Membership Update Summer 2023

As we send you our greetings for the summer, we can smell the barbecues, feel the sand between our toes and are already enjoying lots of sport on TV - from Wimbledon to the upcoming Women’s Soccer World Cup which promises to light up our screens from July 20. 

We’re all watching the world of social media be upturned (or not) by Instagram Threads with Twitter reacting on the sidelines, Generative AI continues to blow up many areas of industry and ways of thinking, and TikTok continues to be a cause for regulatory concern, from Montana to whole countries. We can hardly keep up! 

The clock ticked right up to one minute after midnight on July 1, when Google Analytics 4 fully took over from Universal Analytics. Our four-part series helping you prepare for the switchover was hugely popular - if you missed it, you can watch out for our brand new short course on GA4 (power members only). 

Keeping up with our Members

July means that it’s Member Month at the Digital Marketing Institute! It has now been FIVE years since we started up this community, and we now have… drumroll…over 280,000 members in almost every country of the world. We love to keep an eye on how you are interacting within our Community Forum, tracking the Jobs Board, joining our monthly webinars, subscribing to our podcast, and learning and networking on our social channels, especially on our super active LinkedIn channel where we have over 200,000 followers.

So, keeping with tradition, we are delighted to offer some special benefits during this, our member month. Keep an eye on your emails for new membership benefits. 

Power members can now avail of not one, but two new short courses available to power members - on GA4 and on Data & Data Visualization.

We’re also delighted to announce that, for the 4th year in a row, we have been shortlisted at the Memcom Awards - for Membership Organization of the Year and Best Podcast.

Keeping up with You

We are always looking for ways to help you with your career development: if you’ve been following our weekly member emails you’ll have spotted some of our career-focussed pieces. Here are some of the most popular pieces for you to bookmark:

• 5 Key Elements of a Killer LinkedIn Summary
• How to Become a Social Media Manager - eBook
• Remote Side Hustles: 4 Ideas to Consider
• What Does a PPC Specialist Do?

We continue to keep you informed on what you need to know in your digital marketing career and always appreciate your feedback. Don’t forget, if you’ve written a blog or have a super-useful toolkit you think others in the community would benefit from, send it to us for consideration for publishing on the library. 

Tell us what you think

Through July we're running a membership survey to learn about your working life, how you feel about using AI and some other insights we can gain about our entire community. With the results from the survey we can work to better tailor our content and activity offerings to you.

Take a couple of minutes to fill out our survey here and be in with the chance to win an Amazon gift voucher! 

Keeping up with AI and ChatGPT

As mentioned in our Spring update, we want to be sure we’re at the heart of understanding what AI means now for digital marketers, since the extraordinary adoption of ChatGPT and generative AI platforms. Since then, Bing has adapted ChatGPT into its search, and Google is in the process of fully integrating GPT into its processes, and by our Winter update we expect to report on how much has changed in the world of search during 2023.

There is a lot of concern about how the uses and limits of AI will pan out but there are so many benefits and advantages to using it right now, particularly in terms of productivity, content ideation and development, and coding. 

We learnt a lot from our webinar on GPT in February with Clark Boyd and Danny Richman and could see from your feedback the massive interest in learning more. That goes for us all! 

To help you understand how to use this exciting, but daunting, new tool (or endless suite of tools) we are running a video series where Will Francis and Danny Richman delve into practical use cases, tools and tips in AI. You can follow the series of short videos every week on the DMI library, or on our YouTube, or in a monthly audio form on our podcast.

ChatGPT is in particularly strong use among digital marketers so we are running a webinar on July 26 with Joe Williams who’ll cover clever ways to use prompting to supercharge your PPC and SEO juices. Sign up for the webinar today!

If you’re a newbie to ChatGPT and want to get started, just check out Joe’s intro video on using ChatGPT.

Keeping up with Social Media

Social Media never stops! We’re lucky to have some super experts within our DMI circle, not least of whom is Alison Battisby. One more evergreen topic she covered for us in May was an insightful webinar on Social Media ROI - watch it today if you missed it and keep up with her sharp insights on LinkedIn.

Instagram Threads launched just a week ago but within a couple of days had 10 million users! We'll keep an eye on that to see where it goes, and we recently considered that as one of 10 alternative social media platforms. The main platforms aren't going away either so that's why we have updated our comprehensive 50-page eBook on the main social media platforms (power members).

Keeping up your CPD Credits

For those of you who are Power members and are CPD-eligible, don’t forget to keep up to date with great resources that will boost your CPD credits. Here are a few pieces.

• eBooks on Customer Experience and Social Media Platforms 
• Handy toolkit to help you establish your B2B Buyer Personas
• A detailed tool and planner to help you establish viability to expanding your market internationally
• Our very popular new Strategy Action Plan toolkit
• Keep up with our webinars - watch them live or recorded and earn credits! There are over 80 on there now.

Don’t forget, you can quickly view all Power content here. 

We recently ran a survey with our community to find out about how CPD credits are considered among you - your feedback was invaluable and we will take it on board as we plan the rest of the year. Watch this space! 

If you’re not a POWER member, you can easily sign up today. You can explore the benefits that your POWER member colleagues and friends enjoy, and find a list of these benefits here. 

Keeping up the Podcasts

As always, we’re covering as many voices within marketing and working life as we can. One of our most popular episodes so far this year (apart from the AI with DMI) was our interview with the Toronto-based head of marketing at a B2B design services platform on growing their marketing platform from zero. 

Some other podcast highlights from the last few months include a real UX expert who clearly explained his field from the point of view of a marketer, a lively chat with a veteran advertising creative director, and a truly insightful conversation with a psychologist at a major tech firm who previously worked with disadvantaged inner-city communities.

Our podcast survey is still open so have a look at that and share your feedback with us on the pod (and be in with a chance to win an Amazon voucher!) View podcast survey.

We have entered the podcast into the British Podcast Awards and we would love it if you would give us a vote in the listener’s choice – please do so at this link!!!

That’s enough to be getting on with for this month! We wish you a wonderful summer (or winter if you’re on the other side of the world), and don’t forget to join us for our ChatGPT webinar on July 26. 

If you have any questions or feedback, you can always contact us at membership@digitalmarketinginstitute.com.