Do Something With Your Marketing: Conduct a Skills Assessment

In this episode of Do Something With Your Marketing, I want you to conduct a skills inventory of yourself. Now you might be saying, well, how does one do that when you're talking about understanding where you are as a marketer? The good news is you don't have to. One of the things you can do is you can use other people's information to help you figure out what you do and you don't know. So let's look at how this might work.

Let's go switch this around here. We go to a site like uh Marketing Land. Marketing Land is a terrific website that has a ton of uh information, and you can see there's all these different topics up top here. You can see the the major areas. These are all skills and areas of focus, areas of study that you might want to engage in as a marketer.

You have SEO, mobile, analytics. Now, how do you turn this into a skills inventory? Well, it's pretty straightforward. If you go all the way to the right-hand side, go to more and choose all topics, you get this very nice long, long list of all the categories that they write about. So if we copy and paste this, just very simple copy and paste, and paste it into a text document.

You can see there are over 300 areas of interest here of uh things that might be useful for you to conduct a skills list. Now, you're gonna want to tune some of this up, right? There's a few things in here that uh just kind of got like their um you can see that we actually got some of their uh columns got uh caught up in here, so we can just delete those. But for the most part, as you walk through this list, like here's another area here that uh definitely got all mixed in. Facebook, business issues, Facebook camera, Facebook Exchange, Facebook Instant Articles, Facebook Oculus VR, you can very quickly establish here's what I know about an area of study, and here's what I don't know.

Here are the things that I might not be my area of strength, right? So you might not know anything about GDPR, you might not know anything about Google I.O. You might not know anything about uh live blocking, and if that's the case, this gives you additional areas to focus on to study to grow your expertise as a marketer. Now, suppose you're uh not in marketing. Well, hey, I'm not sure why you'd be listening to the show, but um look at your industry's major publications.

What publications, let's see if there's like an accounting today. Uh there is. So you have financial planning, audit and accounting, and let's see if they have an all topics list somewhere. They have a site map. Aha.

Making progress here. So, what you can do on any of these um industry publications, once you find one that has a robust list of topics, copy and paste that into a document or a simple spreadsheet, and use it to start training and setting out what you want to be doing as a marketer, as a professional, to learn your industry or the profession of marketing better. Look at the areas that you don't know anything about. And maybe there are things that uh you might want to explore in much greater depth, like rich pins on Pinterest. Maybe you need to know that.

Real-time marketing, maybe you need to know that. But this helps you address your blind spots. One of the things that happens is that we, as marketers, as people, as humans, tend to get so wrapped up in our thing, our area, that we don't always look around. And when we don't look around, we don't know what we're missing. So as time has gone by, there may have been things that have shown up in your area that you may not even be aware of that you may be like, huh, I I don't know what that is.

I don't know uh why I would need to know something like that. Um let's go back up here, for example, into Facebook. Face, there's a ton of stuff about Facebook. Uh do I know all these areas well enough? Like, I don't know much of anything about Facebook camera, right?

That's that's a kind of a mystery to me. So that might be something that I'd want to study if I wanted to get better at Facebook. Um, use this catalog, build a catalog of your skills. And by the way, if you are a manager or an executive at a company, use this approach to manage your people, right? To say, here's what go go down this list and check off what you know.

You know, green, yellow word, green, I know this area. Yellow, eh, I got some some more to do. And red, don't know it. Green, yellow, red for each of the people on your teams, and use it as a professional development resource to say, hey, you're um you're a social media marketer. Let's make sure that you know all about the Facebook exchange, right?

Let's make sure you know the ins and outs of that and go from red or yellow to green. So use this inventory to grow your team to grow your capabilities as well. So that's what I want you to do for this week's marketing. Uh do something with your marketing. Use build and use a skills inventory for your team or for yourself so that you know what to do next.

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