“What are the top competencies where marketers need training?”
The leader of a large marketing organization recently asked me this. It’s a great question. Not only did she seek to prioritize effort and dollars, she also asked the right question. Rather than focusing on the most important competencies to master, she wanted to know the right competencies to train for.
If you’re unsure about where your marketers need training, use this simple WHO-WHAT-HOW construct to help you comprehensively assess their needs:
WHO:
Do your marketers know how to mine data and insights in order to understand your audiences and how best to connect with them? To think through this, ask yourself:
- Do they know how and where to access the data?
- Do they regularly make a point to do so?
- Do they know how to cut through data density to extract the important takeaways?
Although your organization may have an analytics team who provides data and insights, your marketers must accurately connect with their findings to uncover how relevant they are to your target audience.
WHAT:
Do your marketers know how to create a tight, strategic brief to meet the specific need of a given campaign? Ask yourself:
- Do the briefs I see (or author) inspire me?
- Does our team write focused briefs?
- If applicable: Does our agency think our briefs are clear and inspiring?
- Do we often suffer rounds of creative review that lead to revisiting the focus of (or lack of) the brief?
In order to unleash the creativity needed to shape the most effective message for your target audience, your team must start with a great brief to achieve campaign goals.
HOW:
Do your marketers give effective creative feedback and direction? To think about this, ask yourself:
- Is our creative as powerful as it can be?
- Are our marketers primarily making executional comments about the work they review?
- Do we use the brief as a critical tool to determine if the creative is delivering on the strategy?
In addition to creating a more effective campaign, knowing how to give feedback also helps build trust and collaboration on the team.
For the most part, core competencies can—and should—be learned on the job. Due to the fast pace of change in our industry, even the most process-oriented organizations are hard pressed to have their marketers excel in certain areas. For this reason, they require overt training efforts to kick start the competency.
Once you’ve considered the WHO-WHAT-HOW issues above, let’s talk through how to develop a comprehensive training program to address them. It would be my pleasure to help.
- Customer-centric marketing
- Writing effective Marketing Briefs
- How to Review Creative effectively
- Creative problem solving for Marketers
- And more
Our courses help marketing departments provide a strong marketing foundation for younger employees while providing new skills or refresher courses to more seasoned employees.
We would be delighted to discuss one or more of our marketing trainings with you.