Ten Must Skills You Should Look For In Your Virtual Marketing Officer
Nov 24, 2020
10 min read
In recent times, the world has made a paradigm shift to digital platforms, and it has notably impacted the way businesses market their products or services. The proliferation of smartphones, the rise of the internet, and the influx of online shopping have played a huge role in changing the way we eat, talk, buy, research, and gather information.
There are 5.112 billion unique mobile users and 3.484 billion unique social media users around the globe presently. With the advent of advanced tech, the only way for businesses to reach the top is through the course of these digital platforms and the charter of this course will be your marketing officer. However, developing an in-house team can strain your finances.
Now, in such a scenario, Virtual Marketing Officers (VMO) are your best bet. A VMO works beyond the fundamental duties and envisions strategies that get you a competitive edge without draining your resources. Various types of technical and analytical skills continue to proliferate for VMOs in today’s day and age. Use of AI, incorporation of Machine learning, leveraging big data, all these new skills are gaining importance in the world of digital marketing and for the VMOs as well.
With a VMO you get not only your Marketing Head but also a full-fledged team.Now, how do you make sure the VMO services offered by a firm are competent and scalable enough for you?
To make things easier, we have compiled a list of the top ten skills that you will need to look for -
Understanding of Paid Social Media
With paid social media ads-spend reaching $43 billion by the end of 2020, it becomes crucial for your VMO to have a good hold on different types of social media advertising strategies. An ideal VMO will be well versed in paid social media advertising on popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram, especially when there are more than 3 billion companies that advertise on Facebook.
A VMO should have an in-depth knowledge of both analytics and insights for all social media platforms and should be able to build a unique and engaging experience for your custom audience base, all the while, experimenting with his creative strategies. There is a myriad of cost-saving opportunities on social media platforms, and your VMO should be able to make the most out of them.
Technical Competency
No one can make it into the world of marketing without solid technical competency. A modern-day VMO is required to have a thorough knowledge of modern-day technologies as they are an essential part of today’s digital world. Any marketing team works along with professionals from various domains ranging from business intelligence and content creation to web development and data analysis. A VMO must understand the correlation of work between all these people to make the marketing efforts successful. You will be surprised to know that almost half of the modern-day marketing professions require technical skills along with field experience and the same should be expected from your VMO as well.
Data Analysis
If you keep tabs on the digital world, you might be familiar with the word big data, a hot topic of debate for marketers. However, it is not just big data that is being paraded down marketing alleys but also the usage of available data within an organisation. The efficiency of analysis of the said data can significantly increase the chances of success for your marketing campaign. An ideal VMO knows exactly how to leverage data and draw out strategic campaigns. Indeed, a VMO can never become a data scientist, but he is required to have a basic understanding of different types of data and how to utilise the insights and patterns drawn from it.
Knowledge of AI and Machine Learning
With the AI market growing to become a $190 billion industry by the end of 2025, there is no surprise that it has made its way to marketing as well. Go by Gartner’s Hype cycle for digital marketing and advertising and you will realise that all the expectations related to the incorporation of AI in digital marketing have reached new heights in the last year.
By taking advantage of modern-day technologies like machine learning, a VMO should be able to easily achieve marketing-specific goals like tracking real-time customer experience or keeping tabs on spending across various channels. In addition to this, AI can be used by the VMOs to streamline automated content tagging and personalisation on a real-time basis.
Source: Unsplash
Email Marketing
A VMO should be a remarkable email marketer as for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get $42 in return, and this is one of the highest ROI generated from any digital marketing campaign. The VMO should have comprehensive knowledge of creating an enticing email marketing campaign, and they should be well versed in building a quality email list as well. The attention span of emails is concise, and that’s why the VMO will need to be good at making people succumb to opening the email and clicking on the CTA.
Video-Based Marketing
Videos are the new king of content. Videos on the digital platforms generate 12 times more share than any other type of content, and therefore, your VMO needs to be exceptionally good at social video marketing. A VMO will need to don scriptwriting and advanced video production as well. Your potential VMO should be well versed in creating videos that don’t only engage the audience but also create leads. In addition to this, a VMO also needs to have a basic understanding of how videos work on different types of social media platforms.
Mobile Marketing
With the introduction of the Mobile-First Index by Google, you must already be aware of the importance of strengthening your digital presence on mobile devices. Therefore, a VMO needs to master the art of mobile marketing to stay relevant in the industry. An impeccable VMO will have the know-how of strengthening your presence on mobile platforms and optimising the website so that users on different mobile devices can easily view it.
Knowledge of Drip Marketing Campaign
When it comes to lead generation, inbound marketing can do wonders. Numerous marketers can easily come up with a unique CPC campaign. But, what you need to look for is a marketer that can examine the incoming data and build a robust drip marketing campaign. Building a drip marketing campaign is all about personalisation and well-written communications. So, make sure that your VMO is not only good at creating the CPC campaign but is also able to use drip marketing in the best possible way.
Account-Based Marketing Approach
The world of marketing is being led by account-based marketers where the right message is sent to the right person at the right time, and this is why ABM is proving to be successful. A VMO needs to be thorough with his ABM approach and be able to channel the given resources to make the best out of it. With the use of ABM, VMOs can push the marketing campaign to not only a single person but to several decision-makers in the buying process.
Customer Data Security, Privacy, and Data Governance
The involvement of some of the biggest names in data breaches has made people lose trust in companies for protecting their information; This is the main reason why only 25 percent of the people believe that a company can handle its data with ethical responsibility.
If you don’t want to lose your precious data, go for a firm that has the right knowledge to act as the most vital guardian of the private information of its customers. In addition to this, a comprehensive understanding of cybersecurity hygiene and usage of critical customer data is also a crucial aspect to look for in your VMO.
An ideal VMO can act as a magic wand for your business and this is why you need to analyse potential VMOs on the parameters as mentioned above properly. The skills of VMOs have evolved a lot in the past couple of years and the need to move beyond the fundamental skills has risen. Saffron Edge offers the best VMO services with qualified marketing professionals backed by a team of exceptional content writers, market analysts, and much more. Connect now to know more.
How Does Partnering an Inbound Marketing Agency Boosts Your Sales
Inbound Marketing has emerged as a new field of marketing and gained importance in recent years. As a result, this required a complete overhauling of the sales and marketing departments and making them learn how inbound marketing works and how to handle the queries that come in through this channel. This makes the two separate teams of sales and marketing get intertwined with one another. It has become important to offer these teams the right kind of support they need in order to get on the right foot. And, the best way to do so is to partner with an excellent inbound marketing agency that provides sales enablement while the in-house team learns the way inbound marketing works during the process. 5 important benefits from partnering an Inbound Marketing Agency 1. Inbound Marketing Strategy that suits your business Not being familiar with the inbound marketing and starting on your own without much knowledge about what best suits your business can be catastrophic and make customers fall out of that sales funnel which was your ultimate goal. Customers falling out of the sales funnel means that some might become critical about your company for the next time even if you target them with the right kind of strategy or re-targeting. But all these kind of repercussions can be avoided if you are up for partnering with the right Inbound Marketing agency. You will get the right advice and people to implement the suggested strategy that suits best for your industry, your unique company, your products or services and your audience. This will help your company realize ROI much better and quicker. One of the eminent players in this industry is HubSpot for US based firms. 2. Making the Sales Team Learn Even though partnering the inbound marketing agency helps in strategizing and implementing it, partnering with the agency that provides sales enablement as well can be an added advantage for your company. During the process the sales team learns how to pitch for sales while handling an Inbound query. It is pretty obvious that your sales team might resist this change and your reps might feel like they’re being replaced. An agency that provides sales enablement can make the transition smoother and get your reps on board effectively. Their coaching will include that they won’t have to chase down leads anymore or cold call anymore, that they will get highly qualified leads that are actually interested in your company’s products or services and hence will make them achieve higher lead targets. 3. Sales and Marketing Teams are better aligned with each other Implementation of Inbound Marketing will make both marketing and sales teams to work in collaboration which could be a huge change for them, but this is a good thing because to get the maximum results we need both the teams to work in collaboration. An inbound agency with sales enablement will help make sure that the alignment between these two teams is more effective. A sales coach will offer tips about how to properly communicate with the marketing team and make sure that both work together in achieving their respective goals ,i.e., lead generation and conversions. 4. It provides help with CRM An Inbound marketing agency like HubSpot provides its own sales CRM for the sales team. Similarly, if other Inbound marketing agencies also do provide their own CRM tools for your sales team, moving over to the new platform can be easy if their is a proper training given about the features of the new tool and what all it can do. If the agency is up for providing the help and support you need then it will be a smooth transition for the sales team to get used to using the new CRM. 5. New techniques for selling If your company’s sales team is used to outbound selling techniques, inbound techniques can be whole new world for them. In that case, they might use the same aggressive techniques that they used previously instead of focussing on the customer’s needs, they might not know what is social selling, they might not know what is thought leadership or they might not know what is customer-centric approach. So in this case, Inbound Marketing agency that offers sales enablement will provide an ongoing training for the sales team and let them learn about the best practices to sell in inbound marketing, so your sales people can make more sales without bugging customers too much. ...
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How a bad website can hurt all your marketing efforts
Your business website is like an old-school brochure of your business that is up and running 24*7. Do you want your brochures to be sub-par and drive customers away? The answer will most probably a no. So, why take the risk with your website? Not having a fully optimized website can have a detrimental impact on your business which can cripple your business to a point of no return. From just being a single website in 1991 to reaching the 2 billion mark in 2016, there are still a lot of active websites out there that are just painful to look at and are studded with keyword laden content that doesn’t make any sense to users. That needs to change! In this technologically advanced world where an online business can not survive without having an effective digital media strategy, having a website that allures users and perfectly aligns with your marketing efforts becomes all the more important. A good website and a good digital marketing strategy goes hand in hand You can not just ignore one and focus on the other and expect results, you will have to work on both to make your efforts worthwhile. If you are facing trouble in making conversions, despite of having a stellar digital marketing strategy in place, chances are that there is something wrong with your website. It can be the content, the visuals (or complete lack of it), it’s speed or anything else that is creating friction with your audience and is driving them away. Apparently, there are a lot of website elements that can be hampering conversions on your website. Figuring out what’s wrong with your website is what you’ll have to do to get up to speed with making conversions, sales and some money for your business and we’re here to help you with just that. What follows is a set of website elements for you to focus and optimize that can be the main cause of low or no conversions on your website. Let’s go through them one by one and I will explain to you why optimizing your website for them is so important for convincing visitors - Lack of proper visuals Depending on just plain text to make conversions for your business works no more. The human mind is 5x more likely to remember an image than text. According to a study by John Medina. adding visuals increases the chances of a reader retaining a piece of information by 55%. And marketing is all about making it stick. Moreover, if users are not convinced with the overall looks, color scheme, layout style, fonts or any other design element of your website, most likely they’ll leave. So, make sure you put a lot of thought behind each design element of your website. Irrelevant content Having content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience is the most common reason websites fail to convert. Many website owners indulge in uploading spammy keyword-stuffed content on their websites that doesn’t go well with users. Also, uploading content that provides little to no value to readers is a sure red flag. Don’t upload content just for the sake of uploading content. Understand your audience and their needs first and then create content that caters to those exact needs for maximum conversions. After the recent developments in Google’s search engine algorithms, the main factors it uses to assess the content on your website depends on the basis of the value it provides to users and the sheer quality of it. Writing content for search engines is not a thing anymore, so it’s about time that website owners start focusing on writing content for their users rather than trying to game the system. Site’s loading time According to a study, more than 40% of users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your website loads in the same amount of time, congrats to your competitors. Waiting for a site to load is a pure source of frustration. You’ll start losing website visitors even before they have a glimpse of your beautiful website. And there is little to no assurance that they will ever return back. So, it’s better to speed up your website in every way possible to provide a seamless experience to your users and boost conversions. Having too much code, extra plug-ins and heavy images on your website are some common reasons to have a slow loading website. Check them first if you are looking to increase the loading speed of your website. Site’s responsiveness Everything is going mobile, even Google. The use of mobile has skyrocketed in the past few years, so much that mobile users have surpassed desktop users for the first time in history. So, keeping that in mind, if your website doesn’t cater to mobile users, you are ignoring more than 50% of your website traffic. Optimizing your website for mobile has some serious search engine benefits as well. See how you can optimize your website for mobile users here. Cluttered website Not leaving some white space in your web pages in order to place more content on it does you more harm than good. It’s not easy to make sense out of the content or images when there’s not ample (or the required amount) spacing around it, making it look more like a clutter. Keep your audience’s readability in mind and try to give as much breathing space to the content on your website as possible so that they can serve its purpose easily, and that is to be read by your website visitors. Navigational issues When a user comes to your website, he expects to see content that he cares about first. The navigational steps the user has to take to consume relevant content on your website should not be more than 1-2 clicks and must be straightforward and intuitive. Don’t let your users spend a lot of their time in figuring out how to reach the most important pages on your website, keep the frustration levels at a bare minimum by making it easier for them to consume what they want on your website. A beautiful website won’t help you if it takes users 50 clicks to reach your service pages, they will be gone before reaching the 4th click. SEO structure Optimizing your website for SEO is as important as optimizing your website for your audience. Search engines are usually the most prominent players that send traffic to a website so optimizing your website for them shouldn’t be an option, it should be a priority. Incorporate some high search volume, low competition keywords in your content, optimize the meta descriptions and title tags, add schema markup and build some backlinks from your website to get some extra traffic from Google and gain some more conversions. But remember to optimize all the content and other elements of your website for your audience first, search engines come later. ...
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How is Voice Search revolutionizing SEO once and for all?
The digital platform keeps on evolving, and every aspect of this evolution affects how your website will rank in the search result. Even a small introduction like a featured snippet affects your SEO strategy, and this is why keeping tabs on the latest changes on the online platform is essential. You will be surprised to know that the Google algorithm changes at least once or twice every day. And even voice search is a result of such evolution of the digital platform and the changes in Google algorithm. People made a paradigm shift from qwerty keypads to touch screens, and now they are shifting from touchscreen typing to voice search. There is no surprise in this type of shift since we always speak three times faster than we type. Well, if you haven’t noticed the rise of voice search in the past couple of years then you should look at the below-mentioned stats:- By the end of 2020, more than 50% of the searches will be voice searches, and this number will keep on increasing. By 2022, around 55%of the homes in the U.S will have smart speakers, and this will further fuel the growth of voice search. Till January 2018, the number of voice searches made every month increased to around 1 billion. During the holiday shopping of 2017, 1 in 4 customers used voice search assistants to ease the process of shopping. More than 41% of the people using smart speakers feel like they are talking with a friend or family member. All these stats might have made you realize the influx of voice search but do you know which type of effect it will have on your SEO and what you will need to do for voice search optimization? Let’s find out through this blog post. The difference between voice search and text in terms of SEO You might be surprised to know that there is not any difference between text and voice search, especially when you are talking about results. The audio received from the internet users forwarded to the voice recognition API, and then this voice is converted into text. This simply means that when you type ‘best mobile phones of 2020’ and use voice for searching ‘best mobile phones of 2020’, you will get the exact same results. But when you talk about the difference between voice search and text in terms of the person’s interaction with the search, then there is a big difference, and this is what will affect your SEO. Everyone using the internet will interact with voice search in a completely different way than search boxes. You should know that users mostly have more of a conversational tone while using voice search. Five ways in which voice search will change SEO The importance of semantic search will increase Google is not only dependent upon keywords as it uses many different kinds of factors like the search history of the user or different patterns of searches to show the best result. Well, this is what we call semantic search, and it is basically a word used for describing that Google is improving its ability to know what people are looking for on the internet. It is because of semantic search that when you type ‘Movies New York’, Google will understand that you are interested in watching movies in New York not movies about New York. And since voice searches are more about conversational tone, you will need to optimize your content accordingly. Start incorporating long-tail keywords to rank better for voice searches. Content will need to be optimized for customers Because of the proliferation of voice search, you will have to make sure that your content is not only optimized for search engines but for the customers as well. You will need to start understanding how customers are talking about your firm on social media and other platforms. You will also need to ask your sales team and customer support team about the most common question asked by the customers and the most common words used in those questions. In addition to this, you will also need to take advantage of your FAQ page and answer some of the most common questions in a detailed way. Don’t make the mistake of using marketing jargon since a customer will never use such words during voice search. You can’t miss a mobile first site Google has already made it clear that there is no way you can skip mobile-first sites, and if your website does not play along, then your survival on the digital platform will become problematic. If your website will take time to load on mobile phones or if it will not fit the screen, then no one will be interested in staying on your website. But even when you consider optimizing your website for voice search, the mobile-first index will come to top the list. Mobile phones acted as a springboard for voice search, and more than 50% of the people use voice search while driving. So, it’s high time that you should start optimizing your website according to the mobile-first index or you will be kicked to the bottom of the search result. The role of featured snippets and ranking zero A wide array of voice searches are answered through rich answer boxes that are now being called as ranking zero in the world of digital marketing. There are many of these boxes that will show you public domain information like how many cms in a meter and these types of answers are given by Google directly. But when you talk about featured snippets, then it is a whole different story. Featured snippets are pulled off from information available on the websites, and Google will give credit to those brands that will regularly come on voice searches and featured snippets. And since you will only need to appear on the first page instead of the first position, featured snippets are a more practical solution for businesses of every kind. If your website is already ranking on the first page, then you will just need to make a few changes in your content and your SEO optimization strategy. The need to pass the radio test When it comes to featured snippets, then Google shows the website aligns with the information, and thus the user can click on the website to get more information. This brings more organic traffic to the website. But when it comes to voice search, then Google presents the answer by saying According to’ or ‘We find this information for you’. This simply means all the brands can gain more from brand awareness. Here, the radio test means that people can hear your brand name just like in the case of a radio broadcast and then remember it for a longer period of time. So this means that all the new brands out there will need to have a band name that can be easily pronounced by Google Assistant. We are living in an era that is being driven by different kinds and phases of evolution and to stay relevant and grow in such an age, you will need to make the right adjustments to your strategy. Well, the same thing can be said about the change in SEO strategy because of voice searches. You can’t deny the influx of voice search, and you will never wish to be left behind when voice search will become a new normal for everyone. This is why, instead of waiting for others to make changes according to the rise of voice search, you should start working out on your SEO strategy and allow your website to grow even when people are searching for you through voice searches. ...
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