Working from home does require a certain approach to be effective, but if you get it right, you can build an effective remote marketing team

With more of us working from home than ever before, use these top tips to build a remote marketing team so you can keep your team on track and meet your KPIs. There are many benefits for all types of organizations, from small startups to large marketing teams to work remotely, including: We are in the midst of a digital skills gap, meaning you may need to search harder to recruit the expertise you need for new roles Research has found that employees are 77% more productive when they work from home than at an office. Businesses can slash their overhead by doing without office space. Modern technology makes virtual collaboration and communication a reality. Marketing teams, in particular, are well-suited to…

How can you expect to compete to acquire and retain customers if you don't invest in marketing?

As long as your business exists, investment in marketing is a vital contributor to your success. What are the upsides when you invest in marketing? Here are 5 reasons to increase investment in marketing today.

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1. Invest in key marketing skills to optimize your marketing strategy

In today's competitive environment, you need to hone your marketing team's key skills to ensure you are working as efficiently and effectively as possible to reach and engage your customers and make money. But without the initial investment, this can be difficult to achieve. In fact, 79% of CEOs listed availability of 'key skills' as one of their top 3 concerns. Marketers need to approach 2021 confidently, planning a marketing strategy across…

Businesses will always need specialist digital skills

So, Mark Ritson believes it’s time to shut down digital marketing teams for good. I disagree. Why? For the simple reason that for businesses to compete, digital marketing demands excellence in specific digital skills, which are integrated throughout marketing. For me, larger businesses need a core digital team or Digital Marketing Centre of  Excellence to ensure that digital marketing investments are prioritized and the latest techniques are used to ensure businesses can compete through digital marketing platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn, which influence so many purchases today. [si_guide_block id="84595" title="Download Free resource –Integrated marketing megatrends" description="Learn about the 10 megatrends that have already helped leading companies future-proof their strategies by ensuring all aspects of marketing are integrated."/] I'm not saying that marketing roles aren't important, far-from-it. Marketing directors, brand, product, and campaign managers are at least as important to…

Now more than ever it’s essential to amplify the impact of your digital marketing management. Here we show you how to do this by boosting both your operational and leadership effectiveness.

It’s essential to boost your management skills

Now, more than ever, how you prioritize and execute your projects matters for effective digital marketing management. Without operational discipline, you’ll soon find yourself staring at the backs of your competitors. In another Smart Insights article, I talked about how to boost the productivity of your team ( https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/5-keys-to-work-from-home-success-during-coronavirus-times/ ) during these Coronavirus times. Here I focus on how to improve your productivity and, more importantly, your effectiveness as a leader.

Boosting your impact involves:

Prioritizing your marketing initiatives

Optimizing your marketing workflows

Outsourcing applicable work

Empowering your functional leads

I will drill into each topic below. …

You and your team are stuck at home - that’s the current reality. By following these guidelines you can boost everyone’s work-from-home (WFH) morale and productivity.

Your customers don’t care where you work

Due to recent Coronavirus revelations, it’s not just you that’s working from home (WFH); your entire team may have gone remote. And stress can surely accompany this transition. But rather than succumbing to fears and pulling inward, it’s time to push outward — with strong leadership and tight collaboration, while also meeting your team’s emotional needs. After all, your customers don’t care where you work, but how productive you are and how you care for them. Do this well and you remain a market leader; flail at WFH and watch your customers bail. Fortunately, with the recent proliferation of project management apps, and some purposeful leadership, your team can still get…

79% of CEOs said lack of key skills was one of their top three concerns and 46% see upskilling as their favourite solution.

With the improvements in technology, jobs are changing. Some jobs are being eliminated or revolutionized to bring them up-to-date. Likewise, some jobs are being created to meet up with the demands created by technology. New technologies like the internet, artificial intelligence, software development, have made upskilling necessary in the new economy. [si_guide_block id="117459" title="Download our Free Resource – Marketing careers and skills development workbook" description="Our guide shows you how to map out your personal short-term and long-term goals, become more productive in your day-to-day work, identify your key motivators and analyze your digital marketing skills."/] In a PwC survey, 79% of CEOs said lack of key skills was one of their top three concerns and 46% see upskilling as their favourite solution. [caption id="attachment_144608" align="alignnone" width="640"]…

Which tools and sites do you use to keep up with digital marketing?

The idea for our new guide for marketing agencies ‘keeping up with digital’ came from a conversation that the Smart Insights team and I had earlier this year - around how agencies often struggle to ‘encode’ a way of refreshing their digital knowledge within the business. Agencies that I speak to or work with will often say that they know that staying on top of all the opportunities that new or evolved digital technologies, platforms, media, techniques - and more - can help them and their clients. It’s a ’good thing’ to do. But they find it hard to put a structured approach to that together. Hence the guide. As we worked on the new resource we realised that many of the most useful digital marketing sites and tools that we recommend are also relevant for other types of marketing…