How to become a better online marketeer?

I recently had a discussion with my team on how to keep up with the constant changes in online marketing. The take away was that each of us should have a personal learning strategy.

Here are my recommendations:

1. Identify the latest and top rated literature

Here are a few links I came up with:

TOP 10 Marketing books in 2014
The best online marketing resources
20 Books Every Marketer Should Read in 2015

I will also review some of the books in this blog.

2. Identify experts and subscribe to their blogs.

I use feedly as a reader, which allows me to also read on my iphone while commuting to work.
Top 10 Online Marketing Experts To Follow In 2014


3. Set-up your own small e-commerce business
Set up a small business / site on your own to test certain things at small scale. Actually this is being done by a few people in the team. this knowledge needs to be shared, however.

4. specialize, but also train general skills

Some of you might know that in professional sports, you do not only train within your discipline, but also  integrate training methods from other sport disciplines. Reasons are to avoid injury, but also to be more of an allrounder in terms of speed, agility,.. The same applies here, you can read specialized literature, but taking into account broader mgmt literature outside your specialized field, will definitely make you a better marketeer.

ASK, Ryan Levesque (Book Review) or how to turn surveys into sales instruments

This book is an easy 200 page read, written in a very conversational style. The main advices of the author is to stop asking your potential customer "What they want?" but rather what they do not like? The main assumption is, that people have a tough time formulating what they want, but are pretty good at saying what they do not like with certain products features.

Ryan Levesque turns this main thought into the a system of survey cycle and sales cyles, which he calls the ASK Formula. In principle engage your potential customer with survey until you know which microsegment exists, what this segment needs, and which of you survey participants belong to which segment. After you potential customer are attribute to such microsegment run context specific sales and marketing message, which draw on the segment specific information from the survey.

Example from my recent experience:
I recently completed a hotel reservation via the mobile web site of HRS. After finalizing it, I get a small survey request, asking me 2 Question and I get a button to download the app. While the idea of the survey is a good one, it should acutally explore the reason why I did a booking via mobile web vs. app vs. desktop, then based on my response I should get a target message.

lets say, I respond:  "I say, I do not know the HRS app" --> Message with advantage of app and call to action to download it. Alternatively I respond " I know the app, but I do use HRS infrquently it is not worth installing" --> Message, thank you for using our mobile website, call to action with a bookmark..

Ideally as a company you can directly link the survey results to your CRM database and trigger direct mailings.

Takeaway:
Not a completely new approach but written in a convincing and very practical way. Also I agree that there Marketers love traditional survey design and usually do not start the survey process in a discovery mode, but actually seek answer which fits their mindsit. Overall easy read, which could actually be summarized in 100 pages, but is absolutely worth buying.