Our recommended process and tools to help you grow your marketing career with strategic skill development
As marketers, we understand how challenging it can be to keep all your plates spinning. You’re trying to manage your day job, while staying up to date with all the latest industry and platform changes, while making sure you are fed and watered and clean and getting enough sleep to keep your brain in gear. Not to mention remembering Auntie Wendy’s birthday and making sure the dog has had enough exercise. With all this going on, setting time to learn marketing skills is often pushed to the back of your priority list. Over time, you drop the plate.
There are a few reasons for this. From speaking to marketers over the years, Continuous Professional Development (CPD), feels like something you should be doing, but often gets ‘saved for later’, while we try to keep…
What does future-proof digital marketing training look like?
When it comes to technology, “The ability of something to continue to be of value into the distant future and not become obsolete” seems pretty obvious. We can all recognize items that have become obsolete as technology changes and improves. But, what does future-proof mean in the context of digital marketing training for work and employment?
From my perspective and looking at reviews from experts in education and psychology, to be future-proof is to “Continue to be useful or successful in future when the situation changes.”
This definition sounds a bit woolly but can be distilled into three primary components:
Being able to identify opportunities by anticipating the future
Using this knowledge to minimize the effects of shocks and stresses of future events by having a clear strategy
Then, using this strategy to…
Three key insights from the UK Government’s latest report on employers’ demand for digital skills
Regular readers of Smart Insights know all too well the importance of having an up-to-date digital skillset. In today’s age of the internet and social media, it’s become more important than ever for employees to have a sound working knowledge of digital in an ever-growing digitized economy.
The UK government has recognized the need for a digitally literate workforce in our modern economy and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport commissioned a report, conducted by Burning Glass Technologies, to provide an overview of digital skills demand and to help inform the development of evidence-based digital skills policy.
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Stay calm, slow down and refocus your marketing priorities to tackle the current COVID-19 challenge
The world of marketing is a busy, hectic and uncertain one at the best of times. From the changing nature of consumer preferences to the evolution of new technologies and digital channels, over recent years marketers have had to adapt to changing circumstances and make the most of new opportunities.
In addition to these micro-challenges, the last ten years since the financial crash of 2008 has posed several macro challenges, too. The nature of work itself has become very different, with a steady rise in contracting and freelancing, remote working and even changes to employment rights. All of these factors have meant that marketers have had to become more resilient and adaptable.
Enter COVID-19...
The recent coronavirus outbreak has tested workers across all sectors in new and unprecedented ways. At the time of writing, the…
How to become a better marketer: 6 marketing tactics you need to work on to stay relevant
With the rapid development in technology, many changes occur in the marketing scene within short periods. Therefore, as you're trying to execute the tactics you know, you're also in a constant quest to learn new things.
Otherwise, it becomes difficult to stay relevant and achieve your goals. Even in marketing channels you know, changes are happening with time.
For instance, 17 years ago, you only need to understand how to send blast emails to be a good email marketer. However, today, you need a deep understanding of automated email sequences just to get by.
That said, you'll always stay relevant as a marketer if you keep up with important trends and apply them to your marketing campaigns.
In light of this, here are 6 essential tactics to work on:
1. Creating and designing visual content
Over the years, …
How to navigate a 'squiggly career'
When many of us consider the word ‘career’, we think about climbing a corporate ladder and following a predictable, linear path to promotion. This was certainly my expectation when I entered the workforce after university; the advice was to join a company as a graduate trainee and move through the ranks to a senior role.
But whilst the idea of a traditional career may still be the case for some, the last ten years has transformed many people’s professional working experiences and their expectations for what a career will provide. This is true across most professions, but especially true for marketing, where the rise of the internet, social media and digital channels has disrupted the traditional paradigm.
Navigating the ‘squiggly career’
In spring 2018, whilst I was in between jobs, I discovered a podcast called ‘Squiggly Careers’. Presented by Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper, it covered a huge…
How to build a personal brand as a marketer: 7 effective tactics for personal brand building
As a marketer, building a personal brand can have a great impact on your success.
Even if you work for a company, building your personal brand will prove a great benefit to your company as much as it will be to you.
With a trusted personal brand, you have a unique position in your industry, the ability to influence a bigger audience and turn many of them into customers.
As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."
But how do you build your personal brand as a marketer? In this blog post, discover 7 effective tactics you can start using today.
1. Understand your target audience
Trying to please everybody is the fastest way to pleasing no one. Therefore, you have to understand…
As a marketer, getting better jobs will be a target at one point in your career. Of course, a great job could mean different things to different people
To some, a better job means better pay. To some, it’s better flexibility at work. To some, it’s the ability to take on challenging work.
Whatever a better job means to you, it’s vital to stand out to get those jobs. In some ways, being able to land great jobs shows your level of expertise.
Having said that, what are the tactics that can make you stand out to potential employers? What will give you an edge when a great client needs a marketer?
In this blog post, discover 7 tactics that can help you stand out as a marketer and get better jobs:
1. Focus on a niche
Every type of business on earth needs a marketer. After all, every…
Five ways to frame our thoughts and actions as leaders
As marketers, there will inevitably come a point in many of our careers when we’ll be asked to step up from operating as individuals focused on specific tasks (e.g. SEO specialists, digital analysts, web developers) to managers responsible for a group of specialists (e.g. digital marketing manager).
Whether you make the move into management depends entirely on you and your personal drivers (and whether it’s right to promote people based on their technical skills is a debate for another day). But if you do decide to take the route into management, it's important to consider the implications.
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The theory, principles and practices of agile ways of working
Over the last few years, I have consistently heard and seen references to the terms ‘agile’ and ‘scrum’, most notably in a technology and project management context. However, more recently this has found its way into mainstream working environments, and I’ve noticed more and more people talking about agile in memos, emails and even job ads. Take this example from a leading financial services provider:
“Our organization is currently embarking on a significant move towards more agile ways of working, giving our colleagues more accountable freedom than ever before and far more opportunity to make a difference to our customer experiences”.
But what does ‘agile working’ mean and why has this become so prominent?
A history 80 years in the making
‘Agile’ is a mindset, a set of beliefs, principles and way of thinking. In the early 2000s, Carol Dweck popularized…
