During my time at Synetiq I have acquired knowledge in a large number of useful marketing tools. A marketing intern or junior marketing manager position in a startup enviroment usually implies wearing multiple hats. For the sake of this post I’ve boiled down the experiences of my first months to the 4, most essential marketing (related) tools that an entry-level, wannabe marketing manager should know, in order to acquire the skills and expertise they will need to move forward in their career. Read my tips and include them in your self-development plan:
A newbie marketing manager
- Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is sometimes considered an extra skill for marketers, but in a startup environment mastering it has proven to be extremely useful. Having a mentor who appreciates design more than anything, I’ve quickly learned that having the ability to customise visuals to the façade of the company or edit and enhance pictures for social media is a skill worthy of high praise. One can really tell the difference between pictures that have been carefully considered and enhanced in Photoshop and a picture that was posted without any attention to details. It also comes in handy when you have to edit portraits for the ‘Meet the team’ page on the website or create a cool GIF for promoting a presentation at a conference.
- WordPress
Unless you have a good grounding in programming at the start of your marketing career – WordPress will be one of your best friends. Creating a maintaining a well-functioning, optimised website is one of the most important cornerstones of a thriving start-up. To be able to optimise it, you’ll need to know how to seize the opportunities it offers. In order to fully appreciate this it is important to be well-read or well-taught on the subject. As a complete newbie I’ve learned through practice. Creating and editing new blog posts is a great way to the pick up the basics. When I felt more confident, we’ve decided on a large scale website revamp to boost engagement and micro-conversions on our website and blog. This is one of the key ways to turn cold leads into clients; to engage them with your design & content. The next step is to measure and optimise buttons, the content, the visuals and everything else for max performance.
- Fb AdManager
Social media advertising has grown into a highly popular marketing channel. Despite recent critics of the advertising algorithms, Facebook is still one of the most effective advertising platforms. Compared to Google AdWords, managing Facebook ads is a significantly easier process; setting up a campaign without significant knowledge about the tool takes about 10-15 minutes and it lets your reach your perfect audience. It is highly advisable to create custom audiences to target with different campaigns. My first try was to set up a campaign with client testimonial videos from 5 different sectors and target a different group of customers with each video. I’ve been using Fb AdManager ever since to deliver highly customised content to each of our potential leads and even to A/B test our ads, content and products.
- Google Analytics
Measure, measure, measure and react – one of the key things I’ve learned during my career as a junior marketing manager. Google Analytics is a perfect way to follow your digital advertising footprint. While at first I thought that the many visuals and dashboards are overwhelming, I’ve found the Google Analytics Academy, which I’m digging into gradually to find the most useful metrics and create monthly custom reports to track Synetiq’s marketing performace. The key Google Analytics metrics that I’ve benefited the most from sofar are the popularity of different pages – useful when deciding which pages to get rid of and which ones to keep, the average view time and bounce-rate from each page and blog post.
While these 6 months taught me that these are the most essential tools that a marketing manager should know how to use, there is no doubt that there are many other useful sites, apps, software and extensions that significantly simplify and support the work of marketers. The latest one I’ve added the to my things to try is the social listening technique.
