3 New Year Resolutions to Improve Your Digital Marketing

It’s 2017 and we’re all looking for a little learning and development. The most popular goals are usually related to health and money, making for packed gyms and empty bars in January. Of course, these resolutions are often broken; often because they are sweeping and unrealistic. If you have an expensive coffee every day, cutting one coffee a week is a lot more realistic and possible than quitting altogether. And it will still improve your health and save you cash.

Start Tracking Your Time

One of the best ways to lose weight is to track what you eat. Keeping track of how many calories and which nutrients are going in obviously helps you limit over-consumption. However it also makes you mindful and more conscious of your actions. It’s harder to mindlessly snack on junk food when you’re inputting items into a notebook or app. The same principle applies with tracking your time. It’s easy to get lost in a task you enjoy (or get distracted) and not realise you are spending excessive time on a job. A simple time tracker will highlight where you are wasting time and help you become more efficient. You can begin by just tracking your time scales, and identifying time sinks. Then you can work on making tasks more efficient; with better tools, time management or scheduling.

If you need some tips, check out our post on tracking your time; we explore five different options.

Read More

A surprisingly popular resolution for 2017, but an extremely sensible one. It can be tempting to think that digital marketing moves too quickly for books to be relevant. That might be true to an extent; when it comes to algorithmic changes and new techniques. However e-books can be published much more quickly than the paper variety, and it’s important to remember that digital marketing is a field of multiple disciplines. However some aspects are timeless and universal. The basic building blocks of copywriting, graphic design and advertising are static. David Ogilvy’s 1963 book Confessions of an Advertising Man is still a bestseller. Anne Lammott’s Bird by Bird, written in 1980, is a common university textbook and commonly used for creativity and inspiration.

Hubspot have a list of 17 books for copywriters here.

Dedicate Time to Learning

Set aside some time – as little as 30 minutes a week – to improving and expanding your skills. You can work on existing skills – expand your PPC knowledge by getting to grips with Bing, or learn how to write Google Adwords scripts. A designer could learn how to take beautiful photographs. Alternatively, try something completely different; if you’re a coder, try creating a social media graphic; if you usually do the copy, learn some basic html and php. This can even be part of internal staff development; your new SEO specialist may not learn to build a website in a few weeks, but they can certainly learn how to implement redirects and make simple coding changes that can improve site speed. This relieves the burden on your development team and fosters understanding between disparate departments.

Try the free website Code Academy to learn programming, and Canva’s Design School to learn basic graphic design.