SEO

November 17, 2016 by Julie McGrath

There’s currently a talent gap in digital marketing and employers are on the look out to fill them…

The industry is currently experiencing a talent shortage in digital marketing. According to recent studies, 90% of marketers report suffering from a shortage of digital skills, and only 8% of surveyed companies feel strong in the area of digital marketing.

Here are seven of the most important skills that you need to make yourself a desirable job candidate in the digital age:

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Of the companies looked at for the study, in which hundreds of job postings for digital talent were analysed, 14% cited SEO as a required skill.

To compete as a candidate for a digital marketing job, you must have technical SEO skills, including server-side settings, sitemaps and server response codes. Moreover, competitive candidates should have experience using various tools to identify customers’ search behaviours and the competitive landscape.

2. Pay-per-click: Seven percent of the companies that were looked at in the study listed search engine marketing (SEM) as a required skill for their organisations, and one of the most important and growing facets of SEM is pay-per-click (PPC). In order to demonstrate your abilities in this area, you need to show that you have the research and analytical skills required to create and execute a strong PPC plan that aligns with an overarching marketing strategy.

3. Mobile: To demonstrate value in this area, you need to understand how mobile marketing differs from desktop marketing and communicate why that matters to the rest of the business. Moreover, a digital marketer should have general familiarity with mobile development in order to best communicate with the design team and create a cohesive mobile marketing strategy that aligns with other online and offline efforts. Get familiar with its vocabulary, including things like SMS marketing and responsive design.

4. E-mail marketing: You need to be able to do more than send out regular communication. You must be able to optimise your e-mail marketing by crafting a compelling strategy, testing relentlessly and refining content based on what works best. It’s also essential that today’s marketers understand the best ways to develop distribution lists and use e-mail nurturing to create more business opportunities.

5. Social media: Ten percent of the businesses that were analysed in the study cited social media experience as a requirement for applicants, and that doesn’t just mean that they want someone with an active personal Twitter account. Digital marketers need to understand how to develop a strong social media presence to help bolster their brands and further their marketing goals.

6. Content management: SEO, e-mail marketing and social media skills are useless if you don’t back up your technical skills with excellent writing for multiple platforms. The ability to flow easily between writing e-mails, press releases, website copy, proposals, social posts and even code is key to success in today’s digital marketing field. Make sure that you demonstrate your ability to write across media, and to guide and polish the content of others on your team.

7. Analytics: In the study, a whopping 13% of businesses listed analytics experience as a required skill in their job descriptions. In order to be a truly great digital marketer, you’ll need to not only implement strong inbound and outbound digital strategies, but also analyse them regularly and use those insights to constantly improve. If you want to make it in a digital marketing job, it’s time to make ROI your middle name.

If you feel worthy of utilising all of these skills within a working environment, check out our latest Marketing role by following this link!

If you would like to learn more about Digital Marketing Strategies, there are many courses which you can enrol on to. Check out the Digital Marketing Course websites below!

Digital Marketing Institute

Home Learning College

Chartered Institue of Marketing

FutureLearn

Online Marketing/SEO Training

– Avi Levine

July 6, 2016 by Julie McGrath

What does the future hold for SEO, online advertising and social media?

Today’s marketing landscape reflects predictions made in science fiction films from the 80’s. We have predictive technology, machine learning and computers that can perform complex actions at nothing more than a voice command.

Put simply, we are living in a new age of internet capability where every discovery leads to more endless possibilities than the last.

The impact this is having on the marketing world is immense as brands look to keep a pace with their customers, the adopters of this technology.

In this 140 character and 15-second video era, it is evident that consumers’ attention spans are decreasing and with it, so are the windows of opportunity for brands to connect with them. It is no longer about “sell sell sell” but “engage engage engage”.

So what does the future hold for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), online advertising and social media and how can marketers effectively use these tools in order to continue to engage audiences?

Why SEO will continue to boom

Given the advances in technology, it’s hard to look more than a few years into the future with huge predictability. However, it’s likely that SEO will continue to grow in popularity, in one form or another.

According to a recent study by Borrell Associates, companies are going to spend $65bn on SEO in 2016. What’s more, the same study found the SEO industry will continue to grow to an estimated $72bn by 2018 and $79bn by 2020.

It’s not hard to see why. There is more of everything. There is more searching as older generations, averse to technology, are making way for younger generations, who use it regularly.

Brands have moved from trying to make their content go viral to focus on creating content that resonates with their audience

There are more users as the internet becomes more affordable and available to different demographics. There are also more outlets for search visibility. When traditional advertising methods finally cease to exist altogether, businesses will have no choice but to look to inbound marketing campaigns in the online world.

Although it won’t all be plain sailing. We’ll see competition increase as more people get involved, which is likely to put up costs.

SEO will adapt with the times and so will how people using it. In the short-term there is much out there to help businesses keep up to date and incorporate a best practice SEO strategy – we do it regularly to support our users.

Looking further ahead, technologies such as self-driving cars will give users more time to perform searches at times when they previously couldn’t. These changes will make it possible for almost anyone to search for anything at any time.

Digital assistants will bridge the gap between online and offline search and as more and more brands get to grips with big data, we can expect to see search engines specific to individual platforms like the app store.

Social Media

While all of this is going on we will see a new age of social media that goes beyond the consumer dominated landscape it is today. It will become a business battleground, particularly centered on metrics and engagement.

Metrics such as likes, followers, retweets, unique views, total story completions or even screenshots, but most importantly click-through rates and the actions taken after that are what marketers will be looking at in more detail.

The goal of every marketer is to have a reliable social ROI (Return of investment) in order to be able to connect social efforts with real world results.

Alongside with metrics comes engagement. Brands have moved from trying to make their content go viral to focus on creating content that resonates with their audience, particularly video, and we will see a lot of developments in this space.

By producing content that is valuable and interesting to their audience, the most likely it is for it to be shared. This might seem an easy task, but it’s not. The only way to get it right is by constantly learn and understand what your audience expects from your brand and your business.

– Li-at Karpel Gurwicz

If this is of interest to you, be sure to check out our latest marketing roles here!

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