We’ve seen social networks come and go. And we now find ourselves in a position where, thanks to platforms like Facebook, we have a phenomenal amount of information about our audience.

How our customers shop changes all the time and the pace with which our competitors make marketing moves can be incredibly fast too.

All of that means marketers need to be more adaptable and agile than ever before. And regardless of how much experience or how many qualifications you have, it’s a digital marketer’s job to be continually learning and up skilling.

Here are 4 ways to stay on top of your digital marketing skills without the need for a huge investment.

Attend BrightonSEO

Conferences are an amazing way to keep on top of your skills. And it’s not all about the speakers and the sessions. I often find it just as insightful speaking to other people doing similar jobs every single day and learning about their challenges and how they overcome them.

But conferences can be pricey! That’s not the case with BrightonSEO, which releases thousands of free tickets for its twice yearly event.

Don’t be fooled by the name, either. This isn’t just an SEO conference. Speakers cover paid search, content marketing, conversion etc. And for the first time this September the conference will move from Brighton Dome, where it has been held for many years, to the huge Brighton Centre.

September’s event will see 3,500 marketers gather. You won’t get free tickets for this one now (they went in just 13 minutes). But there are tickets for £100 available here and you can always keep an eye open for the free tickets being made available for the April 2017 event.

Google Primer

Google Primer is a pilot project recently launched by Google that aims to send weekly marketing lessons straight to your mobile phone.

The app is completely free. When you login, you’re presented with a choice of bite size lessons designed for taking while on the move. So if you regularly commute to work by train or you have quiet time while on your lunch break, you can take in an easy to digest marketing lesson.

The lessons typically take the form of small pieces of text information and short interactive activities, making them memorable.

Read Every Single Day

Blog posts, whitepapers, videos, research pieces, experiments, columns and opinion pieces – thousands of them relating to marketing are published every single day.

Digital marketing is a great space to be in from a learning perspective because people share their findings in public forums.

Read regularly, form your own opinions about what you read and bookmark particularly interesting pieces to revisit.

Some of my favourite resources:

• https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/
• https://moz.com/blog
• http://backlinko.com/
• http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/blog/
• http://blog.hubspot.com/

Meet Up with People in Similar Roles

You’re almost certainly not the only person in your area keen to stay up to speed with this fast moving industry. So why not reach out to other people in similar roles at other companies and organise meet ups? It doesn’t have to anything formal. A chat over a quick drink with one or two likeminded professionals every month or two could make all the difference.

Meeting with marketing from other organisations, sharing challenges, sharing tips and talking about the wider industry is one of the best ways to stay on top of change.

Read more:
4 cost effective ways to improve your digital marketing skills

Hiring experienced professionals or an agency can set you back thousands a month and simply doing nothing just widens the gulf between you and your competitors online.

And if you’re running a relatively new business or you’re tight on resource, time can be as hard to find as expansive marketing budgets. But being tight on time and without the budget to bring in a professional doesn’t have to mean standing still and doing nothing.

Here are 4 marketing tasks you can complete in just 5 minutes each day.

Find a New Keyword or Group of Keywords

Truly understanding how people are looking for your products or services online really is critical to understanding how to find them with the right message at the right time.

And it’s not just about finding product or service keywords. Sometimes it’s about finding the questions people ask online about your products or identifying the concerns they share online for which your service is the solution.

Here’s how you can do it in 5 minutes per day:

• Take a look at Google’s Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.co.uk/KeywordPlanner) to identify keywords people are tying into Google related to your products, services or the problems they solve

• Visit http://www.quora.com and look for the questions people ask related to what you sell or the problem you solve

• Visit www.answerthepublic.com and find the questions people ask about your products

Find a new keyword or closely related group of keywords as often as you can. It takes 5 minutes.

Win Those Searchers

If you have a group of search terms, the next step is using it. Ranking in search engines for “washing machines,” is not a 5 minute a day job. But perhaps appearing in search for, “which washing machine is best for a family of 6?” is something you can appear for quickly – less competition, fewer searchers but likely much more straightforward to appear for.

Create a blog post that answers a question or modify an existing piece of content to include those keywords or questions.

Ok, so it might take a little longer than 5 minutes, but not much longer and spread the work out over a few days if need be.

Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing in Search

If you have a competitor whose work you admire or who is established in your field (with bigger budgets!) do a bit of digging into what they’re doing in search (both paid search and organic search). Find out what content is working for them from a social perspective.

• SearchMetrics (http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research) will give you information about the keywords your competitors rank for and the keyword they invest most of their paid marketing budgets into. You get some limited information with a free account but could upgrade to a paid account for more information

• Buzzsumo (http://www.buzzsumo.com) allows you to enter a domain and find out what the most successful content on that domain is, so you can begin to understand what is working for your competitors and what isn’t.

Understanding what you’re competing against from a marketing perspective is important and 5 minutes a day is enough

Find Out What Content Your Audience Engages with and Which Other Brands They Like

We’ve already talked about finding out what your customers and potential customers are searching for. But getting to know your customers really is more than just knowing how they look for your products. Understanding what other brands they engage with, their demographics, what newspapers and publications they read and so on can help you to understand where you can reach them.

You don’t need to invest lots of time or money into finding this information in the social media age. Facebook Audience Insights (https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights) lets you find out lots about your target market.

Search by age, gender or interest to find out key information about your target customers. List a big competitor as an interest and find out more about the make up of their fan base on Facebook.

Measure Everything

It becomes much easier to prioritise those few minutes each day if you can see the impact of you what you. Set goals, monitor using Google Analytics or Facebook Insights and measure the impact of every single minute you invest in your marketing.

Read more:
5 Minute Marketing Tasks: How to Make the Most of 5 Minutes a Day