By David Wharram, CEO of Coast Digital
For businesses to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic stronger than ever, companies need to ensure that their workforce is fully equipped with the necessary skills to manage the changing landscape. A recent survey by McKinsey highlights that 87% of executives are experiencing a skills gap in their workforce or are expecting one within the next few years. As a result, it has now become even more essential to learn new digital skills and develop existing expertise.
With redundancies on the rise, jobs are becoming more diverse and employees are required to take on new aspects within their roles to remain competitive and accommodate the changing workloads. Due to this, businesses can benefit from offering their employees training and workshops to become more confident in taking on these new responsibilities.
During such challenging times, businesses should be looking at what they can be doing to upskill or reskill their team and considering the opportunities that can be created as a result. This could involve devising and developing new operational methods, or looking to increase the performance of pre-existing tactics.
Collaboration is key
With many people having to take on new roles and responsibilities, collaboration will be the key to success. Sharing ideas and using collaborative tools is more important than ever, as typically fewer people are working due to redundancies. Collaborative learning spaces enable seamless upskilling and reskilling, allowing employees to educate each other. With the majority of people working from home, this can be challenging; however, utilising innovative online tools can be a highly effective and successful course of action.
What’s more, pre-existing skills can be enhanced when working with others and can typically reignite ideas and abilities that might previously have been forgotten.
Embracing marketing tactics
Equipping your team with the necessary tools and skills required to manage digital marketing techniques such as social media, SEO and email marketing, can help to increase brand awareness and drive digital performance. Additionally, you could boost your website traffic and ultimately gain a competitive advantage, which in today’s world is vital.
Social media
Social media is a great tool to reach your target audience, providing a platform on which people can interact and share content. Although organic social media tactics are highly effective in their own right, paid social media can guarantee wider visibility. Providing your workforce with the skills to carry out a paid social campaign can help generate substantial ROI and boost leads.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been a critical requirement for businesses for some time now. However, recent events have highlighted even more of a need for companies to rank highly in Google in order to outperform competitors and succeed in even the most challenging times.
Ensuring that your team is equipped with the skills to devise and carry out an effective SEO strategy can provide businesses with further opportunities. SEO audit tools and keyword research tools are two valuable methods worth learning. These techniques help you discover what your potential customers are searching for, as well as what keywords your competitors are using. As a result, you can establish opportunities for improvement and get your brand in front of your target audience.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a highly worthwhile skill to be equipped with, and now is the time to take advantage of improving your company’s email comms. Ensuring that you are sending out emails that provide value, exciting content and smart headlines is crucial, otherwise, you risk losing customers. To guarantee a successful email outreach programme, effective planning is needed to consider the audience and the engaging content that will be used. Equipping your team with the correct training and skills to carry out an effective email marketing campaign will help drive results and keep your emails out of the junk folder!
