A busy marketer’s guide to skills development.

 Don't-be-stressed

Personal development. It’s often the first thing dangled in front of you as a marketer when starting a new role. Whether you’re about to start a new marketing role or you’ve been in your current job for a while, how do you stay on top of the latest developments in such a fast paced industry?

We’ve spoken to a group of marketers and put together their tried and tested methods which will help you to develop your skill set without having to worry about finding that 25th hour in your day.

1. Prioritisation

If you’re in a generalist marketing role and need to have an understanding of every element of your marketing campaigns, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. Where do you start?

The key is to stop and take time to evaluate before rushing in. What is it that’s actually important to your business? What are the measures of success that matter to them? Focus on these areas first and you’ll have a solid foundation on which to build.

That word ‘focus’ is important. The art of keeping focus in a generalist marketing role is vital. Your role will naturally see you buzzing around doing 101 different things each day. This variety is often what attracts people to marketing roles in the first place. However, you must never lose sight of those core business goals. Make sure they stay at the top of your list.

Ask yourself if there’s anything you can delegate, or request help with. As a marketer, you’re already naturally keen to get involved with things, but no one can do everything by themselves. You shouldn’t either. If you’ve got a team around you, work with them. It’ll make it that much easier to keep those key goals at the forefront of your mind.

2. Knowledge sharing

Whether they’re external or internal, events are a great way to absorb new things or share experiences with your team.

The formula here is very simple:

    Engaged-employees-blog-image

You will likely be out and about more than many other members of your company, so it’s important you feed your newfound nuggets of information back to them.

How you do this will depend on your business. You might consider a weekly mailshot, or the info may be best delivered verbally in quarterly update sessions.

You can also manufacture your own opportunities when it comes to acquiring knowledge. Use appraisals and reviews to present training opportunities to your superiors, and come prepared to show them exactly how this will be valuable. Remember, it’s not all about you, they’ll want to see how giving you this training will help improve the business.

With a solid a plan in place to share your knowledge with colleagues, as well as a timeline with an end goal, you’ll be sure to impress your bosses and help the business at the same time.

You may be lucky enough to work for a business that puts employee professional development at the heart of it’s strategy. They could have huge budgets and teams to allow you to take on this training and continue to up skill.

Market yourself well and show your company how it will benefit them with you getting better.

3. Free content online

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that there’s so much free content available online, you don’t really ever have to leave your desk. The tricky bit is weeding out the good from the bad. You don’t have to search far before your screen is awash with webinars, guides to download and several thousand blogs vying for your attention.

Some of our top trusted sources for great information include:

HubSpot

A must read for marketers. Give HubSpot their due, they know their audience and they certainly know the key to a marketers heart with blog content including:

Moz

For a slightly more technical view on the digital marketing world, the Moz blog is a great source of information providing tips, tricks, and advice for improving websites and doing better search, social, content, and brand marketing.

https://moz.com/blog

Inbound.org

The brainchild of Moz and HubSpot founders, and doing exactly what it says on the tin, Inbound helps marketers stay current and informed with articles such as:

http://inbound.org/view/articles

Register for our free webinar

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Spend 45 minutes upskilling without having to leave your comfy desk chair! Learn all about conversion rate optimisation, the art of increasing revenue from your existing website traffic.

Learn more and register for our upcoming CRO webinar on 12th November here – https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1004737394185989377

4. Get yourself a mentor

Having someone you can talk to and help guide you along the way has helped shape business leaders for centuries.

In a 2014 article, Mark Zuckerberg, Co-Founder and CEO Facebook cited Steve Jobs as one of his most influential mentors along his career journey, commenting “A small amount of time invested on your part to share your expertise can open up a new world for someone else.”

 miyagi

Where would Daniel be without Mr Miyagi or Batman without Alfred? Finding your own Yoda could be invaluable. Learn from their mistakes and take advice from someone who’s been there, done that and is willing to share their precious nuggets of knowledge with you.

What now?

There will always be pressure on marketers to develop and as a marketer that’s something you signed up for when you took your first job. It’s probably one of the reasons you love and sometimes don’t love your job quite so much.

Every day is a learning opportunity and keeping your business goals at the forefront of your mind will ensure the learning you do is for the right reasons and ends up being most beneficial to you.

We recently put our top 6 time saving tips together to help marketers get more from their day which you might enjoy. Alternatively, you can sign up to receive our latest updates below and hear more about our Marketing Manager Meet-Ups.

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