As digital marketing has become crucial for businesses, it’s become essential to employ marketing professionals that have a strong grasp of the latest digital marketing techniques and tools. Many CEOs at young companies believe that if they can find a so called unicorn they can turn web traffic into gold.
The problem is it’s very rare to find someone who is expert at both digital marketing and technology. The marketing role has changed rapidly in the last five years and will continue to transform. Businesses are constantly inundated with new advertising, analytics, automation and social media technologies. For marketers, keeping up to date is a major challenge.
Combine traditional and digital marketing
Marketing technologists need to be skilled in integrating new media and technologies with existing workflow. Digital marketing is data-driven and marketers also need analytical skills to make sense of the huge amounts of information on sources of web traffic, click through, lead and conversion rates.
It’s impossible to know it all. They say dreams are the playground of unicorns. But don’t believe your business’s dreams depend on hiring a unicorn with magical powers to get prospects to notice you. Hiring people who are committed to learning quickly in the role is more important than finding a unicorn. The reality is marketers need to be able to combine many different skills and implement campaigns that use both traditional marketing and digital techniques. They also have to continuously adapt and develop their skills.
At SalesSeek we grow our own digital marketers and haven’t looked to recruit a marketing technologist. Our team is encouraged to explore the latest tools and to look for new patterns in customer behavior. This helps us find ways to improve the effectiveness of our marketing strategies and enhance our customer experience.
Nowadays, there are a wealth of resources available to marketers and you can find help with any aspect of digital marketing, from blogging to HTML, on the web. Most importantly, technology helps modern marketers to manage campaigns, deliver better insights and results.
One tool for sales and marketing
SalesSeek offers sales and marketing automation functionality in a single, integrated platform, so you have all your data in one place and can view interactions with contacts across all touchpoints. Visually, our platform is clean and simple, making it easy to cut through the noise and track the status of every potential deal in your pipeline, or to measure campaign effectiveness.
Communication
Perhaps one of the most important attributes businesses should look for when hiring marketing professionals is excellent communication skills – marketers must be able to bring marketing, sales and IT teams together and talk about how various campaigns are performing.
Marketers must also be able to tell stories and create interesting content to attract prospects and answer their questions whether at an event, via email or online. This activity needs to be monitored to ensure opportunities aren’t missed. For example, as social media has become more influential, we support our sales team to share marketing content and engage directly with prospects on social media networks. Our platform enables us to keep track of these social conversations to ensure customers’ questions, comments, likes and dislikes are acted upon.
Marketers will use technology more and more and demand for tech-savvy professionals will continue to grow. But success doesn’t depend on recruiting a unicorn. Take advantage of the latest digital marketing tools to improve your campaigns’ performance and look closer to home for marketing talent.
Photo Credit: Weymouth Unicorn, Eccentric Scholar / Flickr
