The Top 4 Skills for Tech Marketing Pros

The old adage that half your advertising budget is being wasted still holds true, but now you know which half is being wasted and you can quickly correct it.
 
We live, work and play online and for marketers this new reality creates enormous challenges and opportunities.
 
After talking with numerous Silicon Valley marketing experts, we’ve picked the top four marketing skills essential for success in today’s digital landscape:  
 

Content Marketing: Create useful content for your target audience. This can range from insightful articles, surveys, videos, infographics, how-to's, etc. Once you have the content on your site or, better yet, published on a media site, then drive potential customers/partners to it. Use Facebook and Twitter for consumers and LinkedIn to target investors, partners and influencers.
 
Free Web Traffic: Very little is more valuable than free traffic resulting in new customers. Some effective strategies are: 1) Automate a free part of your service or product on the web in exchange for contact info; 2) Offer useful stats or a report in exchange for an email; 3) Get an SEO and/or search engine marketing (SEM) expert and optimize your site for the kind of traffic you want.
 
Automate, Automate, Automate: Almost everything you do in online marketing can be tracked and then sliced and diced. The number of tools is growing every day, but some good ones are Mint, Clicky and, of course, Google Analytics. These will give you a very clear and real-time picture of what is working and not working.
 
Mobile: Mobile can’t be an afterthought and you are better off with a mobile-first marketing campaign. All your marketing campaigns need to be optimized for smartphones because the majority of views will come from phones.
 
We are all in uncharted territory, but these best practices can separate the winners from the losers. The reward for winners is successfully engaging with new customers in a way that is authentic and mutually beneficial.