20 habits of digital marketing leaders
The success of many strategies is based on developing good digital marketing habits, which is something usual for the main leaders of the sector. They are the people who devise and develop strategies in a very short time, who have their own parallel projects, a blog that is complete and fully updated, thousands of followers on social networks, and excellent connections on LinkedIn.
All of this is not the result of just one day’s work. Nor is it the result of chance. They are great leaders because they follow some digital marketing routines and habits that pave the way to success.
In fact, you do not have to think that you need great changes in order to achieve the results you are looking for. Many times, the most powerful way to re-start and completely change your digital marketing habits is to make small changes every day.
Digital marketing habits that you should start adopting
1.- Constantly ask yourself what you can contribute to your business
One of the main digital marketing habits that you should copy from the sector’s leaders is to ask yourself every day what you can do to achieve the previously established objectives of each marketing strategy. You must be especially careful to take into account the metrics set for each objective, as any action you carry out must be consistent with the strategy.
Thus, one of the habits digital marketing is to always consider actions or projects that can offer benefits to any area of your business.
As an exercise for this, you could ask yourself the following questions:
- “How can you make certain action to add value to your business?”
- “What can you do to help a specific area of your business move forward?”
2.- Understand what each channel is for
For example, social networks are a key place for users to express their opinions about your business, products and services. And one of your tasks is to know how to take what is important to make a good digital listening analysis.
This has to be done not only in social networks, but also in email marketing , your users’ activities on your websites, etc. In this way, you will be able to better understand your current and potential customers. And only in this way, you will be able to apply that knowledge to improve the user experience, identify key trends or understand why users act in certain ways.
This is one of the most important digital marketing habits. Digital marketing leaders perform many digital analyzes in order to improve their relationships with their clients and to work more effectively on personalization.
3.- Live surrounded by data, one of the most important digital marketing habits
You can use digital analytics, lead scoring techniques, and data to improve your ecommerce site, social media, search engines positioning… In other words, any digital marketing leader obtains the most out of all this information to direct their strategies and make them work efficiently.
For this reason, it is important that you, being responsible for the intelligent digital marketing, know how to access, manage and use all this information to your advantage.
Econsultancy notes that more than 70% of purchase decisions include fingerprints, which means that the responsibility supporting this information goes far beyond what we know.
Also, an IBM study points out that 84% of CMOs believe that analytics will have an essential role in reaching their objectives. However, 82% state that their businesses are already prepared to work with large amounts of data. This reinforces the importance of knowing how to work with this information.
4.- Work daily to build a strong team
Any company can use technology and the available tools and apps to its advantage. However, what will help you succeed or not is your human team. Look at your competition. Maybe everyone is using the same programs, but what makes the difference is the work team.
One of the digital marketing habits that will help you boost your business is this aspect precisely: knowing and working on strategies to create a powerful team and attract talent. As an intelligent marketing manager, you must get involved to hire the best people.
5.- Train to make your team do their best
Once you have managed to create a talented team, you need to know how to work with all of them. A good executive and team leader knows that employees need autonomy to work however they consider most productive.
For this, one of the most essential digital marketing habits is effective communication between all team members. Regardless of the situation.
And if you really wish to maximize your team’s productivity, it is advisable to implement an agile marketing strategy.
6.- Show what you know on your blog
If you do not have a blog, you need to hurry up and create one. You need to work on your company’s online reputation and for this, there is nothing like demonstrating what you know and your experience. The keys to write effective blog posts are the following
- Choose the subject with care. You should not choose randomly the subject of your post. Quite the opposite. Not only do you have to write about something that you are an expert on, but you must also make sure that your audience will read it. It is important to make sure they are interested on it. To do this, you can rely on tools such as Google Trends, or the Google or Buzzsumo word planner to identify the topics your users are interested in.
- Focus on your target audience. Even if you need the post you are writing to position in a good place in the main search engines, it is even more important that the audience reads your content. Therefore, think about subjects that solve your audience’s doubts and use an attractive language for your posts.
7.- Work to control your fear
Digital marketing leaders have come this far after falls, errors and, probably, several failures. You have to understand that you might have to take risks on many occasions in order to begin, or you might have to make decisions that you are unsure of. However, if you let those fears stop you, you may not make much progress.
8.- Nobody overlooks email marketing
Those subscribers that you achieve through email marketing will be your most loyal followers. This amounts to some high-value potential customers who are very close to you.
Never stop working on email marketing strategies to attract subscribers. Users that provides you with their information is priceless. And remember that email marketing automation is one of the bases for the success in current strategies.
9.- Learn to automate correctly
Automation is key both in email marketing and in any other channel, for example, in social networks. When you manage large volumes of work, you need to dedicate a lot of time to them. One of the most useful digital marketing habits is learning how to automate recurring actions.
In this way, for example, if you create appropriate editorial calendars for your blog or content plans for social networks and your email marketing campaigns, you will save time and direct your efforts to other more important tasks.
10.- Constant state: open minded
It does not matter how good an entrepreneur you are. You will never have enough knowledge about everything. There are always other people who specialized in other areas that can share their knowledge with you and teach you new things.
Therefore, you should listen others as part of your personal digital marketing habits. If you listen more, and you are more interested in other topics, you will be more likely to achieve success.
11.- Continuous training is one of the best digital marketing habits
Regardless of whether you are a digital marketing professional or somebody who has just started in this world, you will need to be up to date with everything that happens around you.
And for that, there is nothing like keeping up-to-date with all the tools and apps that can help you get by in today’s digital environment, while reaching your goals more simply and effectively.
12.- Train to be fast
Speed is a real factor in business, especially in digital marketing. You need to be capable of an immediate reaction, rapid response and adoption of any circumstance that may arise. This is one of the digital marketing habits adopted by professionals and industry leaders.
In fact, the best marketing leaders and executives devote at least 5 hours a day to professional development. This includes reading, attending conferences, working with consultants, and attending on online courses.
13.- Appreciate criticism as a way of life
You have probably gone through situations in which you have not made the best decision. This might have created friction in your business. In these cases, you should not close yourself to criticism. Quite the opposite. There is nothing better for a digital marketing strategy than learning what can be changed and what should be improved. This is the reason for the comparative A/B tests.
14.- Be social and network
This is one of the digital marketing habits of digital marketing leaders you might not have considered, but it is very common and effective. Simply by engaging in a conversation or any kind of relationship, either online or offline, with different professionals, will improve your visibility without a doubt.
Above all, you can focus this aspect on your content marketing strategy. If you are looking for techniques to carry out natural linkbuilding, there is nothing like appealing to your relationships with other bloggers to make guest posting, for example. And you will only be able to achieve this if you previously establish certain relationships with them.
15.- Do you know how to create good first impressions?
This is one of the most important digital marketing habits that goes together with the previous point. When you meet new people, whether it is as a business owner or as a marketing manager, you will need to create a good first impression.
Train yourself to do this and work to be able to overcome any unforeseen situation. Remember that being positive is an important factor.
16.- Follow the 40/20/30/10 rule
The rule is simple:
- 40% analysis.
- 20% planning
- 30% execution.
- 10% reports.
Organization is the key to any digital marketing habits. This scheme is totally valid for any strategy.
You should invest 40% of your time in analyzing your target audience in order to go deeper into their thought, tastes and movements, as well as in their own digital behavior. Understanding of your target audience is the step on which you should work the most, as the success of your strategies depends, to a great extent, on a good analysis. Once you have all the details of your ideal customers, it will be easier to create your buyer persona.
The planning stage consists on using the analysis data to establish SMART goals, create the appropriate content, and integrate different tools.
Executing a campaign is much easier if the analysis and planning are carried our systematically. And the last thing is the information from the data. Graphs and visual reports will help you understand your movements and the results of each action.
17.- Never give up your passion
Successful entrepreneurs are an example that passion is an important factor in achieving the proposed goals. And really, this habit can be applied to any area in your life. Without passion, it will be difficult to endure the hard work that the best online marketing strategies need.
18.- Squeeze your creativity
Innovation is another important part of managing any successful business. This means that successful entrepreneurs must be creative, and it is important that they use that creativity to solve problems whenever it is possible.
19.- Reward your team for their achievements
To motivate your team, there is nothing like recognizing their achievements. True leaders understand that, in some way, it is important to celebrate small victories. As success is the result of teamwork, and you have to show it with appropriate recognitions.
20.- First of all, keep your goals in mind
Becoming distracted is very easy. To begin to plan a strategy only to end up with totally unexpected actions is even more common. Therefore, you need to work on your ability to stay focused and not to deviate from your initial goals.
These are just some of the digital marketing habits you can adopt to grow as a professional. Do not forget that training and keeping yourself up to date are also important. For that reason, you should also follow the best blogs on digital marketing to learn about trends, strategies and success stories that will open your mind.
Among them, there is obviously this blog by Antevenio in which we daily try to understand the keys to work in a simpler and professional way within the digital marketing environment.
