Marketing has been growing by leaps and bounds, and every year there are new tools and strategies that come out and blow our minds, so take note of these marketing skills.
2017 was no different.
It was a whirlwind of marketing and social media innovation the likes of which the world has never seen before… well, maybe I’m exaggerating.
To me at least, it was pretty freaking awesome.
It’s really easy to get lost and confused in the plethora of tools out there so I set out on a mission to get some clarity. I asked some of my marketing friends a simple question:
What are the essential marketing skills that every good marketing manager should have in 2018?
The legendary growth marketer Aaryn Kobayashi from Kahuna (awesome marketing automation software company) was kind enough to respond.
Here are three important areas that she outlined: marketing analytics, lead generation, and project & team management.
Marketing Analytics
Measuring the results of your marketing campaigns is perhaps the most important thing you can do to achieve growth. In fact, growth hacking or growth marketing relies heavily on analytics and prides itself on doing so.
There are several areas that require analytics, so it’s one of the many important marketing skills.
First, you need to analyze your website traffic in order to know what to improve upon. A few key metrics that you can work on – page loading speed, length of user visits, number of backlinks.
Another key area is social media analytics. You need to analyze the click-through rate of your campaigns, the engagement rates, and the distribution. Is the right audience reading your posts? are you posting on the right channels and with the right frequency? These are some good questions to ask yourself.
You can use eClincher’s analytics reports tool to create a report that combines data from Google Analytics and from your various social media profiles to show you the full picture.
Analytics is going to be a hot topic in 2018 with increased innovation in AI and digital marketing reports.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is how you build and grow any business. A business needs leads just as much as pizza needs tomatoes. (where are all my pizza lovers at?)
One of my favorite hacks in lead gen is using chatbot landing pages and popups. Instead of asking for the visitor’s email you simply prompt them to connect with you via Facebook Messenger and voila! you have their profile info.
Here is an example of one that I created:
The advantage of using a chatbot on Messenger versus email is really apparent when you see how many people open your chat messages. Neil Patel actually got over 88% open rates and over 56% click-through rates by using a chatbot.
Another trend in lead generation is automated drip email campaigns. One of my favorite tools to use is MailShake, which allows me to set up automatic follow-up emails. I used this tool numerous times and got 80% open rates (what???) and about 10-30 leads off of small lists.
Another incredible tool for lead generation is NinjaOutreach which allows you to find and connect with thousands of bloggers and influencers in a matter of minutes. The tool allows you to build a list of contacts by either doing a content search or a social media search. Then you can use their awesome templates and set up automatic email campaigns. I tried this a few months ago and got over 70% open rates and 80 content partnerships and collaborations set up.
Project & Team Management
One more to our marketing skills list. Managing a team and keeping all your projects on schedule is the last piece of the puzzle for a successful marketing manager. There are a lot of parts to a successful marketing campaign. You need someone to do the social ads, a designer to design everything, a content writer, a PR person of some sort, and another person to run the social media.
Unless you are a tiny company or a bootstrapped startup, chances are you have a small team that executes the campaign.
It’s important to have everything organized and know who is doing what, and when. There are numerous tools for that.
Slack – Slack is a great way to organize your team, communicate with everyone and brainstorm ideas.
Monday – A really great tool that displays all your projects visually, it organizes everything for you.
Nuvro – Nuvro is unique because it organizes everything for you – from projects to notes, to documents, to team assignments. It can even help you manage your team members and track their progress.
2018 is going to be about tools that help teams automate and organize processes as much as possible. It’s going to be critical for marketing managers to learn the tools and pick the best ones for their organization. It’s also going to be crucial for managers to know exactly where each project is at and what each person on the team needs to do to complete it.
Recap
Here are the three areas of marketing that a marketing manager needs to know inside out in 2018:
Analytics
– Analyze your site traffic and audience
– Track all of your social media engagement and the success of your campaigns
– Combine site and social data using eClincher to find which campaigns are bringing the most traffic to your site.
Lead Generation
– Use chatbots and Facebook Messenger popups to capture leads and get higher open and click-through rates than email
– Use MailShake to create automated outbound email drip campaigns
– Create massive lists using NinjaOutreach of the most relevant and high quality leads you can get.
Project management
– Keep all of your notes, projects, and campaigns organized with Nuvro.
– Create easy to follow schedules with Monday and organize your team to execute them.
– Keep communication flowing and brainstorming happening at all times with Slack.
