How to Grow Modern Marketing Skills that Work

The successful marketing mix includes a variety of strategies which are complicated and constantly changing. With the continuing improvement of technology on the web, new marketing skills have become just as integral to a solid marketing mix.

Let’s talk about four growing skills in marketing that really count.

Conversion Rate Optimization

When you can potentially double your revenue without doubling your costs, marketers would all ask, “How?” With conversion rate optimization, you’re optimizing your sales funnel to push more people through to customers. There’s less worry about increasing ad budgets and finding better audiences.

Instead, you spend more energy making sure more people that interact with your business have a positive experience and convert. Plus, you can easily do it yourself. When you can become a profit-making machine, without having to call on resources other than yourself, you’ll become a marketing asset that’ll have the recruiters all over your back. There are tons of case studies out there about businesses seeing dramatic results from optimizing a single call to action.

Social Media Management and Community Management

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Social media was all the rage amongst marketers after it first came out, and beating the better judgment of some harsh critics, it’s really evolved and become an important part of the current day’s marketing industry. It’s about customer service, new distribution and even advertising, content strategy, and proactive listening.

Your customers have concerns and you want to hear them. Plus, you want to be able to positively react to those concerned voices and reiterate your business. You also have evangelists and listeners, who’d love to hear what you have to say, if you make it interesting, and if it’s exciting enough, they’ll tell a friend, or ten thousand friends.

Shapeways is a great example of a business doing social media and community management right. With a blog, forum, even live webcasts and attendance to some of the hottest events, they show they know how to communicate and connect with their audience of tens of thousands of co-creators, designers, and engineers.

Search Engine Optimization

The multi-billion dollar search industry led by Google spawned the incredibly complicated industry of search engine optimization. Outside of paid search, where businesses work to increase visibility through ads shown on search results for targeted keywords and where service providers help businesses to increase traffic and sales through strategic bidding, there’s organic search. Google effectively makes no revenue from organic search, but businesses are pouring sizable amounts of their marketing budget into managing search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of keyword research, link building, content strategy, and relevance. Effectively, it’s about being relevant AND useful; usefulness always having been an important aspect of great business strategy, but only recently has it been more important in SEO after the Panda update.

SEO got sexy when marketers realized how much consistent traffic they could get from top positions for targeted keywords, and how great those conversions were because of users’ firm trust in Google. It seemed like the formula for success was getting your business ranked in the top results in Google. While this is far easier said than done, and while SEO isn’t really the end-all for a business’ marketing strategy, it’s certainly a valuable channel for marketers to explore and very useful if they can effectively capitalize on the opportunity available.

Analytics

Good marketing is nothing without proper analytics. Some marketing strategies may seem good without analytics, but they’re probably just lucky, and won’t be lucky for long. Analytics gives you a calculated assessment of what you’ve done, and how that has affected the bottom line.

This way, you can see what efforts are helping or hurting your business, so you can cut out the things that aren’t working and double down on what is. Month after month, you’ll see great results when you continue cutting the fat and working the meat. You’ll be leaner and more profitable. There are great free tools like Google Analytics, and many more sophisticated tools like Crazy Egg to help you figure out what you’re doing wrong so you don’t do it again, and what you’re doing right, so you can do more of it.