Some advertising skills are as timeless as they are movable, which is one of the reasons it’s such a great area to pursue a career in.
Suppose you develop the ability to the investigate, analyze, and understand customers’ key needs. In that case, you will continue to thrive as a marketer, no matter how the nature of the job changes.
Hone your creative storytelling skills, and then you’ll be able to adapt advertising plans smooth as new channels emerge.
And if you can translate those initial two skills into a job that builds brand affinity and convinces people to make purchases, you’re the person brands turn to when they need marketing talent.
A few years ago, most marketers often used these skills in the same environments.
Strategic thinking and planning could have taken place with colleagues in a boardroom (assuming you could have found one free to reserve).
Daily tasks could be in your office or, more commonly, in a cubicle in a row with other compartments.
Then all the back-and-forth client seats, agency partner offices and industry conferences remained.
Remote work hasn’t necessarily eliminated all that, but it has certainly changed how work gets done.
That means marketers, whether they’re new to their role or have been running the entire department for years, need to think about new types of skills:
1. Development and implementation of virtual campaigns
The first ideas for a sequence of ads or social television posts may have started with many people sitting around a table or whiteboard. Then the agency partners could be gone for a while until key marketing assets are created and ready for review and feedback.
Marketers have yet to go through these steps, but working remotely offers an opportunity to save significant time by eliminating a lot of back and forth between offices.
Instead, marketers should rather use digital whiteboarding apps and other tools to brainstorm their next campaigns.
Review and feedback can now be done via video conferencing, allowing marketers to learn how to submit review requests effectively.
When running a campaign, e.g., social content or managing creatives on an ad network, they’ll get even more value from marketing automation like Marketing Cloud. Maintaining strong communication between team members and agency partners is easier when working with tools like Slack.
2. Map countless customer journeys
Marketers who worked on brands where most of the activity took place in a physical location in a store did very well at traditional journey mapping. For example, they knew what lured people through the doors, what they were looking for on the shelves and what they were sure to find at the point of sale.
Those who primarily work with online brands are equally adept at eCommerce travel. These could have started on social media, the brand’s website, and finally, their online store.
Today there are many different variations of these customer journeys. Some start online and end in a physical location. Some will be online only but played entirely on a third party social media channel or marketplace. Sometimes, customers visit a store to view a product but then make an online purchase.
It isn’t easy to run many customer journeys when trying to put the pieces together from a million different places, especially when working remotely. That’s why a single source of truth, like Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform, helps unite marketing teams with sales and other critical business functions.
The more marketers master the myriad of customer journey maps, the better they can segment and personalize the stories they deliver to their most desirable audiences.
3. Digitally driven learning and networking
Marketers are often insatiable in search of knowledge. Among other things, they are looking for great branding and customer retention lessons that could be useful for everyone in their role. In other cases, they try to understand customer behavior in their respective industry better.
Conferences and in-person events have long been a gold mine for marketers to gain these insights and share their brand’s expertise with the world. However, as recent years have shown, they are not the only option.
Today’s marketers need to know how to get the most out of digital summits, webinars, and courses they can take with resources like Trailhead. They must also be able to create digital learning and networking opportunities for their brand.
These do not always have to be very expensive to produce.
You could start by contributing information to a Twitter chat and then host a similar one as part of your marketing efforts.
You could organize a round table for some VIP customers via video conference.
If you want to stay on top of marketing best practices, you should probably have a list of favourite podcasts and maybe even have plans to start a branded podcast to share some insights with the community.
In a way, remote marketing teams’ “new skills” aren’t new. It’s about taking your experience from a world where everyone worked in the same office to an era shaped by digital headquarters.
You may be working remotely, but if you can adapt your skills accordingly, you can get closer than ever