Category: Uncategorized

What are the social media marketing skills you’ll need to master in 2022?

Staying up-to-date with your social media marketing skills is vital if you want to get the most out of your social media accounts. Trying to grow your business on social media is never easy but following and taking advantage of the latest social media marketing trends is one way to get a leg up on the competition. 

In the following article, we’re going to check out ten skills that you need to stay on top of if you want to have successful social media accounts in 2022!

10 Vital Social Media Marketing Skills:

1. Communication – If you’re the face of your business or organization on social media, excellent communication skills are an absolute must! You’ll be communicating with people that contact you through social media and also commenting on posts. 
2. Creativity – With so much content being created for social media, how do you ensure that yours stands out from the crowd? Creativity with your social media posts is vital if you want to stand out from the competition.
3. Writing – It’s easy to forget that social media is more than pictures and videos. It’s also writing. Curating an excellent story to go with your social media posts is an essential skill any good social media marketer requires.
4. Content Curation – Anyone can make content, but only the best can curate their content for an effective social media campaign. 
5. Project Management – Managing multiple social media accounts requires a critical skill, project management. You’ll have to manage multiple posts on different platforms and measure their effectiveness.
6. Flexibility – A good social media marketer knows how to be flexible. You have to be ready to take advantage of trends quickly and adjust your social media content to suit the latest trends on different platforms.
7. Forward Thinking – What does the future hold? If you can get out ahead of a potential new trend in social media, then you’ll have an advantage over your competition.
8. Marketing – Marketing and social media go together, but it takes a skilled and experienced social media manager to juggle multiple accounts and see opportunities when they present themselves.
9. Relationship Building – Social media and marketing are all about building potential relationships with clients. Have you got the relationship-building skills you need to grow your social media accounts successfully?
10. Community Management – Your social media followers and fans are your community. As such, it’s up to you as the social media manager to successfully build and manage that community.
    
    

Vital Social Media Marketing Skills Needed in 2022 for Business Growth – Conclusion

There you go! 10 vital social media marketing skills you’ll need to master if you want to see your business grow in 2022! Social media is constantly changing and evolving. So staying up-to-date with the latest trends and keeping your skills sharp is vital to your success.

If you have any questions about essential social media marketing skills or you’d like to learn more, then please don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us or comment below! Our friendly and professional team is always happy to help.

Stories are everywhere and for humans, they’ve always been a fundamental part of life and how we relate to the world. Fairy tales introduced us to good and evil while page-turning novels show us love and loss. Fascinating news articles teach us about world events while funny anecdotes that we share with our loved ones keep us connected. Stories are powerful tools and therefore, they can be very useful as part of a marketing strategy.

Holding a reader’s attention is getting harder and marketers need to find new ways of connecting with their target audience. While there is nothing new about storytelling, humans undoubtedly respond to and remember the good stories they consume. There is evidence that we are 22 times more likely to remember a story than we are a list of facts or sales pitches. This makes storytelling a very valuable marketing tactic. But what makes an effective story in marketing?

AIDA Storytelling

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action and it refers to a story structure that is well used in marketing. 

Attention: Get to know what your audience cares about and any problems that they might have. Address this straight away with bold statements, statistics, or a question relating to what they want to achieve. Their attention span has no time for lengthy introductions!

Interest: Holding the reader’s interest is difficult but through warm, conversational language, acknowledging their struggles, and including familiar situations, your audience will begin to build up trust and relate to you.

Desire: Tell them how your brand can help them. What problem of theirs can you solve?

Action: Let the reader know what to do next in order to solve their problem. This should lead to a sales conversion if the story you’ve built up has fully engaged your reader.

4P Storytelling

The 4P story structure refers to four rules for marketing storytelling, all beginning with the letter P.

Promise: Get your customer’s attention by making them a promise and explaining what you can offer them. Keep referring to this promise throughout your work.

Picture: Tell the story of a satisfied customer in an engaging way. This will help your audience picture themselves as the satisfied customer.

Proof: Use facts, statistics, and infographics to give the reader proof that you know your stuff and that your brand is trustworthy.

Push: Tell your reader what to do in order for them to gain the benefits of what you’re offering. They know you and trust you now -they want to be your next satisfied customer!

Before-After-Bridge Storytelling

This storytelling technique introduces readers to a difficult situation and shows them how to get to a better one. 

Before: Think about a problem or negative situation that your audience might find themselves in and begin your story there. This tells the reader that you understand them.

After: Tell them how much better the situation could be with the right solution. 

Bridge: Tell the reader what the solution is and how your brand can help them get there.

After-Bridge Storytelling

There is a version of the Before-After-Bridge storytelling technique that begins with a happy ending. The story of how to get there is then told backward so that the reader keeps the ideal ‘after’ scenario as a goal in their minds.

The Hero’s Journey Storytelling

Everyone wants to be the hero of their own story, so putting your customer in that position is an excellent way of engaging them.

The hero needs to have a challenge to face. They need to take on the challenge and they need to succeed. 

By describing how your brand or product can help the hero achieve their goal, the reader will be able to see how your offer is exactly what they need to overcome their own challenges.

Connect through stories

Using storytelling techniques in your marketing strategy gives your brand a human element that will help potential customers relate to you and remember you. If readers enjoy your stories, they will keep coming back to read the next one, building loyalty and meaningful engagement. Gaining their trust and giving them a unique offering will certainly convert your marketing efforts into sales and a community of regular, happy customers. Start telling your story today!

The biggest professional concern for all individuals and businesses in marketing today is lagging behind the technological line. Marketers in the digital business environment are highly software-reliant in creating, automating, analyzing, and managing their promotional activities; hence staying ahead of the technological trend does not sound like an option for marketers. Causey (2022) recommends three educational-based platforms, DataSift, Convince & Convert, and iGoDigital, that can help individuals and businesses stay abreast with the latest marketing trends and technologies.

DataSift offers marketers a great insight into the new trends in events, products, subjects, and activities through the accumulated and anonymized social media data. Specifically, DataSift is a podium where marketers can easily find, filter, and mine information among the billions of conversations on social media happening across the globe. DataSift leverages data from major social media such as Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and Tumblr to power hundreds of data apps and analyses across different business sectors. With DataSift, marketers have access to millions of user data and the platform has recently been updated to allow access to user data to a select group of marketing companies. 

Marketers can also rely on iGoDigital, a major “Predictive Marketing” cloud giant, to keep up with trends and technology. iGoDigital is a powerful way to keep up with marketing trends and technologies because it provides web-personalization options that deliver detailed, predictive, and workable real-time brand recommendations and online guided selling points. iGoDigital allows its marketers to observe consumer behavior, analyze them online, and ask specific questions via the guided selling website to create accurate consumer profiles that can power across-channel optimization and personalization. Lastly, marketers can use Convince & Convert to stay abreast of marketing technologies and trends. Convince & Convert creates blogs and resources that helps marketing companies to develop better strategy and skills for content and social media marketing. 

The importance of keeping up with the latest trends and technology is to stay afloat of the changing market factors including the demand and expectations of the customers. Keeping up with the latest trends such as fashion increases the relevancy of the company and customer appeal and sets the company at par, ahead of its competitors. On the other hand, keeping up with recent technology can affect how consumers reach e-commerce, or impact the company’s growth projects. Technology can mean new markets, create new merchandise, and introduce new ways to give marketers a possible lead over the online competition.

When it comes to business success, personal development is key. If you want to achieve great things in your professional life, you need to be constantly working on yourself and expanding your knowledge and skills.

You can increase your productivity, creativity, and leadership skills by working on your personal development. As a result, you become better equipped to achieve your professional goals.

What is Personal Development?

Personal development is an integral part of any successful career. Many studies have shown that employees who invest their time and energy in personal growth are more likely to succeed in their careers.

But what actually is personal development? It’s the process of improving oneself. It can involve taking courses, attending workshops, and reading books.

Anything that helps you learn and grow can be considered personal development. It enables you to become the best version of yourself and attain your full potential.

Personal development can help you in many different areas of your business life. For example, if you want to be a better leader, you need to work on your communication and people skills. If you want to be more creative, you need to learn to think outside the box and develop new ideas. You need to focus on time management and organization to be more productive.

There is a lot of value in personal development and many benefits. Some important ones include:

• Improved self-awareness
• Greater clarity about your goals
• Increased confidence
• Improved people skills
• Enhanced creativity
• Better time management skills
• Improved leadership skills

Reading books is one of the best ways to develop yourself professionally. Having a good book to read is like having your own personal tutor. You can learn everything from time management to being a more persuasive and effective business leader.

Insightful and thought-provoking, books are a powerful tool for self-development. According to different studies, people who read regularly are more successful than those who don’t.

Since we live in a digital era, there are also many productivity and self-development apps available which can be very helpful on your growth journey.

Bottom Line

Personal development is essential for business success. If you want to achieve great things in your professional life, you need to be constantly working on yourself and expanding your knowledge and skills.

The business landscape is constantly changing. So, to stay ahead, you must learn and grow continuously. If you’re not investing in your personal development, you’re missing out on a crucial piece of the puzzle.

1. Database querying

One of the best ways to optimize a marketer’s performance is to give them the ability to “scratch their own itch,” by which I mean that they can answer their own questions about how customers and prospects are behaving. Most companies use SQL-based databases, and learning how to run database queries is one of the most important technical skills a marketer today can have. For example, if a marketer wants to know the average purchase price within a certain time frame for a user within a certain demographic, having the ability to perform database queries means they can answer these questions on their own. This is a huge advantage to the marketer and a benefit to the rest of the company. If marketers can run these searches independently, they won’t be taking resources and productive time away from other team members by asking them to acquire this data on their behalf. SQL is relatively easy to learn—it only takes about 15 to 20 hours and there are a number of courses on the Business platform that provide a basic working proficiency of SQL, including The Ultimate SQL Bootcamp: Go from Beginner to Expert.

2. Front-end development

Marketers don’t need to become full-blown developers, but those who hold growth marketing or demand gen roles and understand the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are exponentially more useful to their team and their company. First of all, a number of the tools that are helpful for marketers, like KISSmetrics and Google Analytics, require a basic understanding of front-end languages in order to be utilized. Marketers who have that understanding will be able to use these powerful analytics tools on their own, rather than taking time away from a developer. Plus, marketers who have a basic understanding of front-end development can then be more realistic—and empathetic—when making requests of the development team. I cover the basic front-end development that’s required to set up Google Analytics in my course,

3. Basic understanding of statistics

Marketers have never had as much access to data and the ability to run as many experiments as they do today. A/B testing, for example, has become a standard practice on most marketing teams. But not all marketers have been trained in how to understand and analyze statistics to understand how an A/B test performed. How do they know when a test was actually successful? At what point should they stop running a test and pick the “winner”? And how can the insights they gain from these tests inform their future decisions? There are a number of key concepts that will help marketers better grasp the meaning of the data they collect—statistical significance, cohort analysis, standard deviations, and regression modeling, to name a few.

4. Marketing automation

Marketers no longer have to do every process manually—there are now hundreds of tools available that automate many of the most common marketing tasks. In order to be successful in their roles, marketers must become adept at using these automation tools. For example, there are now a number of tools that automate email marketing and personalization. Personalized emails lead to an average of a 20% increase in sales. And there are a number of tools, like Marketo, MailChimp and ConvertKit, that allow marketers to segment and personalize the emails they send to people in their funnel. This means that a marketer’s ability to write a personalized email may now rely more on their ability to use the automation tools that are available rather than their actual writing ability. By keeping up-to-date on the automation landscape, marketers can adapt and personalize their outreach.

5. Modeling

Another key technical skill for the modern marketer is understanding how to collect data, chart it, visualize where marketing efforts are going, and communicate that to stakeholders. Being able to create data models is incredibly useful for making decisions with data. For example, by using pivot tables, marketers can change variables and outline different scenarios rather than just displaying static two-dimensional data. Similarly, having a basic understanding of Excel formulas and the ability to run macros (mini scripts) can help marketers become more productive and efficient when trying to glean insights from data.

6. Designing and running landing page tests

Landing pages are like a Swiss Army knife for marketers. They are key to driving someone to take a specific action (e.g. starting a free product trial, requesting a product demo). By setting up simple landing page tests, marketers can experiment with different wording, offers, and other variables without making huge changes to the company’s entire website architecture. In order to conduct this type of testing, marketers need to have some basic design skills with tools like Canva or Photoshop to crop images and convert file types as well as an understanding of the tools they’ll need to set up the test, such as Unbounce.

Social networking is the hottest online trend of the last few years. Not only do social media sites provide a way to keep in contact with friends, but they can also offer opportunities for professional online networking. Social networking could be advantageous for your career, but there are also disadvantages to consider. Could the time you spend interacting online be put to better use? Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of social networking to work out whether you should be devoting more of your attention to this online activity.

Advantages of Social Networking

Social networking offers many benefits. It is now easier than ever to keep in contact with old friends and colleagues. The professional networking site LinkedIn even allows users to request introductions to business people who are known to their contacts. The potential of this enhanced connectivity is huge; whereas once you would be left sifting through business cards after a networking event, trying to remember details about each person, you can now easily look up a connection’s credentials and business interests on their social media profile.

LinkedIn is a particularly valuable business tool; over 200 million people are members, including hiring managers from many top companies. Your profile is designed to function as an online resume, detailing your education, career history (with recommendations from your colleagues), and creative portfolio. The platform encourages users to connect with people working in their organizations, and to endorse their colleagues for the skills they display in their daily work. You can learn how to take advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer with this LinkedIn Training Course.

Top 5 Modern Marketing Techniques

1. Content Marketing – When it comes to content marketing, you could easily argue that every type of marketing discipline is based on the content marketing and promotional strategy. In basic terms, content marketing is the process of using digital content to attract customers to your site, product, brand or cause. At the core of content marketing is this idea that all potential customers can be motivated by valuable content. In the content marketing space, valuable content is measured in its ability to solve problems and engage customers. This content can be anything from blog posts to social media posts to engaging video or podcasts.
2. Social Media Marketing – Since the advent of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, marketers have viewed this new transformational medium as a powerful marketing tool. In a nutshell, social media marketing is the process of gaining brand awareness/interest through leveraging social media platforms and tools. What has made social media marketing such a big hit in the digital marketing community is that it is equally conversational and instant. That is, marketing messages can be delivered and responded to in real time.
3. Email Marketing – Email marketing is one of the oldest and most successful digital marketing techniques. Essentially, email marketing is the process of using email marketing communications – usually newsletters and promotional email messages – to expand brand awareness and interest. One of the misconceptions related to the social media revolution is that email as a medium is dead, or dying quickly. The opposite is actually true. In fact, email is still the most widely used communication medium in the business world. A recent study commissioned by iContact – a popular email marketing service – revealed that the majority of small business marketing budgetary resources were being allocated to email marketing processes.
4. Search Marketing – Search Marketing, sometimes referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of gaining web traffic and visibility by using organic/unpaid and paid search marketing tools. This involves using a combination of keyword research, search-friendly content and display ads to drive traffic to your website or landing page.
5. Mobile Marketing – Without going into too much technical detail, mobile marketing takes all the digital strategies listed above and delivers them to mobile or smartphone users. According to a recent report by Smart Insights, web users are becoming increasingly engaged by brands via their smartphones. The report actually indicates that so far in 2013 well over 80% of all inbound website traffic is fueled by smartphone devices. This means that any marketing outreach campaign you carry out in the months and years to come should be flexible enough to include the world of mobile users.