Effective Communication Skills For Digital Marketers

Effective Communication Skills For Digital Marketers

 

 

Everything begins with understanding the broader picture. Marketing goals are directly related to the business and sales goals help you understand the origin and impact of these goals on an entire organizational level. Understanding this can reduce friction between teams by relating to the goals at hand.

 

By engaging in conversations with stakeholders from other teams you can learn about processes, points of contact, priorities, history, a necessity for success and KPIs. This can help marketers know how to collaborate with other teams and understand the steps they will need to take in order to work smoothly together.

 

A classic example can be working with a localization team. If you produce content for multiple languages, localizing is your top priority as a digital marketer and content developer. But to efficiently translate and localize your content, you need to know all about the process, what the pain points are, what the localization team need to do to work as fast as possible, and how they can improve current processes for the long term. If you make a request and 50% of the information is lacking, the team will not take you seriously and also it will delay your request for action and thus delay your own planning.

 

Only by actively listening to the other team’s challenges and successes can you know how to approach them. Some steps to become a better listener and get the most out of your meetings:

• Keep eye contact
• Be relaxed but attentive, avoid bringing around distractions such as a screen, pen or phone.
• Keep an open mind even for positions you disagree on, listen to the ‘why’ and try to understand.
• Create a mental picture of what the speaker is saying.
• Avoid interrupting or bringing on your solution straight away. Wait to be asked and stay humble to keep the other person relaxed and confident.
• Wait for the speaker to pause to ask questions.
• Only ask questions that will clarify your understanding.
• Be empathic.
• Provide feedback.

 

These do sound simple but can make a difference in the perception of the speaker. Setting up meetings with people from other teams can be a good way to start learning more and getting all this valuable information you need to start successfully working with them. With digital technology, you don’t even need to be in the same office, you can set up a video conference, phone call, or just chat on your company’s internal tools.

 

Knowing the relationship between you, your team and the decisions you make with the other departments will bring insight to the impact they have on your work. You should define the challenges and obstacles brought by other teams’ priorities and how you can adapt to them.

Here are some points to keep in mind:

• How does your work impact the other’s team priorities and goals, and vice versa?
• What points of friction can you analyze in working with their process?
• How is your team position in the business, what reputation does it have?
• What language and communication style should you adopt with them, based on your previous contact?
• What has been successful in the past and is there any new variable you need to take into account?
• Is your point of contact in each team a decision-maker?
• How can you create awareness about your team to the business and other teams?

At this stage, you should understand where your team and project rank in the company and create a full picture of the marketing team’s interaction with other teams and how the processes drive them. At the end of the day, you also want to analyze the channels that exist for your teams to communicate and how visible your team is and how easily it is to approach you.

 

In order to improve your chance of success in applying the previous two skills, it is important to focus on your socializing skills. If you want to make a good impression and make people comfortable in your presence, it is important to cultivate strong social skills if they don’t come as naturally as you wish. Multiple techniques and tips exist, but here is a small list of points where you can start:

 

#1 Verbal Communication

Mind what you say because people will remember it and the impression it gave them. It is important to stay in the limits of what is acceptable to discuss while going on a more personal path. Small talk is a start but does tend to die pretty quickly. Try starting on a subject that will make them enthusiastic, for example: talking about their own projects, passions and shared experiences.

 

#2 Non-verbal Communication

 This is as important as verbal communication. Your body language can tell a different story if you are uncomfortable, in a rush, anxious or embarrassed. Looking at recordings of you talking is helpful in pointing out little gestures or movements that distract your audience.

 

Playing with your hair, moving your head around, crossing your arms, and moving from one foot to the other can distract your audience from what you are saying and send mixed signals. Stay natural but try to eliminate any conflicting, non-verbal communication.

 

 

#3 Self Confidence

People will believe in you if you believe in yourself. It might be simple to say but it is a recurrent theme in business success. If people feel that they can trust you they will be more likely to share, involve and reach out to you, but also they will feel more comfortable around you.

 

#4 Positive Attitude

Everyone wants to be happy and grow in a positive environment. Think about how you trust people who are negative or talk badly about other people. They are not the people you might want to get close to or work on a project with. Staying positive and enthusiastic can uplift other people and raise their trust level in you and your projects.

 

#5 Smile And Stand Straight

 Adopting a good posture and smiling does have a positive effect on your audience as it makes you appear more relaxed, comfortable and confident. If you don’t feel any of these, your non-verbal positivity will change the perception and help you feel confident.

These few tips can help with developing your social network and create deeper connections with members of other teams. Ultimately these tips can help you create stronger bonds and trust with colleagues and even make new friends. We tend to stay within our own department but trying to mix and get known can be a very rich experience personally and professionally.

 

 

Similar to a digital marketing strategy, you have to think about your internal audience, i.e. who they are, what their problem is and how they want to solve it. Then market your team and project accordingly.

Working strategically across a team requires the use of critical thinking in order to make the right decisions and facilitate collaboration, helping bring success to an organization. Critical thinking pushes marketers to set up processes for decision making. Research conducted by Pearson takes all this one step further by showing that people who score well on critical thinking assessments are also rated by their supervisors as having a good overall job performance, job knowledge and the potential to move up within the organization.

Critical thinking makes marketers more adaptable and able to solve problems quickly. Some of the skills involved in critical thinking are:

 

• Problem-solving: Taking a mass of data and combining seemingly unrelated information to make creative, workable solutions.
• Analysis: Breaking arguments down into bite-sized chunks and establishing how well the pieces of an argument fit together.
• Creative thinking: Assessing key problems, hazards and potential answers, then creating coherent new solutions.
• Interpretation: Decoding the meaning and significance of evidence and experiences.
• Evaluation: Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of an argument (including those of others) and dealing with disagreements fairly.
• Reasoning: Spotting gaps in evidence or flaws in logic.

This relates to working with the business organization and the sales department to understand their goals, how to integrate them, and assess success within a digital marketing strategy. Critical thinking requires employees to stop, look at a situation, turn it around, and come up with innovative solutions that can help build smarter relationships across teams by:

• Understanding team bias and goals and removing any clustered information
• Understanding the digital marketing team’s impact on other teams
• Delivering creative ways for working together

This skill is used across the board and is key in creating and selling an idea the right way to the right audience by knowing and evaluating situations.

 

Finally, one part of being able to efficiently work together is to get the buy-in on your idea, process, campaign and choices by other departments or colleagues you report to/depend on. If you need the help of the PR team to develop content for a blog post, but it is not on their roadmap, selling the idea in a way that will talk to their priorities and objectives can help get the cross-departmental project going.

That is where critical thinking will really pay off – helping you help others and create a better consumer experience of the product together as a business organization and not as singular entities. Selling an idea internally is about proving value by answering the questions like “Why should the organization/team/individual invest resources like time and money in this project?” and “What will it bring?’’.

To be able to answer those questions you need to do your homework, know your product and market, have back up data, be concise and precise when presenting. Answer these three key questions: “What problem does this solve?”, “Why do we need it?” and “What is the likely outcome or result if we proceed?”

Focusing on the obstacles will prepare you to appreciate other perspectives that you might not see the value in. A good idea can get rejected on the basis that it wasn’t sold the correct way to internal stakeholders. The skills we developed earlier will help you focus your idea, create a solid reputation and understand your business case when the time comes to get the business or team on something different you want to get started with. This is a non-exhaustive list of other skills sales demonstrate:

• Product knowledge
• Strategic prospecting
• Active listening
• Communication
• Time Management
• Buyer-seller agreement
• Negotiation

 

Case Study..,

Google’s success is based on a good product and a strong diversification strategy. With that said, a company is nothing without a team that can work and solve problems together. Let’s talk about some of the findings and strategies that Google is using to make their teams better. Not only does Google think about increasing their team performances, but they do research and implement their findings in order to enhance their employee’s experience and workflow.

In this case study, the company’s executives worked hard on finding the perfect mix of individuals necessary to form a stellar team. They believed that building good teams meant combining the best people. In 2012, Google ran a project known as Project Aristotle. It took several years and included interviews with hundreds of employees They analyzed data about the people on more than 100 active teams at the company.

What Google did is put their findings and confirm what seems like common sense, but can be easily overlooked in teams – and even more across departments.
Feeling like you can be listened to. Imagine when you are having a conversation with someone and they keep looking at their phone and not paying attention. What is happening to your will and trust to speak freely? You become self-conscious and will be less likely to provide valuable insights or information as you don’t seem to interest the person in front of you. Google describes psychological safety as the most important factor in building a successful team.

This points out the importance of integrating processes in your team and organization that promote open communication but also monitor your colleagues opinion on communication and in general feeling good at work. Regular meetings with Managers and having open conversations across hierarchy and teams can set a good environment for a great collaboration.

To conclude, creating a safe environment and providing channels for communication is key to making sure teams share and understand each other. It also ensures your message is heard by creating a policy of listening and respect. In the link below you can find many more examples of companies who have used communication to improve their workflow output and overall experience for employees and customers.

 

 

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