The New Skills Marketers Need In A Remote Work Environment

Some marketing skills are as timeless as they are transferable — which is one of the reasons it’s such a great area in which to pursue a career.

If you develop the ability to research, analyze and understand customers’ most important needs, you’ll continue to thrive as a marketer no matter how the nature of work changes.

Hone your creative skills as a storyteller, and you’ll be able to adapt marketing strategies even as new channels emerge.

And if you can translate those first two skills into work that builds brand affinity and persuades people to make purchases, you’ll be the person brands look for when they need marketing talent.

Just a few years ago, the way most marketers used those skills often took place in the same kinds of settings.

Strategic thinking and planning might have taken place with coworkers in a boardroom (assuming it was possible to find a free one you could book).

Day-to-day tasks might have happened at your office or, more often, a cubicle that sat in a row of other cubicles.

Then there was all the back and forth to customer sits, to the offices of agency partners and industry conferences.

Remote work hasn’t necessarily taken all of that away, but it has certainly shifted the nature of how the work is carried out.

This means marketers — whether they are new to their role or have been manning the entire department for years — need to think about new kinds of skills:

1. Virtual Campaign Development And Execution

The first ideas for a series of ads or social media posts might have once started with many people sitting around a table or a whiteboard. Then, agency partners might have gone away for a time until key marketing assets were produced and ready for review and feedback.

Marketers still need to follow those steps, but remote work offers the opportunity to save considerable time by taking away a lot of the to-and-fro between offices.

Instead, marketers need to become more comfortable with digital white boarding applications and other tools to brainstorm their next campaigns.

Review and feedback might now happen via videoconference, providing marketers learn how to convey revision needs effectively.

As for the execution of a campaign, such as posting social content or managing creative across an ad network, they will find even greater benefit from marketing automation like Marketing Cloud. Keeping strong communication among team members and even agency partners is also easier when you work with tools like Slack.

2. Myriad Customer Journey Mapping

Marketers working in brands where most activity happened in a physical location at a store got very good at traditional journey mapping. They knew, for instance, what brought people through the doors, what they were looking for on the shelves and what would ensure they found up at the point of sale.

Those working with primarily online brands became equally adept at e-commerce journeys. These might have began on social media and then led to the brand’s web site and finally its online store.

Today there are many different variations on these customer journeys. Some begin online and wind up in a physical location. In some cases customers will visit a store to look at a product first but buy online afterwords. Some will be online-only but will play out entirely on a social media channel or a third-party marketplace.

It’s really hard to may myriad customer journeys when you’re trying to piece together from a million different places, especially if you’re working remotely. That’s why having a single source of truth, such as Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform, helps to unify marketing teams with sales and other critical business functions.

The more marketers master myriad customer journey mapping, the better they’ll be able to segment and personalize the stories they bring to their most coveted audiences.

3. Digitally-Driven Learning And Networking

Marketers are often voracious in their pursuit of knowledge. Some of what they’re looking for are the big lessons in brand-building and customer loyalty that could be helpful to anyone in their role. In other cases they are trying to get a better read on the ins and outs of customer behaviour in their specific industry.

In-person conferences and events have long been a gold mine for marketers to get this knowledge, and to share the knowledge of their brand’s subject matter experts to the world. As the last few years have shown, however, they’re not the only option.

Today’s marketers need to know how to make the most of digital summits, webinars and the kind of courses they can take on resources such as Trailhead. They also need to be able to create those kinds of digitally-driven learning and networking opportunities on their brand’s behalf.

These don’t always have to be highly expensive experiences to produce.

It could start with contributing insights to a Twitter chat, and then hosting a similar one as part of your own marketing efforts.

It could be hosting a roundtable for a few VIP customers via videoconference.

If you want to stay on top of marketing best practices, you should probably have a list of favourite podcasts — and maybe even have plans to run a branded podcast to share some knowledge back to the community.

The “new skills” for remote marketing teams aren’t really new, in a sense. They are about transferring their experience from a world in which everyone was operating in the same office to an era defined by a digital HQ.

You may be working remote, but if you can adapt your skill set accordingly, you can get closer than ever to what customers really care about.