Research: The Demand for Digital Marketing Skills in 2017

In times of great rise of digital spending, shaping strategies and budgets offer an opportunity to shape the digital marketing structures.

Companies were more likely to hire digital performance experts than social media and creative professionals last year, and that trend looks set to repeat itself in 2017.

According to the research from McKinley Marketing Partners, digital advertising, and content appear to be the most in-demand skills required in the market.

The new research shows that the demand for digital advertising professionals is 46%, while content creation & curation had a share of 38% and content strategy 34% skills.

The Rise of Digital Advertising and Performance Marketing

Due to the ongoing increase in ad spending budgets, performance marketing is playing the main role for the e-commerce and online businesses.

The ROI-focused department is the top priority for managers who are highly investing in human capabilities.

Content is Getting Bigger

There will be always a huge gap between the demand and suppliers when it comes to content creators. According to the research, the demand for content expertise is rapidly high this year.

Analysis and Automation

Interestingly, the survey is showing a slow growth in analysis and automation hiring. That might be due to the low supply of talent in those areas. In comparing demand for marketing expertise against those at least occasionally looking for job opportunities, the study found that traditional marketing was one of the only areas in which active supply outweighed demand.

Digital Marketing Jobs

About the Data: The results are based on a survey of 314 marketing professionals who are working in a marketing role (246) or have experience in one (68). Employed respondents work at various roles across a mix of company types and sizes. Questions about hiring practices were only asked of those who have influence over hiring decisions.

How to Overcome The Challenges of Your Digital Marketing Department

It takes a lot of what ‘not to do’ before you are able to shape an idea of what you need ‘to do’.

I have been there witnessing how the digital marketers started back in time with just couple of us sitting in the corner with no idea what we do and often treated as internet geeks.

Now digital marketing has become one of the core foundations of the business. It is becoming the department that can drive ROI and has huge ability to shape the business with real-time statics. Yet, it is becoming more and more complicated and the biggest headache for CEOs.

Technically, if money cannot buy happiness then money cannot buy the best digital marketing achievements or teams.

1. Starting with the function of digital marketing

Commonly known as the most critical loop that leads nowhere. CEOs expect direct ROI profitability and growth hacking charts rising up while digital marketers believe that their role is more revolutionary inside the organization.

So what is the bottom line for this debate? Both parties are right, I would say. There are many functions your digital marketing can drive inside your organization and there is no ultimate recipe for that. Digital marketing function will be always built according to the company’s strategic business objectives.

The role of the department should serve the core values and client relationship as well as driving ROI. Looking at digital marketing function as acquisition factory will turn it into another sales representative which is a narrow view of the picture.

In a world dominated by the internet and online communication, digital marketing can affect and functionally drive value to the brand awareness, sales quality, customer relation, retention, product development and even HR.

The conclusion: Digital marketing can bring value to the organization when it is positioned to serve the strategic business objective. Startups do understand this and that’s why they rely on digital marketing to serve the overall business objective.

2. Then what are the capabilities?

Digital marketing is hugely powerful but it is not a straightforward machine to feed with money and expect the profit on the other end.

Let’s forget the magic and try to imagine digital marketing capabilities as the financial assets for investors. There will be long-term profitable assets and short-term ones. If you expect to sell the long-term profitable assets immediately, you will end up with zero profit.

Digital marketing is not all in one tactic to acquire clients that have the same lifetime value. You cannot simply put inbound marketing, content with paid channels in one basket and expect the same results from all.

Scenario #1 “The CEO is again shouting when he is looking at our budget and conversion. These will the 3rd time after one thousand for me to go on mission impossible of explaining how each channel has it is a different function. He wants to see the relation, pushing for the language of numbers and the direct impact on conversion. A few months more till the results started to build up and visible trend finally arrived. The inbound marketing was something hard to push on with the limitation of the budget he forced but it finally paid off. Now he gets the picture of the long-term tactics such as content”

3. Considering technology with the market environment

In digital we are growing massively. Machine learning, digital clouds, automation, and programmatic are taking us to a great level of targeting and monitoring. Yet, the online market environment is getting more and more competitive. From SEO, social media to search bidding and Ad placement we are struggling with more and more challenging space for converting the value conversions. Or in business: “The ROI”.

In the old golden days of marketing, the size of the company and market share used to play a big role while now small startups with gorilla marketing joined the game. The competition is getting wider and highly competitive and doesn’t rely only on your budget size or the USPs of your product. One smart social media strategy designed by a small startup can go viral and beat the big firm massive paid campaigns.

4. What about the consumer?

Along with the big flood of online content, communication, and technology, the consumer habits and behavior are evolving to be more complicated. With all the current competition going on the consumer keep developing different habits online. The data analysts in marketing teams are solely focused on finding the patterns and we all know by now that it is getting how challenging it is.

With the use of advanced analytic tools, CRM, marketing clouds, attribution models, social listening and campaign management platforms, we can learn have advanced knowledge and deeper insights of the consumer, but we also eventually learn how it is important to develop more of strategic funnel journey.

5. Setting the KPIs

Getting to the most important part where we need to define the KPIs for the digital marketing department. The majority of KPIs should be optimized to serve the business strategy. There are several factors you should consider when setting up the KPIs metrics

  1. The department functions inside the organization: For companies with branding objectives they use upper funnel metrics while companies who are customer focused they use social listening and social proof metrics.
  2. The direction of business: KPIs should be always clear for the digital team and doesn’t have a conflict or overlap with other internal departments or process.
  3. The reliability and stability: Chasing everything would lead to nothing. If the KPI focus is stable and not swinging this would help the team to be more strategic and focused.

6. Searching for the ROI

Businesses usually have a different formula to calculate ROI which I believe it is the trickiest task. While it is important for a manager to secure their results and to manage the budget, marketers are always struggling to prove their efficiency.

Over the years, I started to develop the idea that ROI is not one straightforward term. It is can be divided into three types:

A) The initial ROI: It is the rate you need to target so the digital marketing campaign starts to be profitable.
b) The maintained ROI: The rate the where you should plan to protect and stabilize
c) The future ROI: The strategic ROI where the digital marketing strategy should build up gradually.

Yes, we might have different types of ROI according to our strategy but we all know that calculating ROI is a very tricky thing when it comes to the digital world.

  1. You need attribution model to be able to understand the different impact of channels
  2. Each business will require a different approach to cross channels/cross-device journey
  3. The funnel is always different. You might have a shorter funnel in e-commerce and long funnel in business services
  4. ROI channels in B2B is different from B2C channels

I will leave you with the below statistics to have some more insights.

So what?

Conclusion: Let’s finalize some final points:

  • Defining the digital marketing function inside the organization is the first thing that should be done right and clear.
  • Digital department capabilities should be measured with a strategic metrics
  • Marketing technology is a part of the whole environment.
  • The consumer journey is a rollercoaster with common patterns to define.
  • KPIs is not few metrics to measure. It is how you define your digital marketing functions and outcomes.
  • There is no one road or straightforward formula to calculate your digital marketing ROI

That was my thoughts. If you have any points to discuss, please leave your comment or contact me.

What Do You Need to Know About Arabic SEO Conversion

What are the opportunities for increasing conversion by enhancing your Arabic SEO strategy?

That’s the most problematic questions now on the web. Everyone in the digital marketing field could have a different answer for this and even very unique predictions. I wouldn’t agree or disagree with people who consider the golden times of SEO will come to an end “very soon”. The debates would go on for awhile with every new strict update comes from Google. Yet, this buzz is mainly considering the English search results.

What about the Arabic SEO in specific?

I strongly believe that the Arabic SEO will live for a long time and I have my reasons for that. I can think of a lot of solid factors that will let you believe me, but I will in this post cut it short for you, right to the heart of the matter.

In the middle east online markets, Arabic SEO is still one of biggest survivor and certainly a winner. Yes, and it is even more effective than other digital marketing activities such as social media. I know that you might be following the trending fashions and putting several efforts on social media activities like the rest of competitors and might find SEO is an old fashion technic, but let me ask you this: How is your conversion rate doing? How much-converted clients do you get from Arabic social media?

We are not comparing Arabic social media marketing vs SEO here, but we are starting with the right question to get things sorted out.

The Arabic SEO conversion rate

The conversion rate is the main objective of all digital marketing activities. Increasing the conversion rate and creating opportunities are the real targets for all what you are doing online. Over the years most of the companies in Dubai, KSA, Egypt and other middle east markets would come to me asking for social media marketing and they insist on that considering it as the new fashion. They are stuffed with romantic ideas and successful social media cases they heard of.  I always try hard to explain to them that every company, field, and market is a special case when you come to online marketing and I always put the conversion as the top priority of doing things right. If you want the Facebook page that’s fine for branding but might not work for bringing new clients especially when you are a B2B company. Let’s give an example:

If you work in field like export/import or constructions, do you think that you will be able to get potential clients via social media channels? Well, let me suggest email marketing instead or to be more effective let’s focus on “Search”.. Yes, the SEO!

What do you think if we focus on your main keywords and services you offer? think of how much opportunities you can get from having a good rank on the results page? That’s what we are talking about!

Now, what about other fields that are focusing on B2C? Yes, social media marketing is really effective but yet if you consider an optimized website for search engines this will help you among your competitors especially if we are talking about Arabic users.

The Arabic Internet market is much larger than what most of the people expect; it is experiencing rapid growth over the last few years. Recent research indicates that there are currently 82 million Arabic-speaking Internet users. Research has progressively revealed that Arabic Internet users are using Arabic keyterms to find specific and accurate results when it comes to local services. The Arabic search queries are heavily used for fields like governmental services, financial services, law firm, mobile phones and real estate classified ads.

Why is Arabic SEO highly profitable?

To cut it short, let me lead you to the secret that everyone involved into SEO knows: “The competition is not high”. This definitely creates great opportunities for anyone who wants to get on top of the rank and increase his online visibility or catch some good fishes. Let me list for you some facts about this market and why you have a highly profitable chance with this market:

  • Most of the companies in the Arab region have launched their businesses via English-only websites with the assumption that Arabic-speaking customers can simply search and find services using English keywords.
  • The majority of Arabic websites still not optimized for search engines which is a good chance for any website with decent SEO to gain traffic and leads.
  • The quality of Arabic translated content is still poor and this certainly harm their chances with local markets and cultures. For instances, hospitality firms sometimes translate “hospitality” as “ضيافة” which is an accurate translation but not effective for search. This translated word can be related to other things in the Arabic culture and wouldn’t serve the services well.
  • Majority of results are generated from forums and personal blogs. Those are mainly articles or discussions and not service providers.
  • Most of the companies are investing in search engine ads (PPC) instead of organic SEO which requires a lot of money and the results can last for short time. I have been watching that for years and the mentality of the marketing teams is always about “spending the budget on fast and quick results”. Unfortunately, it was difficult to convince them something else.

The playground is yours when you really focus on building Arabic quality content and optimize it effectively for the Arabic users. Finally, Arabic SEO is very effective components of digital marketing strategies and you should always consider investing money and efforts in getting up in Google results.