Multimedia Training for Content Marketing Teams
Multimedia training for content marketing teams is essential for keeping your team up-to-date to stay competitive in today’s marketing environment. Today’s environment is such that format diversification and a decentralized content strategy should be at the heart of your efforts to stay relevant, engage your audience, and broaden your reach. These items are essential to educate, engage, and convert leads to ultimately grow your business or organization. Understanding how consumers use content is critical to helping your team hone the skills needed to succeed in competitive and seemingly saturated online markets.
According to a recent study published by HubSpot, marketers and consumers tend to disagree about content. In today’s environment, people are most apt to thoroughly consume videos, social media posts, and news articles. They are also more likely to skim blog posts and long-form business content; while these types of pieces are still important in the right place, at the right time, it is important to recognize the over-arching trends taking place.
The study also indicates that marketers overwhelmingly said that their company’s top marketing challenge is generating traffic and leads. How do you improve traffic stats and get more leads? You start by creating great content, then optimize and amplify that content, and finally, you should continually refine it so that you can better reach your existing customers and prospects.
Create Great Content – Optimize – Amplify – Continually Refine
Creating great content can be a challenge, but it is the foundation of providing information and resources that your readers will want to come back for time and time again. Establishing a distinct voice with consistency across your various distribution channels is key. And creating great graphics to visually align with your brand is equally important. Make sure to invest in storytelling courses, writing seminars, and multimedia classes so that your team members can refine their skills. Understanding platforms like WordPress, graphic design tools such as Adobe (or Canva for beginners), and use of video can also help ensure your team has the skills needed to succeed.
Another one of the most important skills to master is the ability to incorporate the right keywords throughout your writing to rank highly in search engines. Doing the right research, writing stellar content, and having the ability to conduct outreach are necessary to bring everything together to get results.
Finally, don’t forget about data mining and measurement. Once you’ve published your content, make sure you understand where and how your best pieces are resonating. Success can be measured via website traffic, brand lift, quality of sales leads, and higher conversion rates, among others. Take the time to establish goals so that you can continuously track your progress.
Training Resources & Ideas
In this day and age, it is important for great marketers to always be in learning mode. There are many ways to keep up with the constantly evolving world of digital marketing:
- Join a marketing community like growth.org or join a LinkedIn group like the Social Media Marketing LinkedIn Group
- Develop an internal resources training library and update it regularly
- Attend webinars like those produced by HubSpot
- Develop a list of blogs and dedicate paid time to reading and learning
- Develop a recommended reading list with relevant books like Content Strategy at Work
- Create internal processes and guidelines that outline your approach to content marketing
- Develop templates and outline best practices for moving forward with a content marketing project for clients
- Provide coaching, on-the-job training, in-house training, courses (classroom & online), books, and attendance at conferences
- Cultivate an atmosphere of learn-by-doing, forgiveness-not-permission
- Invest in training courses:
- General Assembly
- Udemy
- lynda.com
- Codecademy (focused on coding)
- HubSpot Academy (inbound marketing)
- distilled U (heavily focused on SEO)
- Creative Mornings
It is so important to keep your team up-to-date on the many facets of multimedia in today’s fast-paced marketplace. Maintain a competitive edge by investing in your employees through educational endeavors and opportunities for growth.
