Training techies to be enablers for digital marketing team

Tata Sky Digital Marketing Training
Summary: Sharing the experience of training Tata Sky technical team on digital marketing

When we hear about Tata Sky, the word which rings in our ears is Jhingalala. There are more than that.

Tata Sky is the leading direct broadcast satellite television provider (in common words DTH: Direct to home service provider) in India. Formed as a JV between Tata Group and Sky group 15 years back, it has partnered with global leaders in bringing the state of the art digital technology to many our homes.

The Background

When we met Tata Sky, about 6 months back we were told that the technology team has to learn about digital marketing so that it can work in tandem with the marketing and communication team. And give the best support while marketing Tata Sky through online media.

At this point all seemed good.

We brainstormed and ideated on a 3 day exhaustive workshop covering the important aspects of digital marketing. The challenge was however to balance between the breadth and depth of the topics to be covered. And yet make it interesting (2 of the training days were planned to be held in weekend) all through out.

Now that was a challenge.

We created a couple of different approach and opened them for feedback internally. We then got it validated with Mr Seshadri (one of the key people in the technology team). He had some insights and some his ideas helped in shaping the final content for the delivery. Now it was ‘adequately’ tweaked to take on the ‘tech’ mindset of the participants.

The Start

We started the process by making the participants go through our online digital marketing course. The idea was to get everybody on the same page on understanding the important aspects of digital marketing — mainly the channels and communications. We were surprised to see many of them going on to complete the online course before the workshop. And they were looking forward to these three days. Here is what some of them felt about our online course.

And then …there was the Workshop

Finally on February 2017 when we did the workshop, we started with setting the expectation.

Some of the key expectations that emerged

  1. Be on the same page with the marketing team (and agency) during campaign planning and relating to the ‘why’ of the marketing plan. This will enable them to add value to the campaigns. Much beyond just giving some technical support.
  2. To get all those jargons de-mystified and understand the science behind the online marketing execution.
  3. How to calculate ROI on the money being spend, and how to know whether the desired results were obtained (this is quite surprising from a technical team!)
  4. How is the competition doing and what can be learnt from them.

After having taken up multiple workshops in various corporates we were ready in our mind to tweak around the content and specifically focus on the areas participants want to learn more on.

It was great to see that at the end of each sub topic there were discussions and debates amongst the participants. Some of them having worked closely with marketing team pitched in with challenges in execution and their view points. And they enjoyed learning about the latest trends like programmatic advertisement and discussing the case studies on related industry or comparable strategy.

It did not end here, they also volunteered to take up post lunch games to drive away the sleepy feeling after some nice lunch. So nice of them!

The results …

(At least as we see it). On the 3rd day we can see the ‘we will now make a difference to the digital marketing in Tata Sky’ look in their eyes. (but they had to wait for the next working day). And the key areas they wanted to contribute more post this workshop were

  1. Improving and optimising both the websites — the corporate and the self-serve one in areas of user experience, loading time, features etc.
  2. Look at their web analytics and make data mapping better to improve on the online sales and cart abandonment.
  3. Helping in creating assets for online advertisement like landing pages for better conversion.
  4. Implementing some of the new trends and techniques like AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
  5. Suggest on some of the SEO parameters and directly contribute to the on-page technical optimisation with regular audit in link building.
  6. And possibly building up ‘branded contents’?

So as the online course and workshop provider we were elated spending three days with eager participants enriching the delivery by their perspectives. We had a few things to learn as well.

This feedback sums it up pretty well.

Jhingalala!!

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Originally published at https://www.manipalprolearn.com on March 6, 2017

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