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?

Why should marketers embrace social media as a media channel?

Mitch Joel from Twist Image & the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast put out a post here about how Digital Marketers are getting their heads around social media, and there are several thoughts here I would like to expand on from a client side point of view.

The biggest challenge I faced when walking the two hundred and fifty online marketers through my Six Pixels of Separation presentation was how to build community and content around a working model that is strictly focused on conversion.

I know how you must have felt. It's a tough conversation justifying additional marketing spend for activity that is not as accountable (yet) as Pay-Per-Click. Online marketing has fought hard to earn it's reputation as a 'cost effective' acquisition channel, and for some companies that can become a drug that's hard to kick.

I see parallels between social media and TV Brand advertising. The effects of TV Brand Advertising is difficult to measure accurately, but there is an over-riding belief that it's is the right thing to do for the following reasons;

• It's gives the advertiser reach to a broad audience
• It can communicate quickly who you are and what your values are
• It casts a positive 'halo' effect over direct response channels that improves response rates

Social Media can also provide these three things, but the real opportunity is in what else it can add on top, namely;

• Cost Effectiveness - It doesn't cost a million pounds to enter a conversation online. It could. But it doesn't have to
• Accountability - tracking tools and analytics will continue to improve in this space giving Marketers an unprecedented amount of useful data
• ....and most importantly communication with social media is a conversation, therefore by it's very nature it's two way. This is the real opportunity

Marketers are increasingly understanding both what conversations that are relevant to them, and how they should take part in a credible way. The 'dad on the dance floor' gaffs of brands who got it wrong should become fewer and fewer.

Drawing similarities between the online & offline world, like the example above, can help more traditional marketeers see through the hype and identify the opportunities.

By the end of 2007 I hope there are some great examples for us to talk about.