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6 key skills marketers should add to their resumes in 2024
There’s no way to sugarcoat some of the top workplace trends of 2023: lower budgets and smaller staff numbers. Tech companies laid off over 100,000 workers over the course of 2023 — and the workers who remained spent much of the year scrambling to cover the gaps left when their colleagues were let go. We were truly in our ‘do more with less’ era: the work had to get accomplished, but the resources were slim. [caption id="attachment_493501" align="alignnone" width="8688"]Photo by M. Monk on Unsplash[/caption] While 2024 hasn’t completely stabilized (Microsoft and Amazon both announced large layoffs in January), many workers have recovered from the shock of the collective losses of 2023 and have begun to look toward the future. For marketers especially, there is a collective need to move beyond the ‘Do more with less’ era and into a more sustainable landscape. That’s why 2024 will likely be a year dedicated to upskilling for many marketers — or at least it should be! Try Wrike for free Why you should continue to pursue new skills There are a few very compelling reasons to learn new skills, especially in a tumultuous job market. Whether you feel your current position may be in jeopardy or not, having new skills can help you protect yourself in the future as well as expand your current horizons and improve job satisfaction. One reason to upskill is that it will make you more valuable as a current employee, potentially helping you avoid layoffs in the future. Employers might look more favorably on someone who is able to offer a broader range of skills than someone who has a more limited skill set. Upskilling could also allow you to move laterally within your company to other roles at a time when the scope for promotions might be on hold. Another reason to pursue upskilling is to ensure that if you are affected by a layoff in the future, you should be able to maximize your job search opportunities with more skills under your belt. CNBC reported that when employees were laid off in 2023, a number of those workers ended up being hired at smaller companies or in adjacent industries: “Some laid-off employees immediately found new jobs at smaller software firms and internet companies or continued their careers outside of tech, pivoting to consulting, health care, finance and other industries eager to recruit top talent who might have otherwise stayed at larger tech companies.” Over a third of laid-off tech workers found positions in software development, internet, and IT firms. Joining a smaller firm often means that you will have broader responsibilities than at a large company. In the hiring process for one of these roles, having a wider range of skills to offer can give you a competitive edge. Finally, upskilling will likely increase your job satisfaction. A study undertaken by Gallup and Amazon found that “nearly three-in-four workers (71%) who have participated in upskilling agree or strongly agree that it has enhanced their satisfaction with work.” If you can increase your current and future employability as well as your job satisfaction at the same time, that’s a win-win situation. Areas marketers should upskill in 2024 Upskilling or even reskilling opportunities are often dependent on your current role and experience, as well as your employer’s flexibility and openness to the process, which may involve using working hours. With those caveats in mind, certain categories of marketing skills will continue to be valuable in the coming years and will most likely benefit marketers who seek out those skills. Here are a few key marketing skills marketers should add to their resumes in 2024: Data analysis and reporting: Reporting and data analysis go hand in hand. Data analysis allows you to better understand the numbers behind what’s working and what’s not, and reporting can help you show your managers and executives how the work your team is undertaking is affecting the company’s bottom line. This course will give you the lowdown on how to analyze key metrics for your marketing campaigns. Social media: Social media is here to stay and many marketing departments that have undergone layoffs have had to say goodbye to their social media staff. Learning new strategies in the social media marketing department can allow your organization to continue to have a presence during a period of slower growth. HubSpot offers a free social media marketing course that would fit the bill in this area. Project management: Most marketers function as project managers as part of their roles, but most don’t have formal project management training. The Project Management Institute offers a selection of free e-learning opportunities that will help you gain a better understanding of how the principles of project management can inform your marketing campaigns, event planning, and more. A/B testing: Figuring out exactly what marketing activities, campaigns, or language works best is critical to effectively using budgets and resources. A/B testing allows you to do just that, drilling down into the effectiveness of particular elements with your audience so you can do more of what’s effective. A course in the basics of A/B testing like this one would give you a sense of how to start designing the most effective A/B testing experiments. Generative AI: Understanding how to use generative AI for your marketing role, no matter what that role is, will continue to be imperative over the coming year. Whether you’re using ChatGPT to draft email cadences to nurture leads or brainstorming keywords, the new AI technology can and should help make your marketing job easier and less time-consuming. This ChatGPT for Beginners course would be a smart place to start. Copywriting: As a copywriter, I might live to regret suggesting all marketers upskill their copywriting but, truth be told, it’s a darn useful skill to have. If you can draft more effective emails to potential leads without the help of your organization’s copywriters (if they have them at all), you’ll be one step ahead of your colleagues. Similarly, if you are applying for a position at a company that doesn’t have copywriters, having strong writing skills can only benefit you in the hiring process. This course in High Impact Business Writing would help you polish your writing skills. Why mastering Wrike can help bolster your 2024 goals In the spirit of continuous learning, Wrike offers a range of courses that will help you improve your Wrike skills, ensuring you’re able to use each and every feature that can impact your team’s success. (Our marketing team recently brushed up on our skills and we can attest it’s a game changer!) While Wrike doesn’t offer general marketing courses, so many of our platform’s features directly enable marketers to use the skills we outlined above. Interested in increasing your analytics and reporting skills in 2024? Wrike’s advanced analytics feature allows you to analyze data and create reports with a few clicks. Trying to improve your copywriting skills this year? Use our integration with Grammarly, which offers full functionality in all tasks and ensures your Wrike work is typo-free. Once you’ve created the foundation for a new campaign using ChatGPT, bring it into Wrike to manage it from start to finish. If you’re itching to get started using Wrike to support new skills, a Wrike free two-week trial is the perfect introduction. Try Wrike for free
How Wrike’s Content Team Uses ChatGPT: Successes, Best Practices, and Lessons Learned
Since we first adopted ChatGPT as a content marketing team at Wrike, a lot has happened, to say the least. Not only has the tool itself evolved, Wrike as a company has embraced AI — using it internally to increase productivity and fusing it into our product as well, with a whole new set of generative AI features. As a manager in the content team at Wrike, when first asked how our team planned to multiply content production using AI, my first thought was well, I have no idea. When I recovered from my initial panic, I had two more thoughts. One, AI was really here, and two, why not embrace it and add it as a tool in our toolbelt to see what we can really do? So we dove in. Here’s what we’ve done, what we know now, and where we plan to go. How we’re using ChatGPT now Those I’ve talked to in other content marketing teams outside of Wrike have mostly said the same thing: Their company has adopted ChatGPT and their instructions have been to use it in all content they create to produce work faster. This mostly seems to come as a blanket instruction, without much education or strategy regarding the best ways to use the tool. After having these conversations with others in the industry, I definitely appreciate the approach Wrike’s leadership has taken on generative AI so far when it comes to content creation. We’ve been given the opportunity to test and understand the tool, and be the leaders when it comes to setting and evaluating our AI content creation strategy. So what have we been up to? Here are some of our top initiatives using ChatGPT for content creation: SEO: Our approach to SEO content creation has totally changed with the introduction of generative AI. Why? Number one, SEO content is largely programmatic and an AI model lends itself well to something like this, something with a formula to how it should be created. Since SEO content is always a part of our strategy, it’s also a great place for us to test different methods of content creation using AI. We’ve been running several tests involving increasing our new SEO blog production and we’ve seen an exponential increase of our SEO blog production by experimenting with both AI and ChatGPT. Gated asset production: With the use of AI, we’ve also been able to multiply our gated asset production. These types of assets are often more human-led since the goal is to go in depth on a topic and provide value to our readers, but we’re finding ChatGPT can be very helpful when it comes to repurposing existing content into different formats, providing an outline, or creating draft content for sections of larger assets. Promotional kit automation: For a long time as a content manager, I’ve wanted to create promotional kits containing pre-approved promotional copy stakeholders can use in their ads, emails, and social campaigns. But, as is a common pain point for a lot of content teams, we’ve struggled to find the time to do these on top of our regular tasks and requests. With the addition of ChatGPT to our toolkit, we’ve been able to start testing the creation of these promotional kits with AI, taking much less time from our writers than it would have before. What we’ve learned While I could maybe write 10 blogs on what we’ve learned so far, I’ll keep it to a few top points. Test, but don’t forget to evaluate: Don’t just stick with one or two ways you use AI, but test and retest, and then don’t forget to evaluate the results of the content you’re producing. You want to know what’s working and you want to be spending your time in the most valuable ways. It’s probably not the right time to lean all the way into one method of content production: Based on our tests and retests, we found that human-written blogs still largely outperformed AI-generated blogs. However, we were impressed with how many clicks AI-generated blogs were able to generate without any human intervention. So, while it’s not the right time to go all AI as it doesn’t compare to the performance of our human-led content so far, we’re finding that it’s been a nice augment to the performance of our content overall. Don’t make your writers use AI in everything they do: As discussed above, it’s not time to totally cut out the human voice. Instead, we’ve been thinking about content production in terms of tiers, ranging from tier one (mostly human-written) to tier three (mostly AI-written). As our data has also shown us, we’re currently finding the highest value in producing a mix of these tiers. This also allows our writers to still flex their very valuable creativity to provide the thought leadership voice to Wrike, while embracing innovative technology to supplement their work in other areas. Where we go from here This year, I attended the AI 4 conference in Las Vegas. When it comes to using AI in marketing, the big topic of the day is personalization. How can you use AI to create the exact right piece of content to deliver to the right person, at the right time? Using AI to scale content creation gets us one step closer in that journey, as we’ve been able to multiply production essentially overnight, giving us a much wider sample size to see what’s resonating with our audience better. From here, our plans are to continue to test and measure. Our ultimate goal is to find the right balance of AI content that augments what our team does, doesn’t dilute the Wrike brand, and ensures we get the most value out of working with our new robot friends.
