Recruiting the right marketing employees is hard. This is, however, the easy part compared to keeping them updated on the current trends in marketing. Below are some tips on how to update your employees’ marketing knowledge.
1. Enroll them in a Digital Marketing Course
If you are not keeping your prized employees engaged through ongoing training, you are doing your employees and your company a disservice. Some employers worry that they may train an employee only for them to leave the company.
However, ask yourself what good an untrained, unmotivated employee is to your company. It is better to risk training an employee who might leave you than not training one who might stay. Whichever way you look at it, you take a chance by training or not training your marketers. One of the best ways to keep your marketing employees on the edge of marketing trends is by enrolling them in a digital marketing course.
2. Have Individualized Development Plans
You will need a personal development plan for each member of your marketing team. To do this, interrogate each employee with a view to understanding their specific career goals and interests. This engagement will help you understand the kindly of development plan every marketing team member requires.
People have different goals and perspectives about their career. A development plan customized for every marketer will feature a roadmap for SMART goals aligned to each marketer’s strengths and peculiarities. This improves your ROI for every employee in your marketing team.
3. Measure Performance
Introducing performance metrics lets a marketing employee know what you expect of them in terms of performance. It also helps them locate where they are in relation to where they ought to be. Aligning quantitative metrics with the strengths and capabilities of each employee acts as a way of determining stellar and subpar performance.
Once an employee reaches a certain performance threshold, you can raise the metrics gradually until they reach their optimal performance. These incremental improvements leave an employee motivated and inspired to achieve even higher performance targets. Setting small achievable goals motivates an employee to keep on working towards bigger goals.
4. Get Rid of Barriers
The one thing you do not want to do is erect unnecessary barriers for your marketing staff. They should be as inhibited as possible in the course of their work. Barriers may be in the form of rigid processes and an organizational structure that makes it difficult to achieve performance targets.
Remove any barrier that stands in the way of growth and development of your company. Your job as a leader is to come up with a fluid system that encourages marketing employees to achieve higher-than-expected targets.
5. Provide Constructive Feedback
Every member of your marketing team needs to know how they are doing. The performance metrics you established earlier should be able to tell you with near-accurate precision how every employee is doing based on their performance targets. However, do not confuse feedback with criticism, or an open show of disapproval. Feedback must be constructive and should be accompanied with specific actionable recommendations on how an employee can improve their performance.
It should be delivered on a regular basis; not just for employee reviews. Providing regular feedback to employees helps them repurpose their skills and realign their most valuable skills to attain the most important goals. Instead of waiting to knock them out with a decisive feedback that has no recourse for correction, provide your employees with constant feedback at every turn so they can proceed to deliver with confidence.
Hiring the right employees and keeping them properly updated on marketing trends is a challenge you must take on with enthusiasm. Your company’s profitability depends on the ability of your marketing team to deliver. You need to, therefore, work to ensure they are equipped with requisite skills and tools so they can be more productive.
