The eCommerce industry witnessed a remarkable leap towards advancement with the adoption of new technologies in the year 2020. The pandemic, the country-wide unfair lockdowns, and social distancing for even the healthy (which we cannot agree with) got people to turn to online stores for everything – from groceries, daily essentials, to luxuries like cars, watches, etc. Gradually, it became a way of living for a lot of us.
With the status quo for retail changing at a rapid pace, there’s a notable increase in the demand for personalization. Customers are still looking for the subtle personalized touch they used to experience while shopping offline or using services, like 22 Bet, that create personalized sports offers exactly for them to satisfy their needs. Not only that, but the ecommerce stores are also facing challenges from the growing competition as more and more retailers turn to online space to reach their customers.
The giants in the eCommerce space are well-funded and are utilizing the latest technologies to specialize in marketing functions like user acquisition, lifestyle marketing, analytics and marketing speed optimization. And most of the time, the marketing, communication, and customer experience are making the biggest difference between a success and a failure.
Therefore, for a store owner to succeed in the ever-evolving ecommerce industry, they require a modern, well-trained marketing team that’s updated with all the latest trends, tools, and techniques.
But how do you go about building and training your eCommerce marketing team to withstand and stay ahead of the competition? Let’s explore.
Structure of an eCommerce Marketing Team
For a full-functioning and well-performing marketing team for your WordPress eCommerce store, there are certain core marketing members that need to be hired. Without these team members, you might not be able to get the results you are looking for.
- Technical SEO: Most of the DTC and ecommerce brands pay more attention to customer experience and none to technical SEO. No doubt, customer experience should be one of your top priorities but technical SEO should not be neglected. SEO is one of the best ways to garner targeted, organic traffic.
- Content & Email Specialist: SEO is only one side of the coin. For your SEO strategies to garner results, you will need someone to strategize and create content constantly. And to get the most of this role, make sure they are well-versed with email marketing so you can create a complete customer journey content-wise.
- Ads Manager: This role is quite crucial for ecommerce brands that are just starting out or are in the growth stage. Ads manager can help you strategize, plan, ideate, and create brand messaging that resonates with your target audience while making sure the ads are reaching the right audience.
- Social Media / PR: You’d be lucky if you can find someone that understands social media as well as PR and outreach. In the beginning, it might be expensive to hire two different people for this role but if given a chance, choose a PR person over social media to position your brand in the market. Gradually, once you have enough reputation, you can build your social media presence.
- Designers: People who will create all the marketing collaterals, social media posts, emails, and whatnot. This is among the important roles for a marketing team as people are consuming more and more visual content. And frankly, visual content works better for ecommerce brands.
- Manager: A brand manager or a marketing manager to help connect all these team members and build a synergy and work environment for them to be more productive.
Training Your In-house eCommerce Marketing Team: Need of the Hour
Once you have the right team, the right rhythm, and the right processes, it’s time to upgrade, upskill, and reskill your marketing team. The digital landscape is ever-evolving and advancing at a drastic rate and to keep up, you’ll need your marketing team to stay updated at all times.
Apart from that, here are a few more reasons why training and upskilling your marketing team is necessary:
- Better employee retention: When your employees are able to grow along with your company, they tend to stay longer which directly reduces the amount of time and money spent on hiring and onboarding new employees. In general, it’s always better to retain your employees than to hire new ones.
- Better Performance: This goes without saying. When your employees are trained well and have the right resources, they tend to perform better and garner better results for your company.
- Equips with Self Analysis: A well-trained team is able to analyze their weaknesses and strengths which helps them create a growth plan for themselves. A team that constantly learns and upgrades itself will always outperform a team that doesn’t.
So how do we go about training the ecommerce marketing team? Let’s explore with some of the following tried and tested tips to train an ecommerce marketing team.
5 Essential Tips to Train Your WordPress eCommerce Marketing Team
1. Identifying Skill Gaps
Once you’ve formed a team, you need to list out their roles, responsibilities, and KRAs. Based on these and their growth plan, you can create their skill matrix that can be updated every quarter on the basis of their performance.
This skill matrix will then give you an overview of the gap between their current skills and the skills they need to perform well in the future.
Moreover, it will help you identify the team members that can train for particular skills or processes.
2. A Combination of Internal, External, & Online Training
Since most of the companies are adopting a hybrid work culture, you can also experiment with the delivery of training for your marketing team.
It can be a combination of internal, external, and online training. As mentioned in the first point, using a skill matrix, you’d be able to identify the team members that are able to train internally.
You can also appoint an industry expert on a quarterly or half-yearly basis to give an update on the industry trends, tools, and techniques. These external training can be conducted physically as well as virtually.
3. Set Them for Success with Right Tools
Along with the right knowledge and skills, your team also needs the right set of tools to carry out their tasks in a productive manner. So, here’s a quick list of tools your ecommerce marketing team needs in 2021:
- Basics: Google Analytics, Grammarly, Canva, WordPress Tribulant Shopping Cart (any ecommerce builder), Slack (any internal messaging platform), Mailchimp (any email marketing tool), Trello (any project management tool), and Ahrefs (any SEO analytics tool).
- Advance: HotJar (website heatmaps & behaviour analytics tool), Facebook Ads & Google Ads to manage ads on social media and Google, HootSuite for managing social media accounts, and HubSpot to manage all the marketing qualified leads, landing pages, website and more.
You can also invest in WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO, WPForms, OptinMonster, and more.
Once your marketing team is all settled and you have a functioning workflow to convert visitors into paying customers, then you can invest in a digital adoption platform like Pendo or Pendo Alternatives to create an automated customer journey.
4. Inculcate a Culture of Asking Questions
Having a culture where your team can openly ask questions about anything and everything can help improve overall processes. When all the stakeholders are held accountable for even the smallest of things; processes improve, teams perform better, and you can see better outcomes.
Here’s how you can inculcate the culture of asking questions:
- Have a habit of asking people if they agree or disagree with your ideas and statements. This would open dialogue between the team members which would gradually turn into a culture where people ask questions.
- Reward the team members that question
- Give your team members the time to absorb the information and question deeply.
- Provide the tools to question well. Doing certain group exercises on a regular basis can sharpen this skill in your team.
5. Automate Redundant Processes
A few of the tools mentioned above would help you automate a lot of redundant processes like maintaining social media accounts, blasting email newsletters, SEO analysis, customer registration and more.
Eliminating redundant processes would help free up your team’s time where you can accommodate more training and upskilling sessions.
Learning is a continuous process and having a team that adapts quickly to the ever-changing marketing landscape is nothing less than a competitive advantage.
Lastly, Develop a Performance Mindset
No matter the infinite number of training and tools you provide to your team, it will all go to waste if they don’t have a performance mindset. You need marketers who are resourceful, quick on their feet, grasp things easily and are always on the lookout to try new things.
So, in introspection, it all starts with the hiring process. Training won’t do much unless you’ve hired the right people with the right mindset.