Making the most of self-isolation by expanding your marketing skill set

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Jun 26, 2020 / by
Making the most of self-isolation by expanding your marketing skill set

In times of great trouble, it can be far too easy to sit and fester, allowing worry to hold you back and anxiety to swarm your senses. But while many of us have, understandably, been blindsided and crestfallen by the COVID-19 pandemic, for those that are willing to see the wood for the trees, it actually poses an opportunity to develop a brand new set of skills.

That could be anything from using the time in lockdown to learn a new musical instrument to learning a foreign language.

For marketers, however, with the internet now arguably more important than ever before, it’s the perfect time to expand and refine your skills and perhaps reshape them in order to better face the world that will emerge on the other side of this crisis.

With the world moving on faster now than ever before by necessity, 90% of marketers admit to being under-skilled. So, there’s never been a better time to fill that gap and prepare yourself for the future.

Here, we elaborate on some of the skills you should be focusing on if you hope to remain relevant in a post-coronavirus world.

Analytics

With more people being forced to live their lives digitally, there will be more data than ever before and for modern marketers, data is practically gold dust.

Data tells marketers how campaigns are performing and how they are impacting consumer behaviour but in order to make the most of this data, they need to understand data analytics.

This is a potential rabbit hole of complexity it would be easy to fall into, but start with the basics – learn how Google Analytics works and how it can be used to track a customer journey and turn clicks into conversions. It will take time to develop an experienced eye for data wrangling and understanding the difference between structured data (facts and figures) and unstructured data (survey responses, social media comments). However, with enough perseverance, it’s certainly manageable. And it’s not like you have anything better to do right now, is it?

Automation

AI has long been seen as the ‘boogeyman’ hovering over marketers heads. But it’s not going to replace us (at least not yet, anyway). Indeed, it’s actually an incredibly versatile tool that can be used to automate many tedious processes and even do them more effectively. Marketing automation allows customers to be automatically targeted and for certain messages to automatically be sent to different projects at different points of their journey. It’s really that powerful.

When lockdown ends, it will be vital for all of us to get back up and running ASAP and automation will allow for this, particularly given the increasing power and complexity of AI and machine learning systems. So, your isolation might be the ideal time to brush up on the tools, the strategies and the content that will allow you to automate some of your processes going forward.

Advanced social media skills

Over 69% of adults have a Facebook account, which means that, whatever shape your audience takes, they are most likely spending a fair amount of time on social media. Facebook is not the only player in the game either, with Instagram, Twitter and even dark horses like Pinterest and Reddit throwing their chips in the ring.

The marketers of a post-COVID world will need to go far beyond simply using social media as a platform to post the occasional update. They need to understand paid social media advertising, chatbots and how to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to emerging platforms such as Tik Tok. Because whilst it might feel a bit like it at the moment, the world won’t stop spinning any time soon and you can’t slow the wheels of progress when they are turning themselves.