Christopher Earle: Why Ongoing Digital Marketing Training Creates More Engaged Employees

Engage-Employees

When you hire a new employee, the first few months of their employment is typically a whirlwind of trainings on process, procedure and industry best practices. A strong onboarding strategy is key to team members successfully integrating into your business and gaining an understanding of what is expected of them. Unfortunately, once the initial training is complete, employees are often deprived of quality ONGOING training.

A workplace survey found that employees that feel valued by their employer are 60% more likely to report they are motivated to do their very best. One way to show your employees that you value them is by investing in their ongoing professional development. This can include everything from marketing training related to their expertise, to leadership training for company managers.

While some employees may take the initiative to be in charge of their own ongoing development, many may not realize just how important that training is. Fortunately, as digital marketers we have so many options at our fingertips. Below are just a few of the many available.

6 Marketing Training Opportunities

#1 – Consume Industry Content

Frequency Recommendation: Daily

Reading up on the latest industry news and best practices is a way that many employees can take some ownership of their own education. There is a wealth of knowledge that can be consumed and shared with other team members with little effort.

To give your team that extra push, suggest that they set aside 30 minutes each day in their schedule to consume marketing content. Then, help them find reputable resources that they can bookmark and quickly access to make the most of this time.

Helpful Tip: Suggest employee’s use tools like Spreed to quickly consume digital content.

#2 – Share Helpful News With Your Team

Frequency Recommendation: Multiple times per week

Whenever there is an interesting article or announcement that can potentially affect your business, there is no reason that it shouldn’t be shared with the entire team. At TopRank Marketing, we make a point of sharing emails with the entire team (no matter their position) multiple times per week.

You can also coach employees and leadership to go beyond sharing a link and add commentary to the communication about the potential effect or best practices to help make the information actionable for employees.

Helpful Tip: Setup alerts using services like Buzzsumo or Google Alerts so that you can keep track of the different topics you’d like to share internally.

#3 – Make Time for Webinars & Twitter Chats

Frequency Recommendation: Monthly

Live and pre-recorded webinars can provide a wealth of tactical knowledge, without taking too much time. A standard webinar lasts about an hour and are often offered as a download or a link after the initial session has ended. This means that employees can reference the material at a later date if they couldn’t consume all of the content the first time.

Twitter chats can also provide a lot of information in a short amount of time. They also provide access to many intelligent marketers that your employees can interact with on a more one-to-one basis. Joining the conversation is easy and an average Twitter chat is only about 30 minutes long.

Helpful Tip: Subscribe to receive notifications of upcoming webinars from your favorite brands so that you can alert employee’s well enough in advance to make time to attend.

#4 – Organize Internal Team Trainings

Frequency Recommendation: Bi-weekly

One of the greatest sources for information and training is sitting in your office. Create a calendar of training needs based on manager observation and employee requests to determine what can be accomplished in-house.

TopRank Marketing hosts many internal trainings, some which are voluntary based on interest and position as well as others that apply to the whole team and are presented at all-team meetings. For example, our Digital Marketing Manager Evan Prokop has created and implemented a series of SEO training sessions that offer varying depth of information depending on which one(s) you attend.

These sessions can include everything from how to optimize a blog post to finding ways to uncover client stories at every opportunity.

Helpful Tip: Involve multiple team members in the planning process to increase buy-in and engagement.

#5 – Attend In-Person & Digital Events

Frequency Recommendation: Quarterly

We are fortunate to work in an industry that is filled with quality local, national and worldwide events. While event attendance typically requires a larger investment than some of the other options on this list, they are filled with so many opportunities for individuals, and your company.

In my position I have been fortunate to attend many conferences over the years. Each one offers something a little different in the form of new information, connections and inspiration. Sending employees to in-person events creates an experience for them outside of the office and their day-to-day routine.

Helpful Tip: Encourage employees to put together a training based on what they learned at the event to share with the larger team.

#6 – Invest in Hosting Workshops

Frequency Recommendation: Bi-yearly

If you want to fit a lot of information and motivation into a day or two, workshops are a great option. By bringing in outside experts to speak to your team directly on a particular topic, they’ll see that you are invested in helping them develop.

There should be a good mix of motivational and tactical workshops to help team members work better as a group and within their individual positions. If you’re on the hunt for a thought leadership workshop or more in-depth tactical trainings, contact TopRank Marketing and we can discuss your needs and develop a custom workshop for your team.

Helpful Tip: When considering workshops, search for speakers that can teach and inspire your team. They will thank you for it.

How Can You Tell if Your Employees Are Engaged?

Employee’s that are engaged members of your organization will be easy to spot. They’ll be the people sending you resources for trainings, chomping at the bit to attend events and excitedly sharing the information they learned with the rest of the team.

What training types have you found to be most impactful for your team?

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