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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Mind the (Digital Skills) Gap
00:14:57
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought.
- [00:03]
B
To you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.
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C
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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B
And today, Daniel, we're talking about digital skills and the New Year. New youw Philosophy. Yes.
- [00:25]
C
So this comes from a couple of things. First of all, there have been loads of reports in the latter half of this year of the previous or 2016 are basically looking at the digital skills gap globally and kind of country by country. And we've known this for a long time that the environment is moving very quickly and therefore people staying up to date with that is a bit of a challenge. There's a lot of traditional marketers who haven't upped their skills into the kind of digital arena yet. So there is a digital skills gap. If you're recruiting, that can obviously be a bit of a problem. And I wanted to raise, first of all, one of the things that we're doing, Imperial College. So, as a few of you may or may not know, I lecture Imperial College just for a couple of weeks of the year, so they do a strategic marketing masters and I do the digital marketing module. And if you're not aware of Imperial College, it's one of the top five universities in the world. So we've got some of the smartest students, really, really interesting bunch, and we're trying to teach them about digital. And one of the things that we do as part of that is try and tell them where they need to improve their skills. Now, at the same time, what we have just launched is a digital skills assessment, a free one as well. So if you go to targetinternet.com you will find the skills assessment. You go in and you say what your current role is, your experience level, your seniority, but then really what your objectives are. Do you want to change your career? Do you want to move into a new role, whatever it may be? You then need to commit about 20, 25 minutes to answering a whole series of questions on digital, of all different levels of difficulty on all different topics around digital. And what it will output is basically a spider diagram that says, look, this is where you are at the moment with your skills. This is where you should be based on your objectives. Therefore, here's a load of content that will help you and it will point you towards podcasts like this, blogs, reports, all that kind of free stuff we've got. It will also signpost our digital marketing online courses stuff, which is the paid for stuff. So obviously you don't need to go for that if you don't want to, but it will help you hopefully bridge that skills gap and work out where your strengths and weaknesses are. And it's quite fun because then you can go in and you can say, actually, what if I wanted to be a CEO of this type of company or I wanted to be an admin in this? And it will kind of map for you automatically where your skills are and recommend stuff. So go and take a look at the assessment targetinternet.com and you'll find that now at Imperial College, we're teaching the future digital marketers. Many of them go on to work in amazing companies like Apple and Google and all these kind of places, what skills you're going to need to be successful as marketers, but digital marketers more specifically in that kind of digital arena. The other thing I should say at this point, there's a lot of debate going at the moment. Should we be saying digital marketing anymore? No, really. And it's just marketing. And there is this disparity where we have a digital marketing strategy and a marketing strategy and. And the two things have got no alignment whatsoever. So what I would say is you should have a marketing strategy and bits of that should be digital. Absolutely. I think we do need to talk about digital marketing still, because actually we're still in this transitional phase where everyone's adapting to this stuff and it is all changing and no doubt it will become just marketing eventually. But anyway, what we say is, you want to be a good digital marketer, what you need are these skills. And then we'll discuss this a little bit. First of all, we need tactical skills. You need to know the channels, you need to understand how the channels work and you need to know how they interact. Now, if you're a senior level, you might think, well, I don't need to know how pay per click works. I would challenge you on that, actually, and we'll see. What Kieran's opinion on this is that I think even if you're never doing the stuff, you've just got agencies doing other stuff doing it, you need to really understand a lot of the nitty gritty. Not just the kind of top level, but I would say you need a reasonable level of knowledge. And the reason I'd say that is because actually very small tactical things in digital can have a huge strategic impact. So for example, page titles and SEO is my favorite. Page titles and SEO, it's a very, very tactical, maybe even technical kind of bit on the page that has such a significant impact if you get it wrong, you miss it, it can crush your online business. Now, that means that if you don't really know that, you could have a great agency and they could come and do loads of work for you, but they're not focused on the area of things and it could all go horribly wrong. So I don't think that everyone needs to know everything, but I say a fairly broad knowledge of some of the tactical details of channels is actually really important because then, one, you can manage your agencies better, you can manage staff better, but you won't miss things that can have a kind of disastrous impact.
- [04:57]
B
I would completely agree with that. And though most agencies are very good, there's still plenty of hogwash and pulling the wool over people's eyes. And unless you have a degree of knowledge about this, you are just a lamb to the slaughter. I've been into so many organisations and seen it again and again and again and you know, you need to be. You need to have a questioning and enthusiastic approach to this, always. Because taking them face value, unless you know and have a degree of knowledge about this, how can you possibly grade what's being done or push to get better results? You know, you can't. You could be thinking, oh, you were doing brilliantly and actually you're not, you're coasting and you may be only getting 30% of what you're doing.
- [05:50]
C
Precisely.
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B
If you mug up on it and learn about it and you need. There is a degree of dullness and technicality about it that you have to work through and learn, but without that, you can't get to the really good, fun, exciting stuff.
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C
I would actually say as well you said about the dullness, I think it seems like that, first of all. And then when you delve into it, what you suddenly realize you'll have a little eureka moment. You go, ah, that will make sense. Suddenly. Now I kind of understand why we're doing things or why are we doing this? This makes no sense at all. So we've had situations where we go in and we assess where an organization is and we look at what their agency's doing, we assess the agencies and it's fascinating. You said most agencies are great. I am not sure that's the case, actually, if I'm bluntly honest, I run agencies for years and what I'd say is there's loads of good agencies. There's also a lot of shocking ones. And actually, I don't think it even happens on purpose sometimes. What I think happens is we report on what makes us look Good. So you give the stat that paints the best picture. And every agency, most members of staff quite often feel a bit overwhelmed. They've got too much work on, they're trying to do as much they can but they can't commit as much time as they'd like to. So things slip sometimes.
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B
You are so right to challenge me on that. I can think I've easily done work with over 30 agencies in the past and actually I probably only rate two or three of them.
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C
Right, there you go.
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B
Yeah, sorry guys.
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C
Yeah, up your game is what I'd say. So I think there's loads of great agencies but there's also a lot of. Even within good agencies there'll be good account managers and bad account managers and people that are tired and people that are fully awake and you've just got to going to keep an eye on that. So tactical skills are essential. You then need the strategic planning skills but as part of that strategic planning you need measurement frameworks. So you need to know what you're measuring and why and how that impacts your bottom line. So you get some people that get tactics, some people are good at strategy. I think you need a bit of both to say the least because I think your strategy will be so impacted by the detail, the tactics that you really need to understand how the two things interweave with each other as well. So try and get those skills where you can make sure the appropriate people have. The next one is the one which I think is missing a lot and that is the IT and technology skills we have. Loads of super bright students at Imperial are going to organizations where you've got really clever digital marketing and senior marketing managers, but very few of them, although this is changing, have knowledge in things like HTML, how you build web pages, how web servers work, what FTP is, all these quite fundamentals of web technology that once you get them you kind of know what your IT team's doing or you know what your developers are doing a little bit more as well. And you can interact with your developers in a more fruitful way because you know what they're talking about and also they can't tell you things that are nonsense as well. So I would strongly encourage you if you don't understand the basics of HTML, what PHP even is, how content management systems like WordPress work, how you use FTP File Transfer Protocol to send things to your web servers, what a web server really is. If you question yourself and go do I actually understand what a web server is and how it works? If you get those things it makes everything else make a lot more sense. It allows you to manage your IT and your technology teams a lot more effectively. And actually, we mustn't have this. We're digital marketing, we're technology and the two things are banging heads of each other, or IT as we're normally calling it. Those two things, I think need to be more integrated.
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B
I know I keep coming back to this, but go have coffee with people, ask them questions, take an interest in what they do. You'll be amazed. You'll be amazed. Some of the people that have never even kind of looked at you as you come in, you start taking an interest in what they do and they give and share so much. You get to understand them, their world, how they work, some of the challenges that they have, and you can work with them and help them on that and just build a beautiful relationship. So go do it now.
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C
I think also this idea of cross disciplinary teams is really important. When you do projects, rather than having marketing doing projects and IT doing their bit, there should be a number of people from different parts of the organisation working together and that can really foster that culture of people communicating and understanding what each other are doing a lot better as well. So tactical skills, practical doing, strategic planning, technology, understanding those things.
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B
And beautiful relationships.
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C
And beautiful relationships. And then the final one is the soft skills or the kind of management skills side of things. And this, interestingly, isn't really taught as part of marketing a lot of the time. And that's very often managing up, managing down, working with your colleagues effectively. And the classic one is getting leadership buy in. Any project you do, if you need to change something, you're probably going to need leadership buy in as part of that. And you generally aren't trained how to manage CEOs, so if you're a manager or director or at any level, an exec, anything else, you're going to probably have to manage some senior people and they're quite challenging to manage.
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B
It's like defense against the dark arts, right?
- [10:41]
C
It's absolutely. So the key thing here is understanding some of the techniques that you can use. So I give you two different ends of the spectrum. We're an organization and the directors are resistant to change things, but we know they have to or the organisation is in trouble. We can do a shock and awe, which is we'll bring an external speaker in, very well respected at a senior level and we'll put them in front of the senior team for an hour and do a shock and awe. Why your business is going to fail in the future, the world is moving quickly and it's all dramatic. And there's some people that are very good at doing this that will not work with some leadership teams because they don't react well to that. So then you do more of a softly, softly and you take them on the journey and you say, look, we've got this thing going on. It's not something we expect you to have much knowledge of, but it would be really reassuring for the team if you were to kind of introduce it and explain. You don't know much about it either, but you're going to go on the journey with them and learn about it. And that can be a good way of basically breaking down the defenses of someone senior who doesn't really understand something but doesn't want to be seen to not doing it. But actually if you give them a way out of that by saying, look, go on the journey with the audience, but also the team, then also feel a bit reassured that we're all going on this kind of journey of change together. The other one we did was quite fun. I won't name the organization, but they needed a new website. And I've mentioned this briefly in a previous podcast, but basically the ball turn around and said, we built the podcast, we built the website, sorry, five years ago. Why do we need another one? It's only been five years since the last one. To which we tried to explain, come on, you need to update things. So they refused. So he said, right, let's just get this company's biggest clients. This was a big B2B. So each of the big clients was worth a lot of money and business to business organizations are using acronyms. And we sat them down in front of the company's website and we got them to do basic tasks, but we put the webcam on and we just recorded their faces. So we said to this big multimillion pound customer, go and find this product. And then we recorded them using the website and then pulling very confused, fed up, odd faces where they go, I just do not understand what's going. Where do I click? I don't really understand. And then what we did, we edited those into a five minute sequence and we played it to the board and went, this is what your website does to your customers and these customers are worth X millions of pounds to you. And they basically turned around and said, right, I get it, I'm going to kind of, we're going to change things, okay? So you need to take different approaches, but those kind of skills you need to teach your staff you need to, you need to embed into your own skills as well. So when you're assessing yourself, think about your tactical skills, think about your strategic planning skills, think about your technology skills and think about those working processes and softer skills that you might want to look at as well. Because a well rounded digital marketer, in my opinion, needs all of those things to do well. We get lots of people that are very good at tactics. We've got good strategic planners. We might have something that's very technology enabled or good at managing people. But it's unusual to get all of those wrapped into one. And I think that's where the real sweet spot of skills are. When you're looking at recruiting, look at the mix of skills. No one's going to be perfect. Everywhere might get the odd person, but actually look at where their strengths are and try and balance your team out into those four different segments as well. And that can make a really big difference. If you want to assess your own skills, obviously go to targetinternet.com There is an assessment. If you want to do that for your team, go to targetinternet.com, get in contact with us and we can organize that for teams and for whole organizations as well. And we're more than happy to kind of share that stuff with you. Well, as well. So assess yourself. It's new year. Look at your skills, go into those quadrants, tactical, strategic technology and soft skills, and look at where you can improve things.
- [14:17]
A
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 mentioned, 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.