3 Ways to Elevate Your Marketing skills
You can cultivate a growth mindset, even when life gets busy.
It may feel like you don’t have time to learn new skills for email marketing, but there are a few shifts you can make that will make professional development less of a burden and more of a positive daily influence in your life. Because ultimately, learning should feel exciting.
So, here are 3 fun and easy ways to enhance your marketing skills and become a more valuable marketing leader:
no. 1 – Stay Near the Pulse of the Industry
As we all know, marketing is an exciting industry full of change and innovation. So, it's essential to stay close to the pulse of change to become the most innovative professionals we can be.
Subscribe to Marketing Newsletters
A quick shift to start maximizing your email marketing game is signing up for email newsletters that share helpful information and industry news that will bring insight into your daily marketing projects. Planoly, Stacked Marketer and Please Advise are a few of my favorites.
One way I ensure I'm receiving these without losing track of them in my work inbox is by signing up with an email account strictly used for subscribing to high-quality email campaigns, receiving marketing newsletters and testing email campaigns.
Follow Top Email Campaigns
You can add so much value to your marketing plans by drawing inspiration and ideas from cutting-edge campaigns in the industry. While we should all strive to be changemakers and at the frontlines of new ideas, what we surround ourselves with ultimately impacts our vision and creative juices.
Reallygoodemails.com and Pinterest are two places to start finding emails that are exemplary pieces of design, content and strategy. You can also look up brands you admire and start subscribing to their emails to leverage inspiration.
Since I create campaigns for many higher education clients, I sought out universities that were excellent at email marketing to see how they communicated with their alums and students. As a result, I was inspired to showcase more student testimonies and change my subject lines to incorporate a more youthful, fun tone for specific colleges that needed to refine their stiff, sophisticated style.
Continually Learn and Get Certified
Certificates are one way to maximize your skills because they give you research and expertise that can influence your projects and contribute to new ideas. Marketing Professionals, LinkedIn Learning, HubSpot Academy, SEMRush and Mailchimp Academy are a few places where I've been able to add new skills to my repertoire and gain resources, such as templates for designing organized messaging matrixes or editorial calendars.
no. 2 – Creatively Experiment
Build your experience outside of work through freelance or community service projects when you want to stretch your creativity and try new marketing ideas.
Start by reaching out to a local organization, such as your church or favorite coffee shop, and see if you can help aid in their email marketing for a season.
Through this exposure to new industries and audiences, you can use new tools, platforms and strategies to test and refine your skills beyond the experience you're gaining through pre-determined avenues at work.
no. 3 – Leverage the Experience of Others
Do you have a mentor? You can discover mentorship opportunities by connecting with friends with seasoned industry experience or professionals with careers you aspire to have. One of the ways I have done this is by reaching people who worked for marketing agencies when I was looking to switch from an in-house agency to one that would offer more exposure to a variety of industries.
My friend Lauren, who runs LEO Marketing Agency, brought me on as an unofficial mentee as she showed me how she balanced life as a remote marketing professional and mother of two young boys. I admired her tenacity, kindness, professionalism and brilliant creativity. I wanted to be like her. Lauren's experience helped set the expectations I created for myself. Soon after we started working on freelance projects together, I landed my role at Cyberwoven, where I reached my goal of creating email strategies and campaigns at an agency with multi-national clients.
Another way I connected with professionals was through LinkedIn. I often browsed through brands and found individuals who had career paths I admired and reached out to them so I could chat and soak up everything they have done to become the professionals they are today. This led me to enroll in continuing education opportunities that had helped them in their career and develop great relationships with executives for companies like Kellogg, who was incredibly kind to take time out of their busy schedule to chat with me on occasion and follow up to see how my career was going.
Overall, I urge anyone seeking knowledge to ask for it! I have learned more about the marketing industry through the lens of more seasoned professionals than through training or certificate courses. The tangible advice they have given me have been a guiding light in my career.
As you set out to grow a professional in the new year, remember that “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” Keep on striving!
