Digital Marketing Upskilling for Competitive Edge
One thing we have learnt from 2022 is that all businesses face increasing challenges and disruptions from macro factors and the business landscape is more competitive than ever. Businesses need to make smart decisions to keep a competitive edge or even to survive.
“Businesses cannot press pause on 2023 planning to wait and see how things will unfold…business leaders need to put strategies in place now. And marketing has a major role to play.”
Marketers are increasingly under pressure to find the advantage over competitors, improve metrics and increase ROI on marketing spend. Along with the changes to customer behaviours since the pandemic, the skillset marketers require to make an impact has shifted. But with the majority of the current and prospective workforce thinking they lack the proper digital skills to prepare them for the future (Salesforce, 2022) are businesses creating the appropriate culture and investing in their team to allow them to get every last drop of value out of their budgets and keep a competitive edge?
We’ll look at the impact of not investing in training your marketing teams and what business leaders can do to get the most out of their team and reach sky high ROI.
Customer expectations
Over recent years customers expectations on businesses have increased exponentially. Customers expect businesses to act ethically, communicate effectively, offer value for money without compromising on quality or values and have products or services conveniently available to purchase and delivered at home. That’s a lot of expectations and customers are not necessarily prioritising only one element. They expect organisations to do it all.
But as the elements often conflict with each other it makes it impossible for organisations and marketers to achieve.
Digital marketing in particular has become more and more vital over the past decade and a recent CIM report showed that a physical store was the least important consumer need, highlighting a notable shift towards online shopping and digital channels.
“Digital has become, not only, an essential element of marketing strategy but also of any organisational strategy”
Digital skills
Historically, businesses have not invested in building digital skills or creating an in-house digital marketing team. 45% of digital marketing activities are performed by external agencies and partners for B2C product companies (HBR, 2022). Over the years this has created a digital skills gap and increased business costs.
As digital marketing becomes more integral in overall organisational strategy, the reliance on external agency skills has become more obvious. Without relevant in-house knowledge and skills, marketers are left unable to appropriately manage agencies, create a fully integrated brand strategy or maintain brand consistency across multiple channels.
So what can businesses do to reduce the reliance on agencies and be more responsive to consumer behaviours? Especially when budgets are squeezed and the world is so unpredictable.
Value of digital marketing training
For most businesses, keeping an eye on spending and budgets will be a huge focus for 2023. It may seem counterintuitive at this stage to be looking at spending money on training but it’s surprising how much investing in your team can have a positive impact on your marketing budget.
It has been reported that the UK’s productivity lags behind the rest of Europe, one of main reasons being a lack of investment in upskilling.
“79% of marketers believe the skillset required for their job has completely changed over the past 10 years but only half have received external training in the last year”
A skilled team is more productive - they are able to make better decisions, create efficiencies and can make changes to campaigns faster than agency partners who are managing multiple clients.
Being at the helm of developing digital strategy, managing customer data and being able to make changes quickly to execute an agile campaign that responds to real time data is invaluable to the business and could be the competitive advantage your business needs.
Upskilling your team also improves brand loyalty - individual team members recognise the investment in their development and have enhanced job satisfaction. For the business, it is cheaper to train an existing team rather than re-hiring.
But do remember that one-off training is no longer fit for purpose in an ever evolving and competitive business environment. Skills need to be updated on an ongoing basis and there is a need to create a culture of ongoing learning (CIM, 2022).
The change in consumer expectations and reliance on digital strategies should be a wake up call for organisations and marketers to invest in their training and development. To set them up with the best chance of responding to:
^ The expanding range of skills required to do a good job
^ Unpredictable consumer behaviour
^ Macroeconomic factors
At Balanced Impact our mission is to strengthen business performance & teams to create lasting, positive change. We’ve worked closely with 100’s of brands to advise and build their business with the right strategies, processes and technologies as well as upskill their people to drive performance.
Our approach to digital marketing training has been tried & tested over the past two decades through building, training & mentoring digital marketing teams. We have found that our actionable digital marketing training will ensure your team feels confident to put their learning into practice to drive business performance.
“One of their biggest strengths is their devotion to nurture talent at all levels and produce highly skilled digital experts that can deal with the most challenging of situations with ease”
Find out more about our digital marketing training courses or get in touch with us, we’d be more than happy to find out more about your business and team goals and how we can help you to improve performance.