There are a number of reasons to invest in continuing education and onsite training for your marketing and sales team. Here’s one of the big ones: Marketing is changing all the time. So much of it hinges on social media and search engine algorithms that it’s entirely possible Facebook could introduce a new feature in the time it takes you to read this blog entry, and totally throw the world of marketing on its side.
Onsite training, seminars, and workshops, focused on marketing trends, can help keep your company in the loop, and your marketing department on the cutting edge. It can save you from irrelevance. It can rescue you from obsolescence.
How Digital Marketing is Changing
Don’t believe that digital marketing is changing? Then just consider some of the following predictions—all of them supported by the marketing community, and flagged as highly probable developments in the year 2015.
- Google will change its algorithms to rely increasingly on social signals. This will change the very nature of search engine optimization and social media marketing. Want your online content to “rank” in a Google search? The answer isn’t to stuff it with keywords or gimmicks. It’s to ramp up your likes, shares, and other forms of social media engagement.
- E-mail marketing will continue to surge. Believe it or not, e-mail marketing has always been more successful and effective than social media marketing, even if most business owners don’t really realize it. But they’re starting to, and as such, DIY mail list platforms are springing up all over the place. Look for more of them in the year to come.
- Content marketing will become a true non-negotiable. In January, Facebook changed its own algorithms to penalize companies for posting “overly promotional” content. The only way to succeed on Facebook now is to share content that’s genuinely engaging, informative, or entertaining—something most brands will be scrambling to do for the remainder of the year.
- Twitter optimization will become more prevalent. Twitter continues to make its tweet search engine more accurate and more relevant—demanding that tweets be optimized for searchability.
- Data and metrics will extend their rule. Every day, new tools come out to help marketing teams evaluate and track their online reach and ROI. That’s not about to change—and in fact, more and more marketing decisions are going to be made on the basis of data. Companies without good analytic insight are going to be left in the lurch.
These are only five examples among many of how the marketing landscape is expected to change. The question is, how will your company navigate these changes? An investment in ongoing education is really the only way.