10 Skills Online Marketing Teams Must Have to Succeed
Running an effective online marketing campaign requires a collage of skills, including the ability to bring it all together.
By Rocco Baldassarre •
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Whether the goal is leads, sales or brand awareness, the task of every online marketing team is to significantly scale up results. Over the past couple of years, I have worked with over 6000 businesses and some of the best online marketing teams in the world. There is a pattern of how those teams are put together and one of the most important aspects is the variety of skill sets.
Online marketing teams need a number of different skills to be able to grow campaigns effectively and this article lists ten of the most important skills every online marketing team should have.
1. Web designing.
The designer of online marketing campaigns has to create visuals that sell and represent the brand at the same time. Web design is frequently outsourced but even then, the person who manages the outsourced design tasks has to judge the quality of the design and have a general overview of what to look for.
2. Managing social media.
Integrating the organic presence of the brand with paid campaigns is essential. Potential customers frequently visit Facebook pages, Twitter profiles and other social media pages before making a purchasing decision.
Related: 5 Ways to Optimize Local Search Results and Compete With the Big Guys
3. Knowing Google AdWords and Bing.
Paid search is still top priority for businesses that serve an existing demand. People actively searching for a product or service are much more likely to purchase than people who are passively exposed to an ad.
Serving existing demand in real-time is the very basis of digital marketing and a must know for online marketers.
4. Effectively analyzing data.
Tracking what websites people visited before coming to their website and how they behave once there allows marketers to know customers and scale up campaigns quickly. Whether it is knowing advanced Google Analytics or data retrieval from other third party tools, data analysis is always needed to measure performance and optimize campaigns.
5. Being familiar with SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is widely believed to support paid search, in particular when it comes to Google AdWords. One part of SEO is to strategically insert relevant keywords on website pages. The price of Google AdWords is influenced by something called the "quality score,'' so the higher the score, the cheaper the ad. How relevant the ad is for the search query people type in and the page of the website people land on is influenced by keywords. Well done SEO will result in cheaper ads.
6. Competent project management.
I have found that the size of online marketing teams has significantly increased since 2011. I now often see teams of 125 people per account, working on campaigns for just one platform. This is good for the marketing industry. Marketers who have gathered experience in campaign creation have one more way to take their career to the next step by keeping large specialized teams on track.
Related: 4 Project Management Tips to Keep Your Virtual Team on Track
7. Know the many facets of content marketing.
We have all heard the phrase "content is king." In the past, content marketers were frequently confused with professional copy writers. Content marketing nowadays involves much more than writing. It includes infographics, infomercials, videos, and podcasts.
Additionally, content marketers are expected to be familiar with best practices to distribute the content. That touches upon the field of online PR.
8. Programming.
A minimum of basic programming skills is essential, especially for companies with multiple physical locations and ecommerce businesses. One examples of a situation where programmers are needed is to automatically insert the name of the closest city on the landing page based on the IP address of the website visitor.
Additionally, making landing pages load faster typically increases conversion rates. While some ads are more likely to lead to conversions than others, the landing page is what converts in the end. There are very few exceptions to this such as Facebook lead ads where the ad converts but even then web developers come in handy to customize fields.
9. Seeing the vision.
Whether I work with small businesses or the largest advertising platforms in the world such as Bing Ads, everything we do has to fit into the bigger picture of the company.
Seeing beyond short term goals and understanding the long term repercussions of marketing activities and decisions is an important aspect of scaling a business.
10. Being proactive.
Proactive online marketers experiment with ad strategies, jump on trends, develop fresh ideas and explore new sales funnels. Many online advertising platforms boost traffic during private beta phases and shortly after the launch of new tools. By staying on top of updates, businesses can beat competitors by getting the first mover advantage as soon as tools become available.
