Finding the Right Digital Marketing Talent for Your Company
Two years later, in a market there internet penetration is
over 30% (with closer to 7.5 million internet users) the enthusiasm among company
top executives for digital marketing is really kicking in. Comparatively to two
years ago, today companies are spending almost double the marketing money on
digital. This still doesn’t even come closer to at least 10% of their total ad
money. But still it’s a significant growth for the digital ad industry.
With the ad spend on digital increasing year over year, the
next questions most companies are facing today is how to find the right people
to manage these ad budgets. Marketing staffs at most Sri Lankan companies are
not fully geared to handle a serious digital budget. They survived with smaller
budgets by simply letting their ad agencies to make decision; if t doesn’t
work, it’s only a couple of hundred thousand rupees, so nobody really cared.
But today, the digital ad budgets come in millions. We see lots of occasions
where companies blindly spend almost 80% of their digital ad budget on some
fancy rich media take-over on a local news website (and that are it! That’s
digital).
This why every marketing department today needs at least one
qualified digital marketer. Eventually, your entire marketing team has to be
trained for the digital world, but starting with at least one recruitment
specialized in digital is important.
On the other hand, companies should not appoint people as ‘digital
marketing managers’ for the sake of filling that vacancy. It’s important to
find the right people. Unfortunately in Sri Lanka, you don’t find plenty of
people with real digital marketing competencies, because there is no single
yard-stick to measure their qualification. If someone comes to an interview and
introduce themselves as ‘hi! I am a digital marketing expert’, only method you
can verify that claim is by counting the number of buzzwords he or she uses in
the interview. Because, most interviewers
doesn’t have the enough experience to gauge the talent of a digital marketer.
This leads in to many problems for the company. You hire
someone to the post of ‘digital marketing manager’ and then that becomes your
benchmark for digital marketing.
Within last six months I was approached by more than a dozen
companies, asking for help in finding the right digital marketing talent for
their marketing department. It wasn’t easy to find people. At the same time,
our agency gets regular calls from headhunters to tap into the talent base we
managed to build over a period of three to four years. It isn’t easy to retain good
people either :-)
During the year 2016, marketing fraternity in Sri Lanka has
to do some serious contributions to uplift the quality of digital marketing
talent in Sri Lanka.
In 2013, our agency (Neo@Ogilvy Sri Lanka) signed a MOU
with the University of Sri Jayawardenepura, to introduce a Digital Marketing
subject in their final year. We have successfully completed three batches, and
maybe this is one source your company can tap into when recruiting Digital
Marketing talent. All 200+ graduates passed out in 2013, 14, and 15 were given
a three months crash course type of a training in digital marketing.
Since 2012, I have been involved with eBusiness Academy to
train more than 1,500 marketers in Sri Lanka for Digital Marketing. Most of
these people were trained at one-day bootcamp sessions, but there were around
50 people who completed the six months certificate course offered by EBA. Due
to the busy schedule of the people involved, EBA went inactive for quite a sometime,
but we kept getting calls asking for the date of next certification course
batch.
Now we have decided to totally revamp our courses and
planning to launch a Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing in association
with Sri Lanka Technological Campus (SLT Campus) in March.
This is probably the best
digital marketing training you can give your marketing staff in Sri Lanka. We
selected Sri Lanka’s most experienced digital marketing professionals; each
specialized in their own area of expertise. Resource panel consists of myself
and Suranga, and expert marketers like Rohan Jayaweera (former Googler), Gamika
De Silva (former SLIM president), Manupriya Jayathilake (Google Analytics Certified
Expert), Mohenesh Buthgamuwa (Mindshare
Sri Lanka), Gayathri Seneviratne (eCommerce Manager for Jetwing), Chamara
Peiris (UI/UX expert), Upeksha Premathilake (Google Certified Adwords
Consultant), Milinda Tilakaratne (Manager eSales at Dialog Axiata) and many
more guest resource persons. (Check all the resource persons profiles here)
This Diploma in Digital Marketing Course is an outcome of over one year of
research and efforts by me, Suranga and Rohan and other resource persons are
adding an immense value in delivering the course modules we developed by
carefully benchmarking several international courses.
If you are looking for a good training program for developing
the digital talent in your marketing team, check out the detailed courseoutline and make an inquiry here.
Our aim is to train and certify at least 70 good quality
digital marketers before the end of 2016. This will be a real career booster
for them, as the demand for qualified digital marketing professionals is
increasing day by day.
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