Marketing is about keeping up with the latest trends, delivering your brand values and mission, and keeping in touch with customers. To achieve all of these, it’s important to constantly train your marketing staff to handle difficult situations and adjust to anything new in the industry. During this process, you must consider important things such as your budget, business, and team needs, the skills they should learn, etc.
Depending on your company’s goals and other specifics, you will also have additional factors to consider. So, make sure to dig in first to understand where the gaps are in your marketing department so you can determine what your team should learn.
Three effective ways to train your marketing team
Training your marketing team for various processes and operations has its challenges and drawbacks. The tips and methods below will help simplify the training process and achieve successful results.
1. Provide employees with external courses
Some companies prefer hiring in-house specialists and training them. While this may be the best solution, it can sometimes be more expensive and take more time. Besides, if you choose this option, you will have to bring in an expert to share their experience, skill set, and other professional advice. On the other hand, other companies prefer using the option of external courses and training. Whether you need Shopify development or WordPress integration for marketing purposes, your team can learn pretty much anything.
When you see a training event held by a marketing expert, you can quickly sign up your team and ensure they learn from experienced people more cost-effectively. Moreover, this is an excellent opportunity for your marketing team to network and meet industry leaders. During this process, you should follow the latest industry trends and see what’s happening. Later, the employees who took these courses can train the new ones and share their knowledge.
2. Make the training engaging
Your training program may be the most fulfilled or the most informational one. However, it won’t keep your team around for long if it’s all about reading and taking notes. Especially for marketing specialists, it’s important to stay creative, generate new ideas, and think of innovative ways to solve different problems. Hire a QA analyst to see whether your strategy and approach is working or not.
This is why you need to ensure your training program is interactive and can engage your staff. For example, the upskilling strategy you’ve built should include exciting games similar to situations your marketing team may face. Some companies have tried and succeeded in gamification processes that can also help learn and improve skills simultaneously.
3. Use micro-learning techniques
Seeing the bigger picture of the training may scare away some staff members and make them think the course is complex. On the other hand, if you provide the syllabus in bite-sizes, your team members will see their everyday tasks, learning schedule, and material and can participate more enthusiastically. In the meantime, you can also use a Facebook chatbot to answer their questions, if needed. If you provide real estate services, consider getting a real estate chatbot as well. Also, sharing information in small chunks can help simplify the learning process and make the course more digestible.
Moreover, micro-learning also makes it easier to manage the whole training process, so it takes some management tasks off your shoulders.
Conclusion
If you plan to upskill your marketing team, there are a lot of strategies and approaches you can take. The options are endless, from keeping it in-house to hiring an external expert and signing up your team for online courses. You can also combine all the strategies and any other ones you have in mind to make the process as smooth as possible.
