← The Digital Marketing Podcast
The Digital Marketing Podcast
How To Develop Your Digital Marketing skills
00:21:45
Daniel and Ciaran have an update on some changes happening at Target Internet which we hope you all our listeners will find of value. As you may or may not know, Target Internet produces a whole host of different learning and training materials...
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A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello, and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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And today, Daniel, we're talking about developing your most valuable asset. You. Well, not. Not you.
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B
It's all about me.
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Is it all about you? Everything is all about developing, Daniel. They're talking about developing you, our audience, you as individuals.
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B
Now, before we do that, I've got some exciting news as well.
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A
Oh, what's happened?
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B
Well, I hope you noticed, as you may know, Kieran and I have done the podcast for a long time. Seven years now, I think, I believe. But at all points, I was running Target Internet and Kieran has been kind of helping out. He's been not exactly volunteering, but been part of the thing very much. But. But it was always doing other jobs, which was good because he brought outside insight into things. He's done some very, very big, important jobs as well. But finally I've managed to snag him and he's now our marketing director.
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A
Yeah.
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So he's coming to work Target Internet finally, which is brilliant. I think a lot of people thought he kind of worked with us anyway. But he's now working as marketing director and he's going to be looking after the podcast, of course, but also looking after all of our content, content marketing, marketing automation, all sorts of things, which is all slightly overwhelming at the moment, but we're very, very, very pleased to have him on board. So as part of that, we should be doing a lot more things.
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A
A lot more things. And it's interesting, we've talked in past podcasts about sort of the history and how we got together and stuff, and it was always a bit of our dream, wasn't it? I remember us saying way back on the first recording, I wouldn't be great if we could just do this for a living. And now kind of, I am. It's very exciting. We've got some. Some really good stuff lined up, and all of it is very much about developing you guys. That's what Target Internet aims to do, and we do that with a whole variety of things. So the first thing I've been tasked with, and I'm going to take the take. The Bull by the Horns is developing the podcast into a weekly podcast and having more regular shows and making sure those are out. So we're going to aim to get these out to you guys every week. We decided that we're going to make sure that anybody that subscribed to iTunes gets them a little bit earlier. So if you haven't already subscribed in itunes, please do, because that'll be one. One of the benefits of that.
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B
Also on that, if you are listening to that and going, well, that's outrageous, because I'm an Android user and I don't feel that's entirely fair, then you just message us, I want to know what. What Android platform most people are using. So we're currently on Stitcher radio, we're on SoundCloud, and we end up filtering through to some other places because we publish everything with a tool called Libsyn, which ends up feeding through to a number of different places. So we are going to put things into itunes about a week before they're published on the website and other places like that, so the subscribers get them earlier. The logic for us doing that is the more subscribers we have, the more it pushes us up the itunes chart. It's kind of selfish, but at the same time, that also gets us to a bigger audience and it kind of expands things generally. Now, we're really happy to do that at the same time onto an Android platform, but I'm not convinced I really know which one most of you are using at the moment. By the way, if you listen on your iPhone and you're using the podcast app, that is where itunes publishes through to. So don't worry, you don't have to go directly to itunes. You can just use the podcast App on your iOS device and you'll find that. So, yes, we're going weekly, which is brilliant because we wanted to do that for a long time. But getting us now down to be in the same location at the same time is always tricky, but now it's a lot easier.
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A
And we're also going to be trying to recruit some more outside speakers. So I've now got a lot more time to focus on this. We're looking for anybody with some really cool, really great content and stuff that they can share with you guys and teach you new things. So if you're a bit of an expert in a particular area and you'd like to reach out, please get in touch. You can reach me now on Kieran. That's C I A R a n@targetinternet.com I'll make sure my contact details are in the show notes for this episode. But yeah, please, please do. I'd love to hear from you.
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B
Now. One thing I would say is that when we've been selecting guests before, one of the key things is that big brands obviously bring in Big audiences. But actually we're very happy to do big brands and those kind of things. But at the same time, what we're looking for is good, practical insights. So our brand positioning has always been very much about hands on, practical digital marketing advice. So if you have run a campaign, you think you've learned something particular from it, you have a technique you use. By the way, you don't need to be a fantastic kind of speaker either because the way we edit the podcast, actually you can get away with fluffing things up. We rerecord a dozen times and so on as well.
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A
You should hear what I say in the. In the edits. My goodness.
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Yeah. If you thought this was bad, if you thought that the drivel that comes out sometimes is bad, you should see the other stuff. That's not true at all.
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That's good. So that's the podcast. As always, we really value your feedback. We love reviews. So if you haven't kind of put your fingers to the keyboard and done that, please do write a review in itunes. Now, you've heard us say this before, but it really, really helps. We're also going to be developing, well, we already do develop a lot more kind of in depth articles on the Target Internet website. If you go to resources, you can find those and we never really shout much about them on the podcast, but there's a lot of content there that will help you. So definitely worth visiting Target Internet regularly and taking a look at that. And then in addition to that, we're also going to be really getting back on the bandwag again with contacting people via email and a couple of promises from us. If you've subscribed to our emails, we don't share your details with anybody because we find that really annoying when that happens. So you have that promise from us. And we're also not going to email you any more than twice a month, just with regular updates on content that we've been putting out podcast episodes just in case you missed them. And also giving you an update on any new in depth articles or training modules that we have, which brings us nicely on to the training side of what we do. Daniel, do you want to say a bit more about this?
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B
Yeah. So what you might be aware is that one of the main part of the business is kind of twofold. It's that I'm out delivering training. Kiran does some kind of public speaking stuff as well. We deliver training events for a lot of big kind of global companies and we're starting to run in a limited way some of our own training courses. There's two particular topics that have been coming out a lot lately. I thought what we do, we do quite an exclusive training session. We partnered up with pretty incredible venue in London and we're going to do two key sessions. One is a digital strategy session where the aim is that you come along and you leave with as much as possible a digital strategy document that's kind of planning everything now. However big your organization is, you should be able to leave with something that's very, very useful after two days. It's going to be a very kind of hands on interactive session. So that's one and the other one is social selling. We're seeing incredible growth in people kind of crossing over between sales and marketing and trying to understand how they use LinkedIn more effectively, how they use their social profiles to actually directly sell. So we're running a one day session on that as well. Now very limited places at the moment, trying to do it quite exclusively at the beginning. When they're gone, they're gone. But if you go through to Target Internet, if you go to the training section there's details of those courses on there. So if you're interested, come along, make meet up face to face and we'll go through those things. So that's a kind of new thing for us, so worth getting involved in. The other thing I was going to talk about was that the E learning, most of you know that the majority kind of part of the business is the E learning business, Interactive online training. One tip and I was asked about this by someone the other day, you can go and sign up for a free account and you'll get two weeks for free. But you do need to put your credit card in at that point. But actually just bear in mind you can go in for two weeks. You can use every single course that we have. I think we're just under 120 courses now. You could complete all 120 in two weeks. There's online certification so you can go and do an introduction to Digital Marketing and an intermediate certificate in Digital marketing. You can get actual physical print certificates and then you could cancel it all within the two weeks and pay not a penny. And if you want to do that, if you're that enthusiastic, I've got no objections to you doing it. You'll be a bit exhausted listening to.
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My voice I think, I think if anybody does do that, an additional certificate.
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You won't send your prizes for doing it as well. So there is access to do that. But because we're here talking about kind of developing yourself and developing your skills, which I'll come on to a bit more in a moment as well. If you haven't yet, go and do the digital skills benchmark. There's no credit card sign up. You can go in, set an account up for free. It will ask you a load of questions about digital marketing and it will output where your skills are against industry best practice. But what's great is we've just improved the kind of algorithm and rules behind it, so you can go in and select your particular industry, your job role, your seniority level. We've had thousands of other people do it and then we've adjusted the kind of benchmark accordingly. We've got some Chartered Institute of Marketing data in there now about what people should know at different levels as well. And we took some of the research that Google had done and we tried to build that in as well. So essentially, you go in, you fill in the questions, it will say, this is where you are versus where you should be. But what you might not be aware of, it's going to recommend to you, okay, you can have this premium E learning stuff if you sign up, but even if you don't sign up for that, it will give you blog posts, podcasts and videos that are relevant to your skills gaps completely free. And there's no limit to you having access to that as well. So what it's basically doing is we've got these, I think now, nearly 2,000 bits of content beyond the E learning, and it will recommend what's the right stuff to read. Because as we all know, one of the biggest problems is developing yourself is knowing where to start with all this. So hopefully it will benchmark you and then it will give you access to all this other content. But as part of doing that, you're signing up to the email, and then you're going to get an email every two weeks saying, this is what's new, this is what you could be learning about. And we're trying to filter a lot of that stuff as well. So hopefully that makes you a little bit aware of all the other stuff that we're doing. So you'll find that useful. But just take a step back for a second into improving your skills and keeping yourself up to date. I just want to go through a few topics around that as well.
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Yeah.
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So I think there's two kind of key things that we get asked an awful lot about. One is the kind of qualification route, which is the I want to learn about something in A more of an official way. And then there's the ongoing learning. And because we work with the chartered internship marketing and we work with lots of big organizations and we do our own E learning, I've got fairly, hopefully reasonably well informed opinions on this now and it's quite interesting. Most of the time when people do a qualification, it's not actually about improving skills. Always what it's about is getting another job and it's about having something on your CV that looks like the right thing. So I think you've got to work out why you're doing it. Is the first question to ask yourself. Not the qualifications aren't completely valid. They are, but I think it depends on why you're doing it. So generally what happens is because qualifications take quite a long time to be accredited, they're not always containing the very, very latest stuff. Which means even if you do every qualification under the sun, you've also got to find out another way of keeping yourself up to date. So I would take a two pronged approach to this. Yes, by all means, do qualifications and then find a way of filling the gap in between of ongoing learning. And a lot of the stuff that's been done around digital transformation and how organizations are coping with digital is about creating this culture of ongoing learning. So how exactly are you going to go through keep up yourself to date on a regular basis, but learn on an ongoing basis. And hopefully that's where our stuff comes in, the E learning, the podcast, the blog and all those kind of things. But also understand the difference between qualifications and certification. So certification, anyone can kind of give you a certificate. So you've got to look at the value of it. So for example, you go through to elearning, you can do a number of different certificates. What you want to look at is how those certificates are actually endorsed. So for example, we've got CIM endorsement of our content and we have CPD certification, which is continuing Professional Development certification. Now bear in mind when you do a Google qualification like Google Squared for example, which Kieran's done.
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Yeah, yeah, it was good.
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And maybe it gives a bit more of an opinion on that in a moment as well. But that's just a certification. It's a Google qualified certification. But it's only because Google is so big they're able to do that and it's seen as a kind of value. Whereas qualifications that are accredited, like university qualifications or chartered internship marketing, have to go through a different process and of learning outcomes assessing those. And exam boards are involved in those sorts of Things which should give you more consistent quality. Now, I'm not saying that one is more valuable than the other. It's actually a lot harder to get accreditation because there's a whole load of process to go through. But that also means it slows things down. So just be aware of the difference between the two things. There's a lot of people talking about the value of things like MBAs and how valuable are they anymore? And is real, real world learning better and so on as well. I tend to think a bit of both is actually the ideal solution. I don't think one is ever better than the other. I think the formal learning environment of doing an accredited course means you are generally studying with other people. So like a CIM course, a Google course, or something else like that. And that can have its own benefits. I think when I did my CIM training, which is quite a long time ago now, the biggest benefit is generally the other people you're studying with because you learn an awful lot from the people that you're studying with as well. So I would look at both forms of learning, the formal and more informal style of learning to keep yourself up to date. What I'd also look at is formalizing the process of informal learning. Okay, so, so what I mean by that is have a regular pattern and way of doing it. I generally use Twitter, so I have a number of people I follow on Twitter and I will dip into that half an hour in the morning just to see any latest trends and things that have changed. And I always use Feedly for doing that as well. We've mentioned previously as well.
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Yeah, I use Feedly. It's really great for staying up to date. And actually, yeah, the people I follow on Twitter, they're always talking about whatever is news. Almost a race to get the new thing in there. So I think Twitter's a really great channel for doing that. You do have to filter out some of the backwards and forwards chatter to say the least. But yeah, they both have their place.
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So you've got Twitter and Feedly for keeping you up to date on a regular basis. I always mention with Feedly, and I'll just really briefly mention this again, go in and follow the Google blog, the Twitter blog, the Facebook blog, LinkedIn blog and so on, because that will give you the latest news on what they're doing, what they're changing. And that's one of the key things is just to understand how the platforms are changing as well. So you go through, you have your formalized process of informal learning. And as Part of that, there might be podcasts, there might be interactive elearning, whatever format you tend to like learning from as well. Work out what works you in terms of format. So for example, with podcasts, I think at least 80% of our listeners, if not more, listen when they're traveling. So it is the whole thing of sitting on the train, the bus, being in the car and listening and making better use of that kind of commuting and travel time as well. Whereas actually I like learning from video as well. And what I found is every year Moscon, the Big Moz conference, they release all their videos and I download them all to my iPad, so I pay for them. So it's not cheap, but it's I think about $300, but it was well worth doing and then sitting watching those when I'm traveling. So that works quite well. I understand having been interacting with Kelvin from Brighton SEO, they're thinking about doing the same similar thing. So they were going to release all the videos at that kind of conference. So that can be a great thing to do. So right format of learning in the right environment and then try and make use of that time. I worked out thinking, oh, I don't have enough time to do this stuff. And then I worked out the amount of time that I sit in hotel lobbies, fiddling around on Facebook or Instagram, whatever it may be, and actually just changing that behavior. And I actually took for a period of time Facebook and a few other apps off my phone to stop me from doing it. And it was incredible. I actually became a bit more productive. Now I did miss it a little bit, so I put it back on. But I'm using in a much more formalized way and I've just set some rules for myself in terms of how I'm using it because otherwise it's just too easy just to switch over. And 10 minutes of learning on a regular basis could probably make quite a big difference.
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And it is, I'm a big fan of that. Regular bite size chunks. Very few of us have the luxury of shelving day after day to learn a new topic or what have you. And that's really what we've always focused on. A target Internet with training modules that we offer and the online learning that you can do. They're all broken down into short chunks, short manageable chunks and split out into beginner, intermediate and advanced level courses. So it's all there. If you find that element of things useful, please take a look.
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Yeah, the other thing I'd say as well is with the chunkier stuff. So quite often I'll come across a blog post that I think is really good, but it looks really long. I've started using Evernote a lot more effectively for that as well. So there's a plugin for Google Chrome for Evernote. So if you're not familiar with Evernote, Evernote allows you just to keep notes together basically, and you can categorize them and so on. But what you can do is you can grab a blog post in a number of formats, the whole thing with all the graphics or a cut down version of it may be, and I just put them into a reference folder in Evernote. And then when I've got some time to actually, or I'm in the mood for sitting and reading something more in depth, it's all in one place, kind of referenced there as well. And actually I found that to be really useful because I've always got something to read, should I want to read something. And actually it's in a format that makes it quite easy to kind of scan through should I want to do it as well. So yes, by all means, look at qualifications, look at your informal learning process. Use the right channels at the right time and work out how you can use more efficient use of your time. But plan it. I mean, that's my one bit of advice is that get into a regular routine of how you plan out your week.
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Have a regular meeting with yourself where you cover this stuff. Because meetings are sacred, aren't they? You know, you attend a meeting, you wouldn't dream of being late for a meeting. And actually there's a lot to be said for just setting up a meeting with yourself where you do this, this stuff. It's a great way of securing that time in your diary and making sure you don't get any interruptions so you can really focus on it.
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The other thing that I find useful and you can maybe play around with this is that when we get together to record these podcasts, we book out the recording studio and we come in and I reckon a good third of the time we book in a recording studio, we're not recording anything because we come in and we sit there and we just go, have you seen this? Have you done that? What about this tour? If we're going to talk about this and so on, actually having a meeting with someone else that is keen to learn similar things and going through what you've learned and bringing something to the table each time is actually probably one of the best ways I've learned of actually learning about something. One of the other things that works really well is having to explain it to other people. So if you're training or doing a podcast, it very, very quickly becomes apparent when you don't really understand something, because when you try to explain to someone else, it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult. So actually, one of the things I've seen quite a few companies we work with, they have these regular learning meetings where you have to come along and speak about a new topic for five minutes. And that might be. You don't put slides together, it says literally some bullet points. But by going through and creating bullet points on a topic, you really work out where the holes in your knowledge are. And if you can't explain something in a kind of linear fashion, you suddenly start realizing, I don't really know about that. So, for example, we were going to do a podcast. We go through our podcast list and we were going to go through and do one on Christmas. And it's a really nice idea, right?
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It was a brilliant idea, was my idea.
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So we were going to do a Christmas one in July because a lot of retailers are already thinking about their Christmas planning. And we said, yeah, that's a really good idea. We should do that. We work with a number of big retailers and they're planning their Christmas stuff all year round. Kevin spent years working in retail actually planning some of these things really, really early. And then we sat down and went, what are we going to talk about? Well, what we're going to say is you should start planning early. That was kind of the exhaustion of our knowledge on the topic, really. Kind of, yeah, it was.
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It was what to say about Christmas 2017. And actually, when you actually sit down and start researching it, there's very little information out there on it that I could find. And there really wasn't any guts to it. So it was a nice idea. It just completely off the scale in terms of practicality.
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And I think it's that thing if you can't sit down and put some bullet points against it, you need to do more research. You need to kind of invest a little bit more in that as well. So go through, work your process out. The other thing that I found quite useful as well, there's a few discussion forums out there as well. One thing we haven't said we should have mentioned is that the LinkedIn group we've got. So there's a digital marketing podcast, LinkedIn Group, and we're really starting to liven that up a little bit as well. So we're posting all our content through to that, but we're actually doing more Q&As and those kind of things. So have a look at that and throw questions there. We really appreciate it. We really want your questions. We really do want them because it gives us something to talk about in the podcast and then discussion group and so on as well. So anything you're struggling with, just think of us as a bit of free consultancy. We'll ask the audience as well and we will try and give you fairly in depth answers to those questions. As we're going through things, we're going to do another Q and A session on the podcast as well. So we're happy to take your questions through to the podcast and get people involved in those. And actually when we bring our guests in, we're going to ask questions of the guests as well. So the idea is you get different opinions on all these types of things as well. So Kieran's joined us. Lots of new stuff going on. Hopefully some tips on keeping yourself up to date and improving your skills as we go through things as well. If you haven't been to the website now, just get through to the website. If you haven't signed up the email, sign up to the email and then you will get access to all this new free stuff that we're putting out there.
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Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mention, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to.
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Sam.