You’ve not only heard it for two decades, but you’ve now seen it globally during Covid-19: Businesses must go digital in order to compete in the modern day. The fundamentals of business have not changed:

• distil clear offerings
• identify your target market
• segment the audiences in that market
• make them aware of, interested in and persuaded to enter into a transaction with you
• maintain appropriate communication at every step
• meet customer expectations not only with your offering, but also in the experience of dealing with you

As a business, you must understand the role of ‘digital’ and ‘technology’ in these same fundamental activities. We all know that email is more time-efficient than postal mail. The majority of businesses pre-covid-19 probably had not thought too hard about anything more than that – definitely not to the extent that an expert would make use of digital technologies in their business.

Digital Marketing is a field of its own because more marketing methods, mechanisms and consumer dynamics were born alongside the technology that facilitated them.

Pay-per-click (PPC) for instance, refers to having a monetary budget assigned to an advertising campaign that runs on search engines. You must have seen the word ‘Ad’ next to search results – when someone clicks that link, the entity behind it is charged a certain sum of money (small or large). They are charged for every click, hence pay-per-click. The good news about this advertising is that you spend money on some engagement, as opposed to printing an advert on a billboard with no record of who saw it and what engagements there were.

After digital marketing, came content production, often just called ‘content’ e.g. the content team.

Content Production is as it says on the tin: physical and digital content that is typically for dissemination. When someone blogs to simply express themselves, this is not called ‘content’ in the business sense.

Content typically has a ‘content strategy’ behind it, and refers to anything produced or purposed in order to yield results of some kind. What was once just ‘advertising copy’ for a recorded TV commercial, can now be published as a blog post, trimmed down for a twitter post, graphically enhanced for an instagram post, extended in video form for cheaper distribution online etc. etc.

There is a heap of new terms that one must appreciate, just to fully grasp Digital Content Marketing in all its glory. Behold the Junior Content Marketer course.

The bespoke Junior Content Marketer (JCM) Apprenticeship is the prime cut; a contemporaneous manifestation of economic need, business goals and employer ambition. This gold-dust-of-a-course is sure to amaze if your business wants more customers and more revenue. This course has been tailored to SMEs by virtue of extensive consultation and evaluation with thriving and diving businesses. We have thought about every concern: manpower, time scarcity, skills gaps, quality control, reputation management, you name it; this course mitigates numerous risks in your business and systemises the processes that will make you thrive.

The magic happens when you look at this course through the lens of your business right now. Book a free call with one of our specialist consultants who can assist you in identifying the sheer number of business impacts a JCM Apprentice can create during their 12 month course under your employment. You can find the JCM course brochure here.

Did you know that you can even do this course as an Executive or Director? The government is funding upskilling in digital skills for all seniority levels – utilise this funded opportunity whilst it lasts and obtain an accredited qualification for the pleasure of transforming your own business.

There is a catch-22 that Commun-IT set out to solve: The boss says to the digital marketers to publish ad campaigns and they ask, where’s the content? The boss says to the content team to make content and they ask, what for? The JCM training produces a hybrid skillset that can create autonomous highly productive staff who know exactly what to do and why to do it. They will understand end-to-end business growth from the ‘boss perspective’. Commun-IT adds immense additional value by training apprentices in soft skills, stakeholder management amid an array of other critical business skills that general training and academic education lacks.

By now you must realise that you, or someone you know, needs to rocket-boost their business with the latest and greatest digital skills. You can book a call for yourself, or share this link with anyone who you think can benefit from business growth in the post-covid economy. As a Government-approved training provider, Commun-IT is pioneering digital skills training to strengthen our economic recovery, whilst supporting the Education Technology Community Charity in their primary school education projects. By placing an apprentice with Commun-IT (current staff or new hires), a local primary school is funded to receive an education project from ETC. Look at their great work here.

Before 31st March 2021, organisations can receive a £3,000 cash incentive for every apprentice who has started their training.

We have heard many a time that teachers are stretched, with a lot of work to do. These good souls sometimes volunteer to deliver above and beyond what they have been asked. It may be to run an after school coding club, it may be to assist with computer rooms and IT facilities, amongst many others.

The question about doing so much work is: Is the training for those job functions up to date?