Now more than ever it’s essential to amplify the impact of your digital marketing management. Here we show you how to do this by boosting both your operational and leadership effectiveness.

It’s essential to boost your management skills

Now, more than ever, how you prioritize and execute your projects matters for effective digital marketing management. Without operational discipline, you’ll soon find yourself staring at the backs of your competitors. In another Smart Insights article, I talked about how to boost the productivity of your team ( https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/5-keys-to-work-from-home-success-during-coronavirus-times/ ) during these Coronavirus times. Here I focus on how to improve your productivity and, more importantly, your effectiveness as a leader.

Boosting your impact involves:

Prioritizing your marketing initiatives

Optimizing your marketing workflows

Outsourcing applicable work

Empowering your functional leads

I will drill into each topic below. …

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…

Implement these suggestions to enter into your WebOps role smoothly

Congratulations! You’ve been hired as your company's new website operations manager, but you might be wondering what exactly your role is. While some companies use an agency relationship to fill this job, they are increasingly hiring employees in-house to assist with this vital source of content and commerce. As a website operations manager, you are responsible for your company’s websites and WebOps (aka DevOps for websites). Tasks involve creating and editing content, installing security updates, addressing any bugs or website-related concerns, monitoring and optimizing web performance, translating content into other languages, and eliminating technical debt if you are inheriting an older website. [si_guide_block id="86160" title="Download our Free Resource – 10 common website customer experience mistakes guide" description="This guide reveals examples of poor website design from different sectors which are commonly seen, but best avoided. Expert strategy recommendations, practical tips…

Employee engagement has been shown to impact many different areas within an organization with three primary areas being performance, retention, and revenue

The shift of employee engagement to disengagement often comes down to a mismatch between employee expectations and what the organization is offering, particularly in relation to training and development. Across all experiences, I have encountered students and employees who are disengaged and at times, I have been disengaged myself. So what got people re-engaged? For others, it was personalizing the learning experience, what had got them to this point and where they wanted to go moving away from the ‘one size’ model and searching for new and novel ways to engage them. For myself, it was recognizing that I had needed to take responsibility for my own continuous learning. To say that I’m passionate about learning and engagement. [si_blog_banner_cta] A little bit of background about myself. Even though my initial training was in secondary…

How a digital product manager can bring leadership and organization to your business

The role of a digital product manager can encompass many tasks. Traditionally, the role oversees the entire life cycle of a product, from defining the scope, building the technology, creating a great customer experience and acquiring customers. However, these specific tasks can vary from company to company. [si_guide_block id="117459" title="Download our Free Resource – Marketing careers and skills development workbook" description="Our guide shows you how to map out your personal short-term and long-term goals, become more productive in your day-to-day work, identify your key motivators, analyze your digital marketing skills, how to leverage your strengths, and understand the different paths you can take to reach your goals."/] To get this work done on time and on budget, it means managing a cross-functional team, including the design team, development team, marketing, and others.

Product manager responsibilities

A digital product manager is responsible for the…

The first 90 days as a marketer can tell you a lot about the business and its customers, as well as help you show what type of marketer you are

“Ergh, urm I - er, I’m not sure”. That was me back in 2008 when I started my career in marketing and was introduced - unexpectedly - to my MD. I wasn’t expecting to bump into them, and at that moment when I was asked who I was and what I planned to do in my new role - a simple question - I lost the ability to speak. Why hadn’t I prepared an elevator pitch for this very reason? What a great first impression from the marketer who’d said in the interview she had the ability to communicate effectively and, as such, would be the right candidate to help craft the voice of the business. After this, I swore I’d always prepare for whatever…

Helping your team to develop their skills and knowledge can improve engagement, retention and business results.

Upskilling your digital marketing team should be an ongoing project if you want to ensure you’re always using the best tools and techniques, as well as getting the best results. Far too often, companies take on a business-as-usual approach, with everyone performing their usual tasks and a lack of focus on learning. While this results in getting the job done, it doesn’t help your team grow or develop new skills. Ensuring you put some focus on learning not only benefits each individual member of your team, it can ensure that you retain talent, grow skills that will benefit your business and bring more activities in-house in the long run. You might think that team development needs a big budget, but there are plenty of options available that can allow you to grow people’s skills without incurring a high…

Practical steps and tactics to set leaders and employees up for success

The concept of employee motivation is something that organizational development professionals have been thinking about and researching for decades. Where once money and other tangible rewards were considered to be the primary ways to motivate staff, there’s since been a move towards more intrinsic rewards, such as flexible working and professional development. In 2010’s ‘Drive’, Dan Pink eloquently outlined three key factors that influence motivation: [caption id="attachment_145701" align="aligncenter" width="916"] [Image Source][/caption]Over the last few years, I’ve seen and experienced a tangible increase in the word ‘autonomy’ and other related terms and synonyms. It feels as though organizations have developed a renewed sense of duty to remind employees that they can and should be autonomous within their roles and it’s something I’d like to…