 The top five skills that every marketing professional needs to have. Welcome to the We Are Slam show where you'll learn marketing agency insights, best practices, and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder and chief strategist at Slam Agency. And we take the time, week in and week out, to create this show for marketing professionals like you. Whether you're a VP of marketing, you're on the C level, you're a marketing director, or maybe you're a small business owner who, up to this point, has done most of the marketing all on your own. Now, if you're that small business owner that has gotten to a point to where you just can't continue to do marketing, you just don't have the bandwidth to do marketing on your own. And you think that hiring a marketing professional really is the way to go. Or if you're in the marketing profession and you're looking to increase your value and you want to know what it's gonna take to get that director role or that VP of marketing role, what are the things that you need to know? Well, today's show is all about that. So it's the top five skills that every marketing professional needs to have, needs to know, needs to understand. Because if you don't know these things, then it's gonna be very difficult to hire teams that can execute in these areas. And I'm not talking about soft skills. I'm not talking about being curious or having a high degree of creativity. I'm not even talking about managerial skills at this point. I'm talking about what are the things that you need to know to be effective in your position? What are the things that you need to know to be able to not only hire the right teams, the right agencies, the right individuals, but also to be able to know the things that you are doing are going to have a positive impact on your business, on your employer. Now, coming from the perspective of an agency, we interact with a lot of different types of clients and individuals. And what I've found is that these skills that I'm going to mention are what separate the top-notch marketers and just the run-of-the-mill marketers. Typically, when we go into an organization and we begin helping out, we're typically gonna run into one of two types of people. The first is like somebody that is, you know, they've hit the ground running, they understand digital, and they know that they need a team to execute because just them, by themselves, they just can't execute on their own. And then there's the other type of marketing professional that we typically work with. And this is somebody that's been in the business for a long time. And because of that, they've seen things transition from traditional outbound to more of an inbound digital marketing approach. And really at this time right now, they're seeing that happen, you know, at warp speed. And so they might not have the knowledge that's necessary to be able to run with the digital marketing aspects that their position requires. And so they're kind of just biting their time and hoping that they can make it to retirement, knowing what they know and not necessarily learning any new skills. But if that's you and you're in that position, I would urge you to start to understand these things because if not, people are gonna pass you by. And in our day and age, you might not make it much longer in your position. So if you've been in the business for a while, these are the skills that you need to know too, okay? And like I said, I'm not talking creativity or curiosity or management skills. I'm talking about the types of skills that are needed so that you understand what in the world is going on and how to get the best results, okay? So here we go. Number one, the number one skill that you need to understand is search engine optimization. You have to understand what this is. You know, I talked to a lot of business owners who really just, they fall for the pitch. And SEO in many respects could be like that snake oil sales person. But here's the thing. If you understand what makes good SEO, what makes bad SEO, the types of things that need to be done in order to be effective when it comes to search engine optimization, then you can hire an agency or an employee to come in and do this work for you and you won't be taken, okay? So you have to understand SEO. You have to understand what it's all about, how to get results and what are the practices? What are the types of things that a person or an agency should be doing in order to get the type of results that your business expects? You have to understand that at a minimum. Once you understand SEO, then you can begin to understand pay-per-click, Google ads, these types of things because really digital marketing, inbound marketing is all built on this foundation of search engine optimization. It also plays heavily into content marketing and how to create content, not only for users, but for search engine spiders in a way that isn't bait and switch, but in a way that is effective to get your content in front of the right people in the right places at the right time in order to make the decisions that are going to benefit your business. The number two area that you really need to have, the number two skill that you need to have as a marketing professional is content marketing. You need to be able to understand what is content marketing, why we keep talking about it and how your business can benefit from it. And when I talk about content marketing, I'm talking about so much more than just blogging. Really, when it comes to content marketing as a marketing leader, you need to be able to understand distribution. Where should we be distributing our content? Why does this format need to be distributed over here and this format over here and why shouldn't it be the same or why should it be the same? And when should we remix it? When should we keep it as is? When should we boost it? When should we kind of just let it just flow organically? Like all of these types of things are things that you need to know about and this is content marketing. So you need to be very knowledgeable because if not, you're gonna have an agency come in and they're gonna promise you this, this, this and this and they're gonna say you need to write five blogs a month and you might not need to do any of those things. You might just need to have more of a focus in social media or more of a focus in video or any of these types of things. Content marketing really, it comes down to who is your audience, what types of content are they consuming or being captivated by, what attracts them and then where, where in the world do we go to distribute that content so that we can get in front of more and more people who are our customers or potential customers? And so you have to understand content marketing. This needs to be a skill that you have. Now I don't mean that you need to sit down and start typing out content or creating videos personally. What I do mean is you have to understand the process, what it is and why it works so that you can manage it. Okay, number three is email. You have to know email. There's so many people that we have worked with over the years that email is just a second thought. They're content with a 5%, 10%, even 15% open rate and I'll tell you that those numbers are low. You should be shooting for 30, 40% open rate if not higher than that. And you definitely need to be watching the click-through rate. You should have a 5% or 10% click-through rate on every email that you send. You as a marketing leader, you as a business owner looking to hire somebody to manage your marketing, you need to look for somebody that understands email, understands that it's more than just pressing a button and publishing an email just so that you can say that we put an email out this month. What are the KPIs that are important? What are the tactics? What are the strategies? What are the types of emails that work for your audience, for your business, for your industry? These are the things that you have to understand and you have to know that building a list is digital marketing 101. So it's not just like taking the 500 people that we have and sending them an email weekly at Thursday at two o'clock, these are not the things that matter. What matters is how can we grow this list? How can we continue to engage it? And then how can we drive results every time we send an email? Number four, you really need to understand conversion rate optimization. And I know that this is more of a specialty, but in recent years, I think this is something that good marketers, great marketers get. And this is where the science of persuasion and psychology and landing page optimization and user experience all come into this perfect mix of how can we improve the conversion rate on our landing pages, on our offers, on our CTAs or calls to action? How can we increase the percentage of people that complete the call to action or take the desired action? And what are the techniques and strategies and tactics that we can use as a business, as a brand that can ensure that we are constantly testing, rinsing and repeating the process of conversion rate optimization? You know, SLAM as a business is the result of a conversion rate optimization company combining with a video company to create an agency so that we can have this digital marketing expertise combined with this high quality creative production. When you put those two together, you have a powerful combination. That's what sets SLAM apart. And so this is what you need to look for. You need to look for somebody that understands, if you're gonna hire a marketing director, if you're looking to say, okay, I'm gonna give you the reins, you have to hire somebody that understands conversion rate optimization, the psychology, the art of persuasion, all of these things that go, the copywriting, all of these things that go into a good landing page into a good offer and why and how we can get more people to convert on our offers. And finally, number five, and disclaimer, for some of you, this may come as a surprise because you've kind of just been, you know, going through the marketing professional status quo for many years. And maybe you haven't even seen the writing on the wall, but number five is that you need to have the knowledge of and understanding of marketing automation. Marketing automation is going to and has taken the marketing industry by storm. This is the future, okay? You have to understand whether it comes to, you know, a CRM like HubSpot, how sequences and workflows and these types of things work. But when it comes to advertising, you also have to understand, you know, machine learning and how can you integrate machine learning to benefit you and then how can you automate certain processes and still remain authentic, still remain current and still remain relevant. As a marketing professional, you need to understand automation. So these are my five areas, my five skills, the five things that you absolutely must know as a marketing leader and the five things that if you're a business owner looking to hire a marketing director or VP of marketing, then you need to make sure that they understand these five areas as well. Number one SCO, number two content marketing, number three email, number four conversion rate optimization and number five automation. These are the skills that you need to have. If you don't have them, then make sure that you go to Google and you just, you know, you Google, the great thing about today is that you can learn anything. You can acquire any skill if you just put in the time, put in the time to Google it, to go to YouTube and watch videos, you know, go to one of these skill sharing sites and you'll figure it out. It's all about do you want to figure it out? Do you want to improve your skill set? And I would suggest that if your answer is yes, then you need to focus in on these five areas because these are the five areas that are gonna separate you from the rest of the pack. They're the five areas that are gonna take you from being a good marketer to being a great marketer. So thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this show, be sure to subscribe, rate and review. And I will see you next week. Thanks for watching. If you like what you saw, subscribe and hit that bell. You'll be the first to be notified when new content goes live. 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