SilverDisc Guide For Marketing Managers: Building Your Paid Marketing Skillset

As we established in the first blog post in this series, looking after the marketing for your business means you have a lot to do and it often requires a varied skillset.

For the second instalment in this series, we’re talking about how you can build up your paid marketing skillset. We’ll provide resources for increasing your knowledge and recommend some specific areas to focus on. We have so much information on the SilverDisc blog, but there are also many useful external resources worth sharing with you, too.

Paid Marketing

We have written articles on a range of topics concerned with paid marketing, to help you to:

Copywriting

Whether you are writing copy for a PPC search ad or a paid social ad, you need to be able to write effective, succinct and eye-catching ad copy. Copy is written material aimed at promoting and prompting action.

Regardless of what digital marketing channel you are utilising, copywriting is a must-have digital marketing skill. Emails, landing pages, ppc ads, social media posts and ads, chat bots, product descriptions all require copy.

Copywriting for ads is a different skill from other writing because you need to be able to capture a potential customer’s attention and persuade them towards action, with a limited number of characters.

Google provides some best practices for writing successful text ads and common mistakes to avoid. Google help pages are always handy to turn to as any restrictions or actions that Google would disprove will always be considered. There are resources available for whatever areas you want to brush up your skills in whether it is Google Ads Editor, Google Shopping or any other Google marketing platforms.

Excel Skills

Given the importance of data analytics with any paid advertising, being proficient in Excel is highly important.

Marketers need to quickly manipulate data for different means and in different ways to best use the numbers and text in front of us. Having strong Excel skills is essential to deal with large sets of data, whether this is involving keyword planning, ad copy writing, campaign building or data reporting.

The Hubspot marketing blog is a great resource for helping to improve any skills that will build your paid marketing abilities. Their Excel tips, tricks and shortcuts blog post is particularly helpful to get your head around functions to avoid tedious manual work when sorting data.

Analysis

As a marketing manager, you will know that most businesses have large amounts of data to track, and great digital marketers need to understand how to gather and use this to their advantage.

To do PPC advertising well, you need to be able to effectively create, optimize and report on campaigns using both Google Ads and Google Analytics in conjunction with each other. This type of data analysis is a highly important skill that takes both perseverance and an eye for detail to find actionable insights and ways to improve campaign performance. Monitoring and reporting via such tools is pretty straightforward, but the tricky part is how to gather and use that information to help you learn more about consumer behaviour and apply it to new solutions that boost traffic and conversions.

Most companies will always be looking for people who not only know how to “read” this data, but know exactly which data to use towards improving business strategy in the future.

One tool that is great for helping you to be able to report on results on a weekly or monthly basis is Reporting Ninja. Reporting Ninja automatically links directly to data from custom Excel sheets as well as sources such as Google Ads accounts Microsoft Advertising, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, social media platforms, and more. This means that any tables or graphs you add to the report will be automatically updated with data pulled in from these sources.

Experimentation

There is a lot more to paid social media marketing and pay per click advertising than just creating an ad. You need to know how to generate user engagement, copywrite, build ads, create visuals and analyse and act upon results. You also need to understand all of the rapid changes that come your way as a digital marketer, and when to utilize different platforms for varying business goals. Therefore, being able and willing to experiment and not fear new strategies is a highly important, and often overlooked, skill that takes time and confidence to build.

In terms of PPC marketing, a brilliant tool to analyse your client’s website or mobile app is Google Tag Manager. Even if you don’t want to get too technical, being able to get information about redirects or duplicate content via your tags can be really helpful when it comes to accurate reporting and making decisions.

When it comes to paid social, a few marketing tools that are worth being proficient in are Hootsuite and each social platform’s built-in analytics. By using such tools, you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and experiment with how best to optimise your accounts and provide insights into when your accounts are or aren’t performing well and what the reason for this could be.

Hootsuite’s blog is also a great place to stay up to date on relevant paid social help and information, such as finding ways to make the most of your ad budget. You can also find out more about information about finding your feet with paid advertising on each social platform in our blog post about all things paid advertising on social platforms.

A Client-Centric Mindset

It is always important to keep the needs of the business and their goals at the centre of your decision making process. As far as soft skills go, great marketing managers should be forward-thinking, client-focused and strategy-centred and this is particularly important when it comes to paid advertising as you want to be doing all you can to provide an impactful return on investment.

In the next blog post in this series, we will help you to improve your SEO skills.