On this installment of the How Marketers Work interview series, we hear from Ron Sela of dapulse. If you’ve been keeping up with past interviews so far, you know that with each new article, we explore how marketers get inspired, stay productive, and generate results, and how you can do the same!
Ron Sela is a Full Stack Marketer at dapulse. He’s a profit-driven marketer having held roles previously at Klear and Pagewiz. He is also a blogger at RonSela.com, where he discusses B2B content marketing topics.
Named one of the B2B Marketing: Top 100 Twitter Influencers (#13) by Onalytica and a Top 50 Influence Marketing Bloggers (#2) by InkyBee, Ron is a digital marketer and conversion optimizer, focusing on maximizing ROI on social media and influence marketing campaigns.
dapulse is a project management tool for startups, which lets you create a clear visual display of your top priorities and progress, for everyone to see and contribute. You can set goals, assign people or teams and set deadlines. Anyone can see and update the high level, or dive in for more details.
Without further delay, let’s jump right into the interview, since it contains a ton of valuable content and tools for all the full stack marketers out there!
How would you explain specifically what you do as a marketer?
Optimizing the process of attracting prospective customers via digital marketing, and converting them into paying users is what I do as a marketer. In this process, I conduct research by using web analytics tools to identify potential clients, build sales funnels, create content for the customer journey and optimize the process continuously.
Growth stage companies experience limited resources. Therefore, the content marketing frameworks that I often use are thought leadership marketing, employee advocacy, brand ambassadors and influence marketing.
To make the sales funnels more efficient and scalable, I use marketing automation. Automating the process helps me with amplifying the content distribution by extending its social media reach at optimal times.
Which new skills are most important for marketers to learn in the next six months?
Lately, we evidenced a shift from highly specialized marketers to full-stack marketers. Low budget companies no longer choose between paid, earned or owned content, but rather hire marketers who are familiar with all disciplines.
As such, marketers are now required to be familiar with all aspects of building feedback loops to compete in the job market. In the next six months, marketers should concentrate on getting skilled in measuring the results of their digital campaigns. Content marketers should become familiar with assisted conversion, social media analytics, conversion optimization and content amplification (owned, paid and earned).
What do you find most rewarding about marketing?
Real-time analytics tools provide immediate feedback on the results of online marketing campaigns. Getting real-time positive feedback from online marketing campaigns is what I find most rewarding.
Profit-driven marketing is rapidly taking over traditional marketing. Until not too long ago, marketing was considered a cost center. In some organizations it still is. Today, we see more marketers required to manage the entire sales cycle. As a result, budgets are no longer assigned and measured on an annual basis, but rather analyzed continuously.
How do you stay updated with the latest marketing industry news?
Flipboard is my go to tool for staying updated with the most recent marketing industry news. It is a fantastic app for content discovery, curation, and distribution.
Flipboard aggregates all my social media feeds into one place, which allows me to react quickly, rather than checking each feed separately. Flipboard also suggests content based on my preferences and shows in a magazine style my trending news feed from BuzzSumo.
I share content that I find interesting on Flipboard to Pocket, where I read the article offline. I use IFTTT to distribute my favorite article automatically to my social media networks, via Buffer.
Since Flipboard is also a social network of its own, I curate more than 30 magazines on topics that I find interesting, such as B2B content marketing, influence marketing and thought leadership. It is a great venue for me to share my thoughts with more than 4,000 followers.
As a marketer, what is your favorite productivity hack?
Well, naturally it’s using dapulse as a content calendar. It’s a hack because it’s not a calendar at all. But it gives me something that goes beyond scheduling which post will be published when. It gives me process and team collaboration.
What I do is I create a Board for my content, Imagine an excel sheet only pretty and colourful.
Then each line is a task. Like let’s say a new infographics.
Then I use columns to create process and assign team members to different stages of the process, like research, writing, designing, copy editing SEO etc.
The reason it’s my favorite hack, is that no matter where I’m working from and where my team members are, it’s as if we were sitting next to each other. We don’t need to talk on the phone or exchange emails. We just all look at this Board and see with a glance who completed their task and what’s next.
I can tell with a glance if a task is progressing. You see, whenever one of my team members completes their task, it turns green with the word Done. It’s a very gratifying experience. And when the entire thing is complete–everything’s green and Done.
That’s my happiest moment at any given day. Well, maybe apart from numbers going up 🙂
Are there any particular marketing trends on the horizon that really excite you?
As a marketing professional, I am following the trend of Programmatic Marketing. We see more and more computer programs taking over traditional marketing tasks and in particular writing.
This phenomenon requires sophistication from marketers. The most interesting part of the trend is to see how quickly programs learn to write high-quality content, in a very short time. Artificial intelligence programs are becoming increasingly capable of producing long-form content based on accessible information and with human fluency.
Large publications are using AI solutions for writing routine data-driven reports on topics such as sports and financial reports analysis.
What are some of the top tools and apps in your marketing stack?
As an early adopter, I am using a variety of tools. I most commonly use the following:
Content discovery: Klout, Nuzzel & Feedly Pro.
Content distribution: Buffer, Oktopost, Tailwind & Shareaholic.
Content curation: Flipboard, Roojoom & Storify.
Content Analytics: Google Analytics, Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools.
Visual content creation: Canva, Snappa, Pablo & PicMonkey.
What advice would you share with other marketers who want to become more productive?
Use tested routines, optimize your procedures and manage your time tightly. With the information overflow that we experience on a daily basis, we can become easily distracted. Marketers need to have clear workflows even for soft skills.
Use marketing automation when possible. It does not mean that robots will run your business.
Automating routine processes can save enormous amounts of time, and provide superior results in activities such as email marketing (e.g. trigger based emails), social media marketing (e.g. social listening and event-based messaging) and find the productivity application that suits you best to manage your time, and connect to as many other apps that you are using as possible.
It will keep you organized, and will help you become more efficient, as it will allow you to analyze your daily activities and their related outcomes.
Connect with Ron
You can find Ron on Twitter and LinkedIn. Also, be sure to check out his blog!
The How Marketers Work series asks marketers from around the world to share their greatest productivity tips, tricks, and tools. Do you know someone who should be interviewed, or do you have specific questions you’d like to see answered? Let’s chat.
