If you follow us on social media, then you may see posts every year sharing our latest achievements in training. I may already have lots of letters after my name and countless courses under my belt, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to stop learning. After all, can you ever know too much?
We put a huge amount of emphasis on training in our business, but not all people working in marketing do. In fact, some marketers haven’t been trained at all. So why, at Lindsay Woodward Marketing, are we bothering to spend all these hours learning more?
Here are my top 5 reasons why I think training in marketing is so damn important.
1. Keeping Up with Industry Trends
Marketing is a constantly changing field. I’ve been to marketing courses where what I learnt 6 months ago is now out of date. It’s all too easy to become out of touch with what’s happening, but regularly attending webinars and training workshops allows a marketer to stay head of the trends.
2. Become Strategically Minded
I thought I was doing strategic marketing before I got my Professional Diploma in Marketing. It turns out I hadn’t even skimmed the top of what is actually involved, and I certainly didn’t understand how marketing should be aligned with a business strategy.
I’m not saying that experience is meaningless. In fact, experience is just as important as training. With regards to strategies, I spent months learning the theory and the structure, and then I went back to my role and I figured out how to adapt that learning to make it effective for the business I was working for.
If you read my book, you’ll discover that I have created my very own structure for writing a marketing plan, aimed at helping smaller businesses open up their marketing without too much extra work. Those ideas are all mine, and my experience has honed them. But they wouldn’t be useful if I hadn’t have built them on all the training I did.
I understand things now that I couldn’t have understood had I not learnt them formally. Through formal training, I was given the opportunity to debate things in a classroom, review case studies, share ideas with other students, explore factors that were new to me, and develop a 360 degree viewpoint of how it all needs to work. You can’t get that from experience alone.
3. Boosting Creativity and Innovation
Personally, I think the best marketers are the ones who strike a balance between science and art. You need to be able to analyse data and build structured ways of working, and then execute your plans with artistic thought and attention grabbing creative. Those who get the balance right tend to find more success.
For both of those elements I have gone through a lot of training. I have a BA (Hons) in Writing & Media, where I learnt the art of communication, and then I have completed training with the Chartered Institute of Marketing on the science behind marketing. I now never approach any work without blending both of these skills together. It’s what gets my clients results.
But without training, how can you know that what you are doing is for the best? If you’re not trained, you’re limited to the confined experience you’ve had.
4. Global Perspectives Not “It Worked Before”
It’s only through training that I’ve had exposure to a wealth of marketing channels and techniques. I’ve been trained on more marketing techniques than I’ve ever been able to use in my direct experience. But the important thing is that I know they are there.
When I write plans for clients, I now have a full armour of marketing tools, approaches and channels that I can choose from, to ensure that I can get my clients the results they’re looking for. I can genuinely write bespoke plans that are created for their exact needs, pulling on my experience as well as my vast training. It has opened up a whole world for me.
If I hadn’t have been trained, I would only know what I’d done. This would mean the plans I write are far less innovative and I have far fewer tools in my utility belt. It makes everything less bespoke.
5. Increases ROI
Training has given me proper marketing knowledge, allowing me to know how to build stand out marketing strategies. And this means there is far more chance of a good ROI.
If you are writing a strategy based on your limited experience, then it will be, by very definition, limited. How can you know you’re doing the right thing if you don’t have that broader knowledge?
Marketing Advice You Can Trust
When I completed my Professional Diploma in Marketing and I became a Chartered Marketer for the first time, it blew open my world. My ability to do my job significantly increased, I could speak to senior stakeholders far more confidently, and I was getting more budget and more freedom as I could prove that I knew what I was doing.
Since that time, there hasn’t been a year that’s gone by where I haven’t focused on learning, and I continue to grow my knowledge all the time. I love marketing, and I know that I am able to do a great job to help clients.
Without that training, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Do you trust that you’re getting the best marketing advice? If you’d like to know how our training could benefit your business, then get in touch and we can explore how we can help.
