The role of a marketer in simple terms is to explain and promote a brand and the products and services that it offers to the public. Marketers are also tasked with understanding and successfully explaining the interests, needs, and preferences of the target market to the company. Successful marketers are professionals who are able to drive sales through improving customer relationships and subsequently boosting the company’s revenue. While advertising is one branch of marketing that we are all familiar with, there are various other fields to consider including customer support, public relations, market research, and more.
In the past, marketing was often heavily based on personal experience and intuition, but today, modern marketing has evolved into a very data-heavy position that involves collecting, sorting, and analyzing huge amounts of data in order to determine the best strategies for marketing to customers based on their behaviors and trends. Today, these are some of the main skills that employers are looking for in good marketing professionals.
Communication Skills
Since it involves communicating information about brands, products, and services to the public, marketing is a form of professional communication. Marketers are tasked with a wide range of communication tasks from creating scripts for TV and social media ads to writing ad copy or press releases. Marketers may get involved with communication through design, creating multimedia campaigns, or writing ad copy, which requires them to have a general understanding of who the end-user is and what they are looking for in order to be able to get the message across successfully. Because of this, communication and listening skills are hugely important. Not only do marketers need to be able to communicate with the audience to determine what they are looking for, but they will often need to communicate effectively within their team and when collaborating with other departments to ensure the best results.
Analytical Skills
Today, marketing requires a lot of data analysis based on research that is designed to determine the wants and needs of the audience. Marketers need to be analytically minded and be able to carefully strategize around the analysis in order to ensure that they are meeting the needs of the audience most effectively. New information may also leave marketers in a position where they need to quickly change course, and it’s important to be able to swiftly draw new, logical conclusions based on data gathered so far. Click here to learn more about the role of a modern marketer and how data analytics plays a huge part in the role of marketing professionals today.
Public Speaking
Many marketers need to become good at public speaking. Whether you’re coming up with a new marketing campaign or marketing initiative, it’s usually essential that you are able to pitch your ideas to your employers, colleagues, or clients through a presentation. Some marketing positions may also involve giving presentations to large groups of potential customers. Because of this, marketers benefit from developing their public speaking skills and getting comfortable with speaking in front of groups and handling on-the-spot questions.
Creativity
Marketing is not only a very analytical career choice, but it also has the option to be very creative. Many marketers are creative thinkers who like to go outside the box and come up with new and exciting ideas to make a company stand out from the crowd. As a marketer, you will need to be skilled at quickly coming up with new, exciting ideas that will not only appeal to your target audience but also current customers, in order to ensure that the business doesn’t get left behind in favor of a competitor. This could involve coming up with unusual themes for advertisements, coming up with new ideas for loyalty programs or customer rewards, planning events, writing interesting ad copy, and having an input in aspects such as product packaging or website design.
Work Under Pressure
Marketing can be a very stressful career option to get into. The deadlines can be demanding, lots of things can go wrong with moments to spare, and you can’t always accurately predict a response to a marketing campaign. With the business profits and revenue riding on the success of marketing campaigns, it’s essential for any good marketer to be skilled at working well under pressure and dealing with the various stresses of this job. Strong time management skills, the ability to learn from criticism, problem-solving skills, strong organizational skills, being resilient and able to thrive under pressure, and being able to keep a calm head in a crisis are just some of the key skills that any good marketer needs to possess.
Negotiation
Negotiation is an often-forgotten skill that many marketers use on a regular basis. Whether you find yourself negotiating with clients to manage their expectations or decide on a timeline or budget, or are working with vendors and designers who are going to be working on your campaign, a professional marketer often needs to be able to drive a hard bargain. In terms of the marketing campaigns that they are responsible for, a marketing professional will often be tasked with evaluating marketing and advertising proposals, evaluating campaign effectiveness, influencing others, managing budgets, negotiating terms and rates, cutting costs, and considering profit and sales volume when setting prices.
Tech Skills
Last but not least, every successful modern marketer needs to be skilled in technology. Today, there are very few marketing roles where technology isn’t essential, with so many different software programs and tools deployed by marketing campaigns to get the best results. Marketers are faced with a huge range of options when it comes to leveraging technology, from software designed to facilitate project management to track campaign progress, to analytic programs that gather data about a customer base which is then analyzed and used to put together data-driven marketing campaigns for the future.
Modern marking is a fast-paced, ever-changing position with a lot riding on the marketer’s shoulders. If you are looking to get into a career in marketing, these are just some of the key skills that you will need to develop.
