📩 3 skills of highly effective marketers

Hey 👋

Welcome to Neighbourhood Post issue #34 - easy to implement digital marketing ideas straight through your metaphorical letterbox.

Hope you’ve had a great week.

Today we’re uncovering 3 skills that make a great digital marketer. How many do you have?

👉 By the way, if you’ve missed previous newsletters you’ll find them here.

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A long time ago I read about the “T-shaped marketer”.

It claimed the best marketers had a broad knowledge of all marketing channels and a deep expertise in one of them.

Hence the T shape.

It’s helped guide my own personal development.

Over the years I’ve noticed some skills that disproportionately give marketers an advantage.

Here are three of them.

#1 Copywriting

Here’s a hill I’ll die on…

Copywriting is the number one skill any digital marketer can learn.

In the first few years of my career I studied it extensively.

I was obsessive.

My favourite activity was printing off copy, going through it with a red pen, and cutting out every single word that didn’t pull its weight.

Here’s the proof from 12 years ago:

(Despite how sad I sound, I did also have friends.)

Digital success relies on words.

Web copy, social media captions, email newsletters. Even reports and strategies.

If you write words that sell, you instantly gain an advantage.

I learnt a lot from this book by Andy Maslin and this website from Harry Dry.

It’s not too late to learn.

#2 - Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

As digital marketers we focus too much on generating traffic and not enough on what traffic does when its generated.

We love click through rates and website sessions but traffic is only half the battle.

The real wins come when you can turn visitors into customers.

The best thing about CRO is you can steal from the biggest brands.

Organisations like Monzo, Oxfam, Apple and others will have whole teams and six-figure budgets just for building the best websites.

Study their landing pages and work out how best to apply it to your context.

Do you know your website conversion rate?

It’s (conversions / web sessions) x 100.

Measure it for a period of time, make some tweaks to your website and try again.

There are some great learnings from Roast My Landing Page’s videos.

#3 - Strategy

I’ve written about strategy a lot, so I’ll keep this brief.

If you understand the difference between a strategy and a plan, you’re in the top 5% of marketers.

A plan is how you achieve the strategy.

A strategy is about leveraging your strengths to exploit an opportunity or solve a problem.

Let me give you an example from our own work.

Last September I created a marketing strategy for Neighbourhood.

It didn’t start with the how (post on LinkedIn, start a newsletter.) it started with the what:

“We do great work, but people don’t know about us. So let’s show our work, invest time into content, convince people we’re worth it and feed the funnel.”

That was extrapolated into a broader document, but the sentence is a strategy in itself.

It identifies a problem/opportunity and directs resource and strengths to exploit it.

It must have worked because we’ve grown 300% since then.

I wrote more about strategies here if you want to read it.

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Do you possess all three skills? If not - there’s always time to learn.

If so, do you want a job? 😂

See you next week.

✌️

Before you go - we’ll never use these newsletters to directly sell you our services, but we’re always here if you need any expertise or support 👍