Rapid advancements in technology are changing the face of marketing. Clients we’ve worked with in the German market are increasingly coming to us with requirements for a marketing leader for tomorrow’s world, and it looks pretty different. Unsurprisingly, the focus is heavily digital and centres around embracing new ways to reach your audience.
A new focus for SEO
Search engine optimisation has long been a priority for marketing professionals, and often significant proportions of budgets are invested in this area, certainly in the consumer world, but increasingly in B2B as well. Now there’s a new challenge for what was already a bit of a mysterious and unpredictable area of marketing – zero click results.
Zero click results are the results that appear at the top of a Google search, where it previews a web page that Google thinks best answers your query. Web users want their answers as quickly as possible, no click results certainly achieve this.
The challenge for marketing professionals is to work out how to get their websites to feature. Strong SEO skills has long been a common demand for professionals in the German market, but with the goals posts moving again, we’ve seen a lot of consumer teams look for SEO acumen at a more senior level so that marketing strategies incorporate tactics to get their websites featured. As ever, there are no hard and fast rules available for how to get to the top position, or whether Google even uses the top results to form it’s no click results, so marketing professionals need to be more adaptable and creative than ever.
Another new focus for SEO professionals is voice search. According to Google, 20% of all mobile queries are voice searches. This means content on websites needs to be optimised for voice searching and most marketing professionals agree that this means making the tone much more conversational. A shift in requirement for copywriters also.
New channels for advertising
One of the newest ways of reaching your audience is through at-home smart speakers. Amazon’s Alexa owners can download “skills” – essentially apps that are built by third party developers, which include major brands. Proctor & Gamble are a brand that’s started experimenting with this form of advertising. They have created an Alexa skill which gives users step-by-step guides to removing hundreds of different types of stains, in the process advertising its laundry detergent brand, Tide.
Similar to the changes in SEO, this new, subtle and highly creative form of marketing encourages a slightly different skillset to traditional marketers. Perhaps this isn’t quite yet a mainstream form of advertising, but it is certainly on the radar of our larger German consumer clients so smaller brands and B2B organisations should take note and potentially get ahead of the competition by embracing this new opportunity to reach their markets.
Inevitably, digital skillsets remain highly in demand but it’s a different type of digital acumen that clients are after. There are plenty of highly skilled digital marketers in Germany’s major business centres – but it’s the individuals with a strong mix of digital talent, creativity, adaptability and a keen interest in digital trends that are most successful at interview.
Bilall Yunus is a Senior Consultant at tml Partners and specialises in senior marketing and product appointments across Germany. He has particular expertise on executive searches in Germany for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Product Officers, Marketing Directors and VPs of Product.
