How to retain Digital Marketing Talent in your company

 

To this day, talent retention is a global problem, present in all areas of a company. While Baby Boomers saw as an ideal thing to spend their whole life in the same company, more recent generations such as Millenials think the opposite. What was previously perceived as a loyal employee committed to your company, today is labeled a "stagnant" employee who has failed to reinvent himself.

But are there industries where this new corporate reality is even more evident? Well definitely yes. In a field as new and constantly evolving as Digital Marketing, the risk of talent leak is even higher than in other industries.

The following article proposes some guidelines to retain digital talent, and in this way avoid the financial losses that companies experience when failing to achieve employee loyalty.

 

Creativity and innovation

By nature, Digital Marketing is a field that's highly dependent on innovation. Search engines, social networks, email marketing and CRM platforms did not exist just a couple of decades ago, and are growing year after year at breakneck speed.

While many companies in the textile and tourism industry have managed to catch the train of new technologies in time, other more traditional industries in the financial, pharmaceutical or insurance sectors are still known for their rigidity and lack of creativity in their marketing campaigns.

A company that refuses to use social networks in a fun way by publishing viral content to spread its brand will not be an attractive environment for a young Community Manager used to produce entertaining articles and videos.

It is important that digital marketing experts feel they are thriving in a creative and innovative corporate culture, if we do not want them to join those companies from the competition that have understood the importance of doing so.

 

Technological openness

Many companies still have restricted access not only to social networks (despite the fact that many studies have shown how these increase the creativity of employees), but also to many web pages that the corporate firewall detects as inappropriate.

Digital Marketing experts are constantly looking for information to keep abreast of the latest developments in the sector. How will an SEO expert feel if he can not go to specialized blogs to find out about the latest Google algorithm updates? And what about an SEM expert who can not catch up on Google Ads latest news?

Another problem is that many Digital Marketing tools are in the cloud, and some of them (such as Hubspot) need to host information from client prospects on servers outside the company. To this day, many companies still do not trust the transfer of data to the cloud, and have a rigid IT policy that prevents employees from working outside the corporate intranet.

Beyond the feeling of rejection that tends to result from technologically repressed and archaic corporate culture, a Digital expert will also feel hindered at a productive level in a company too controlling of how employees access the internet.

 

Efficient department structure

In an ideal corporate world, each department of a company works for the common good of the business, without competing against each other or trying to show off their work internally. However, in real life things work quite differently, and often a key department such as Marketing does not have enough decisional power to get the support they need from other departments.

A Digital Marketing team that has to fight with the IT department for every change that they want to make to the company's digital assets (web page, CRM, etc.), will soon see its members getting discouraged and considering a job change. Likewise, a bank that applies to each marketing action slow and cumbersome legal validation procedures (typical of financial environments) will have difficulties in convincing its Digital Marketing Manager to stay.

The most advanced companies in the digital world usually have a self-sufficient marketing team, with computer engineers, CRM and lawyers one hundred percent dedicated to the Digital Department. However, for lots of more traditional companies, this type of self-sufficient model implies a massive departmental restructuring that is too expensive to implement. As a result, these companies need to maintain a hierarchical structure in which the technical and legal profiles do not respond directly to the Digital Marketing team. If this is the case, it is key to ensure that those outsider profiles essential for the development of the company's Digital campaigns give maximum priority to the requests coming from the marketing department.

 

Strategic salary reviews

No matter how generous the salary offered to employees, if a company fails to create an attractive environment where workers can grow, the only thing it achieves with salary increases is to postpone by a few months the employees's inevitable departure.

This means that, before considering the question of remuneration, it is key to ask ourselves if the other points addressed in this article are being fulfilled: Am I developing a creative corporate culture and innovative products? Can my Digital Marketing experts easily access the cloud or do you have to request permissions for everything? Do the other departments respond quickly and effectively to support my Digital Marketing team?

If we can answer all these questions affirmatively, then it does make sense to consider investing in periodic salary raises. But before doing so, it is important to understand that a satisfied employee in his or her job does not usually request a salary far above the average salary range of the sector. According to a recent Glassdoor survey, a majority of employees value corporate culture and development prospects above money.

But we can not rule out the financial argument, thinking that employees only value the other criteria addressed in the survey. The best thing to do is to offer salaries that are in line with the market, or even slightly above, to maximize the loyalty of our Digital Marketing talent.

 

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