Wondering about the value of having a Digital Marketing Professional on your payroll? According to McKinley Marketing Partners, Digital Marketing was the most sought-after marketing specialty for 2019. They estimate 61 percent of hiring managers plan to add Digital Marketing Professionals to their team this year alone.
That’s because Digital Marketing Professionals know how to generate customer growth for their companies.
But what strategies and tactics do Digital Marketers need to know to generate higher customer growth? And what type of digital marketing technology platform is best?
Let’s talk first about the strategies and tactics that Digital Marketers are expected to know in order to effectively do their job. Then we’ll explore how they can learn and stay up-to-date with all of those tasks.
This is where it starts. You need a strategy to know how you are going to reach your audience. The purpose of your strategy is to use your currently-available resources, such as any digital channels you’ve created, tools, and your people, to meet the specific goals for your company to grow your customer base and revenue.
How do we do that?
There are many facets to this. It includes the following key areas that you need to know or learn how to do:
To perform well, companies must have an identifiable brand. You need to become a thought-leader in your industry.
Publishing content through your primary digital channels helps you to achieve this.
Primary digital channels include search engines, review websites, and social media sites that your would-be customers use to research about your products and services.
By creating impactful and valuable content on these channels, you’ll attract these customers to your company’s website, social media pages, and blog.
In this step, the focus is very much educational by defining the key aspects of your target buyers’ problems or challenges and showing them how your product or service addresses their needs and solves their problems.
The marketing tactics you identify as beneficial and implement across your digital channels should include a range of tools such as display advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, paid search, SEO, email marketing, automation, and analytics.
How is that done?
To build this brand awareness, you need a Digital Marketing Professional that can tackle tasks such as:
Content creation, and its marketing, is the single most challenging aspect of digital marketing activities. Every component of content creation must be focused on attracting your target audience and engaging with them on your website.
Ultimately, content must convert your prospect into a lead.
In order for this to occur, content needs to meet specific goals. Digital Marketing Professionals achieve this by ensuring the content is:
When content achieves these goals, it moves the potential customer further into the buyer’s journey, giving them valuable insight into what the product or service is, but also answering their question about how well your company fits their needs.
Having leads isn’t enough. Having qualified leads – those that your sales team can turn into customers – is valuable. To achieve this, you need your content to not just be great, but also to motivate your target audience to take action.
You need to be able to convert your target audience into leads.
How do we do this? There are a number of ways your digital marketing professional will achieve this including:
CTAs are buttons and links used on your website that take the viewer to a custom landing page where they can then provide information, make a purchase, request a quote, or otherwise begin to work with you.
These are content-rich pages that educate those who visit your website and encourage them to take the next step in their buyer’s journey. They work in conjunction with your CTA and include things like special offers and tools – i.e. eBooks, guides, white papers, studies, and other content offers – that encourage people to provide their contact information to you in exchange.
When someone visits your site, you want them to have a simple way to provide their personal information. Forms allow this. They are specific to the stage of the buyer’s journey as well as to the content offer, subscription services, product, or the service you plan to offer. Forms should collect, at least, the name and a valid email address of your customer.
Once you have the information from those forms, you then need a tool – such as the HubSpot Hub – that allows you to manage it. It should also include all the intelligence on the activity that person took on your website, social media channels, emails, or other areas. This is done through cookies set on a person’s computer. This type of intelligence is important because it allows you to remarket to those individuals, creating personalized messages based on the experiences they had on your website.
It seems simple, but this is a confirmation page that is displayed right after the form is filled out. It is customized to your landing page and the buyer’s journey stage. And, it works to reaffirm why they filled out the form. For example, it may include a link to download the eBook they just signed up to receive.
These emails are sent out to the email addresses that you’ve collected through the form. They are sent out as a series to help educate the interested buyer and, eventually, to verify that the email address is valid. The email may include a link to download a white paper or offer another product to the potential customer.
Workflows are a series of automated actions that are triggered to occur based on a person’s action or contact information.
For example, the workflows can include messages that are sent to email addresses at various times to help engage with your leads and get them back to the buyer’s journey and the buying process. They also work to qualify leads so your sales team can step into them as needed.
Additionally, they can help you engage with your customers more effectively.
In today’s digital world, your marketing and sales teams and processes must be more integrated. To achieve this, consider the advantages of an Inbound Sales Methodology. It is fast becoming an emerging method for engaging prospects and leads with your sales professionals.
A key reason for this is that buyers control the sales process today. It’s no longer sales-managed. That means your sales professionals must meet your buyers where they are in the buyer’s journey and work to guide them through their decision-making process to become paying customers.
Several things make this method different. Inbound sales is a personalized and modern sales methodology that allows digital marketers and sellers to work together.
Their goal is to focus on the buyer’s pain points – or the things that are holding your buyer back from making a purchase.
They also act as a trusted consultant and adapt their processes as needed in the buyer’s journey.
When your digital marketers and sales professionals work together, this becomes feasible. They can do this by:
Digital Marketing Professionals also play a role in customer service. While they don’t provide customer service directly, they need to be able to use insight from customers to help the company to grow. How does this happen?
Your customers should love your product, but they should also become promoters for your business. That happens when you are giving them what they want and need.
For that to happen, your professional marketers need to be able to understand the product, understand the service delivery of it, and then work closely with the company’s customer service team to understand how to continually improve.
What information does the customer need? What type of content do they benefit from? Are there customers willing to give testimonials or reviews? Is there an opportunity to develop a case study on how you helped one of your customers overcome his or her challenges and meet a specific measurable goal?
Digital marketers also need to use customer feedback to help the company to grow to reach new customers and expand the target customer range as needed.
Your customer success comes from a group working together – it’s not a single person’s job.
View it as a team sport, one with professional marketers along with sales professionals, and customer service reps who work together to build the company’s customer advocate program.
This can be done in a variety of ways such as:
Digital marketers are no longer just marketing your services. They are using detailed insight into operations to make decisions.
According to a report from McKinley Marketing Partners, 46 percent of hiring managers expect to be able to hire a Digital Marketing Professional with expertise in research and analysis.
Their job is multi-faceted. It should include the ability to effectively use technology, analytical tools, and intelligence, in order to research and then analyze. This should then allow them to create and operate effectively in a fast-changing digital marketing field.
If they are unable to handle this work themselves, they are missing key opportunities to adapt quickly enough to meet customer expectations.
Industry leadership is critical, and your certified professional marketers are a key asset in your rise to the top. Keep in mind that industry leadership isn’t about providing great products and services.
Rather, it’s about establishing your company as an expert in the related field.
This is done through your digital marketing efforts. Individuals in your company work to share your intelligence and work to educate your market, which helps you achieve industry leadership.
To do this, they must use numerous tools and methods. They work to:
Digital marketing and sales professional positions are considered middle-skill jobs. And, according to a survey from Capital One, more than 8 in 10 middle-skill jobs (about 82 percent) require digital skills.
Yet, it is very common for those holding such positions to lack the needed skills in some of these areas, especially if they have no formal digital marketing experience.
What skills do your marketing professionals need to have?
Here’s a very specific skillset that any middle-skill position is likely to require today:
Can you confidently say your team has these skills right now? If not, those skill gaps could be hurting their productivity and results.
Here’s the bottom line – professional digital marketers simply must be very tech savvy to effectively sell your company to today’s customers.
Technology acquisition, implementation, and management are tasks you may think your IT department needs to manage. That’s no longer the case.
Rather, marketing’s use of technology matches or exceeds what your IT department manages.
There are plenty of examples of its importance.
The Gartner Group CMO Spend Research found that marketing technology is the single largest area of investment in marketing resources and programs today.
Check out this Wall Street Journal article written by Christopher Mims, called “Every Company Is Now a Tech Company.” You’ll learn that we’ve entered a time of upheaval where technology is driving connectivity, and artificial intelligence and automation are critical.
Every business has been impacted in every industry because of this change in tech demand.
According to Chiefmartec.com, professional marketers’ technology landscape includes an incredible list of tools and resources – they range widely from advertising and promotion to content and experience, social relationships, commerce and sales, data, and management.
Look at this chart to see just how many tools digital marketers need to use.
Digital marketing is constantly changing. While you may have access to numerous training courses today, you need to not only understand digital marketing but also how to implement it within an advanced technology platform such as HubSpot.
You need a way to learn about digital marketing and its technology in a cohesive manner, where every component is taught together.
Xcellimark offers personalized onboard and training in both digital marketing and the HubSpot technology used to implement your campaigns.
It’s clear that you need to have a Digital Marketing Professional to help you propel your business forward in today’s digitally-focused world. It’s also important to recognize the importance of having the right technology platform in place to implement your strategies and plans.
That’s where Xcellimark excels – by working directly with you and your team to provide digital marketing and sales training and support, along with the onboarding and training you need to get the maximum benefit from the HubSpot CRM platform.
Find out more about our personalized digital marketing and HubSpot training.
