The significance of marketing usually goes without saying, but let’s remind ourselves why exactly you are so interested in training your team. First of all, marketing is there to raise awareness about your products and services. You simply can’t receive any proper revenue unless your brand is known to customers. Not all consumers shop out of curiosity, but rather because they have heard of the brand. If they like it, they will keep coming back.
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, the smaller the business, the more money it should invest in marketing. Therefore, marketing is your driving force, and now we shall see how you can train your in-house marketing team to gain an advantage over the competition.
Determine their current level
In order to be able to provide them with the most suitable training, you first have to acknowledge their real level of expertise, no matter how low it may turn out to be. Recognizing weak spots is the first step towards improvements. Identify the skills gaps and wrong tactics. See which techniques aren’t generating any income, and which ones are bringing you leads and sales.
Encourage knowledge sharing
Once you recognize which workers possess greater knowledge and expertise than the others, try to entice sharing those. Your employees should feel happy and confident enough to help their colleagues. No one is perfect, and even those who excel at marketing can find out something new and useful from those who have yet to prove themselves as experts.
Sharing can be done during lunch-breaks, or you can organize mentorships, too.
Going to conferences
In order to gain the necessary information on the latest marketing tricks and strategies, it’s advisable to visit conferences. Nevertheless, some of them can be quite pricey, not to mention you can’t always be sure how many useful, practical things you are going to learn. For this reason, try buying a recording of the conference – it’s much cheaper.
Reading blogs
There is so much useful information available online nowadays that can prove invaluable to your business. Find several excellent marketing blogs and use them as a means of educating your team. You can assign several people to follow certain blogs, and then share the most interesting bits to their colleagues.
Asking questions is OK
As it is the case with any learning process, a student (an employee) is bound to get confused at some point. However, that is no reason to be shy and refrain from asking for clarification. If your team is to make any progress, egos and shyness have to be set aside. Hence, encourage curiosity and questions.
Create processes
If you have already identified what your team is doing well, do not replace the technique, but rather make it a standard process. This will save time greatly, thus providing excellent results.
Make a sound plan
Having an experienced, knowledgeable team is a great asset to every company. They create great plans and strategies and know how to execute and apply them. However, in case your team is still struggling with making a decent plan, it would be best to order a customized marketing plan from experienced professionals such as a marketing agency. This is not to say they should always create plans for you, but if your marketing team is still very young and inexperienced, they will benefit greatly by seeing what a proper marketing plan is and learn best by doing.
To summarize, marketing is an amazing and intriguing field which is constantly changing. Training your in-house team is challenging, but in time all that hard work is bound to pay off. Soon enough, you’ll be feeling the benefits of a good marketing system – an increase in your sales and revenues.
