How to Upskill Your Marketing Team for the Future

Adopt an In-house Training Approach

You have multiple training avenues available to teach your marketing team new skills. Adopting an in-house approach is often one of the best options because you maintain control over which skills are taught and how the training is delivered.

Furthermore, when you use in-house training, you can begin by upskilling the team members who are most suited to expanding their skill sets and then have them train other members of your team.

Make a list of the skills you want your marketing team to learn and then select members of your team who already have strong skills in relevant areas.

You can save costs by providing in-house training and ensuring you upskill the right people better, but there are other advantages of using the in-house approach.

For instance, the people you select to train will already know the personalities and abilities of the rest of the team. That familiarity means they will be able to train their colleagues better.

Personalise Your Training Methods

Using an in-house training approach also enables you to provide skills training via methods that best suit individual members of your marketing team.

For example, some people may learn better when they engage with podcasts and other digital content while other team members may prefer engaging with trainers face-to-face and reading books.

Basically, adopting a personalised approach to upskilling your marketing team enables you to get the best out of each team member.

You can also get more inventive with training and make the process fun. That could be as simple as using custom holographic stickers or vinyl stickers from StickerYou to make training manuals and other documents more colourful and engaging.

The more personalised you make the training process, the more engaged your team members will be, and the more skills they will learn.

Enable Your Team Members to Attend Courses and Seminars

In addition to in-house training, or as an alternative to in-house training, consider sponsoring members of your marketing team to attend courses and seminars outside of the office.

You could enable your team members to work toward gaining new certifications. Alternatively, they could attend day courses that are less formal but just as powerful in helping them to learn the new skills they need to handle the future of marketing.

If learning software applications and new technological tools are an integral part of the upskilling you want to introduce to your company, external courses and seminars can be particularly beneficial.

Use External Experts

One of the drawbacks of in-house training and sending employees on training courses is that it takes time. So, another option for teaching upskills is to hire external experts.

When you bring in a professional to train your team, the expert will have all of the know-how and relevant tools to bring your team up to speed faster and help each team member to put his or her new skills into practice.

An expert could visit your place of work, or the expert could provide learning through digital means. By using the latter method, you can ensure you get the best expert for the task on board, as it will not matter whether he or she is on the other side of the world.

Encourage Microlearning

Regardless of the precise training methods you employ, such as providing in-house training or sponsoring employees to attend courses and seminars, consider encouraging microlearning as well.

Microlearning involves team members learning new skills in their own time and at their own pace. If there are constraints like time constraints for learning, microlearning can be a very helpful method to use.

Make the Learning Process Interactive and Simulate Real-life Situations

Upskilling is not just about teaching new skills. It is also about applying those skills. So, any upskill training process should include simulating real-life situations.

When your marketing team is able to apply the new skills that they learn to their jobs, they will become much more efficient and skillful in the new methods and actions they are taught.

Gamifying the learning experience by making training interactive is one option. Through games, trainees can answer questions and apply knowledge to problem-solving incidents that will arise in real life.

Through gamification, your marketing team can acquire knowledge more quickly and apply it more effectively than they would be able to do through solely reading books or watching podcasts.

Carefully Consider the Skills That Your Team Needs to Learn

Whatever approaches you employ to upskill your marketing team for the future, you need to carefully consider the precise skills that you need your team to learn.

One of the best ways of identifying the types of skills to teach is to keep abreast of current and future marketing trends and technological tools.

For instance, artificial intelligence and machine learning are being used more and more to create better and more reliable marketing approaches; from enabling more accurate, real-time analytics and measurement to improving customer engagement.

Voice assistant tech is another thing that marketers should be up to speed with because it allows users to have contextual interactions and enables marketing teams to take personalization to a completely new level.

Other technological tools that your marketing team should become familiar with include virtual reality, data mining, and blockchain technology.