, you may not be able to know where you can modify it to reach more prospective customers.
Involve your customers by seeking their opinions about how a product should be like, and what ingredients it should have. In a way, educate your target prospect by not pitching your products. They will surely reward you with business and sale once they get the valuable, relevant, and consistent information about the product. And digital marketing is continuously evolving. As the industry and consumers become more knowledgeable, different silos and classic marketing are quickly breaking down. In a way, engage your customers as much as possible. This also alters the roles of the professionals working in the industry.
Conclusion:
A marketer must increase the integrated or hybrid marketing skills outside their specialities and need to become well-armed to handle the challenges of more integrated marketing campaigns. They must find time from their busy schedule and learn different marketing and non-marketing skills in order to shine in their career. And we know digital marketing is always an area of continuous improvements in different channels of online marketing. Technology is advancing everyday with a subsequent advancement in these channels. So, a marketer should be well versed with all these new offerings and act well in advance to guide their brands through the changing digital environment.
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