Steve Jay's Digital Marketing Blog

Winning Behaviours for Digital Marketers

I've wanted to put this list together for some time now to try and capture some of the behaviours that people need to exhibit in this space.

I think there is a real challenge here for potential employers & recruitment consultants as people with this mix of skills will be hard to find. To make the job harder there is no real consistency yet in how Digital Marketing jobs are described in the market, i.e. eCommerce Manager, eBusiness Manager, eMarketing Manager etc, and the mix between IT, marketing, product & strategy is not well defined.

Now I'm not claiming that I'm a shining exemplar of all of these behaviours 24x7, by any stretch of the imagination, but these are the things that I believe are important and I aspire to them.

Winning Behaviours for Digital Marketers

Be a Digital Evangelist

If you don't believe itwhy should anyone else? Enthuse and tell everyone about it in your organisation. Has this happened to you? - you've sat in a meeting trying to solve a problem or an issue. In a flash of brilliance you think of a digital solution to the problem that you KNOW will work. But you hesitate to blurt it out because you think people will think you are too left field. If you've had that feeling, great. Your half-way there to being a Digital Evangelist, next time blurt it out.

Have a constant insatiable curiosity for new things

It is likelythat there is no-one above you in your organisation that you can learn from. Learn whatever you can from wherever you can. You are working in a medium which comes readily equipped with the tools to help you find the answers, you just have to find it. Blogs, Wiki's, Podcasts & people exist that cover every topic imaginable. Some are better than others and YOU can help improve the ones that aren't as good.

Seek out and get involved in conversations

Wherever the conversation is happening listen, read, learn, write, mash-up, contribute, disagree and help as much as you can. It's now your turn to put something back in for the people with a constant insatiable curiosity. Doesn't matter if it's in the UK, the USA or the Philippines! When I look to recruit the next person into my team the first thing I'm going to do is Google them to see what conversations they've been involved in.

Try not to make snap decisions about new media

This is a great piece of general advice for life and it's probably one of the hardest things to get used to doing. But once you have eaten your fourth truck load of humble pie it gets easier. Sometimes the benefit or use is not immediately apparent. Kick it around abit like an old football in the garden. Things are evolving and being 'figured out' in real-time. Just because you can't see the practical use today doesn't mean you won't invent one tomorrow.

If you are not learning from your agency partners, question if you have the right ones

You need all the help you can get to stay upto date, try this mantra - 'if your not learning they shouldn't be earning.' If you have a nagging feeling in the back of your mind that your thinking is further ahead than your agency,  you need to do something about it. Knowing when it's time to move on is a core skill if you want to maintain a level of continuous improvement.

Don’t get smug about your on-line successes

Likely there is an offline part of your department that you need to continue to work with. The most succesful companies will be the ones that learn the correct balance of online to offline for their particular business. How to get both channels to play to each other strengths will be imperative. Calling your offline counterpart a dinosaur will probably not help discover this balance.

I want to grow this list to a Top 10 as I think of a few more, so I would really like to know what you think and to hear your suggestions?

Digital Marketing & traditional Marketing - How do I get the best of both worlds?

How do I organise my marketing department in the wake of the digital revolution?

This question is increasingly being asked in the client side world. Over the last eight years I have seen the online marketing evolve, or snowball, through the following stages;

The handful of pseudo techno geeks playing at building websites in the corner of the office

The ‘smart’ high-flyers of the organisation who joined the pseudo techno geeks to try out some ‘new business models’ with a newly acquired bucketful of cash

The bruised and battered eCommerce people who emerged from the dot.com boom licking their wounds, but still believed that what they were doing was valid and vital to the future of the organisation they were working for

The digital specialists who grew from the eCommerce people and began to demonstrate results in their medium through the application of common sense, analytics and the sheer accountability that’s built into the channel

The Digital Marketers who budgets are approaching parity to offline channels and who are driving up to 70% of the new business in some bricks & clicks business

 

In most industries the growth and importance of Digital Marketing is not up for question. The change is no longer something ethereal that will happen ‘in a few years’, it’s here. Right now.

Why then does it feel that traditional businesses are not tackling this issues head on? To me there are some things that are fundamentally broken, that are preventing businesses from evolving further, and they are ;
 

• The Digital Marketers, despite their successes, are still metaphorically sitting in the corner of the office.
• People  working in offline roles understand the shift, but don’t seem to be interested in learning new skills and making the transition
• Senior management have gaps in their knowledge about strategic opportunities online and there is no program in place to help them bridge the gap
• In many cases front-line staff know less about their online proposition than the customer they’re talking to.

 How do companies get past this? What is it we have to do to get out of this trough an up the other side? 

I love new media. I love the fact that we are so excited about the opportunities open to us at the moment. We are genuinely in the middle of a revolution, and it’s very cool. But we have to realise that to some extent we are in an echo chamber. Soon we will have to work out how we bring our offline colleagues into the conversation.

This is not a issue pertaining only to clients. I think that many traditional agencies are suffering from the same problem, how do they in corporate their digital offshoot seamlessly in to the rest of the company? In a way that comes across as integrated to the client?

Interestingly I was talking to the Strategy Director of my online media agency, and he felt there is an inverse corollary here to some issues experienced by Digital Agencies. i.e. they often lack some of the skills of traditional agencies particularly around media planning, client management & the ability to demonstrate skill in aspects of offline business and how it complements digital.

I really feel that the businesses that will win in this area are the ones who learn how to cement these two worlds together. So that the combined skills in both areas become the ‘normal’ way of doing business, and not exclusive to the geeks sitting in the corner.

Do I have my early adopter glasses on, or should I wait for everyone to catch up? This is a massive issue and I would appreciate your thoughts?