Essentially, a marketer needs a mix of these 6 essential skills every exceptional marketer needs to succeed.
The field of marketing is wide and vast — and it’s only continuing to grow every day. As marketing career paths evolve in today’s digital landscape, there are always new skills and topics that every marketer has to learn or brush up on. However, trying to navigate all the different skills to cultivate can be overwhelming. Hence we’ve rounded up a list of key soft and hard skills that any career-minded marketer definitely needs to thrive.
Here are the 6 essential skills every exceptional marketer needs:
Hard Skills
Creating effective marketing strategies requires marketers to leverage data, and that means knowing how to understand analytics. Unfortunately, MIT Sloan Management Review points out that 40% of companies are struggling to find and retain data analytics talent — but as a marketer, take this as an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. Successful marketers are well-versed on how to use and comprehend data from platforms such as Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Hubspot, among others, as it allows them to make data-driven decisions. You can take up courses or watch videos on how to understand and interpret the appropriate metrics correlated to campaign goals and key performance indicators.
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In today’s digital landscape, a key one of the 6 essential skills every exceptional marketer needs is content writing. Content marketing is everywhere. A healthy chunk of companies is constantly churning out new content every day to improve their SEO, as marketing experts from Ayima explain that relevant content is necessary to rank on search engines. Thus, any marketer who has the skills to write not just relevant, but unique and engaging content is highly valued in any industry. In fact, 78% of CMOs believe that custom content is the future of marketing, with 80% believing it should be central to marketing in general. That said, it’s imperative for an exceptional marketer to capitalise on this skill by taking writing and content creation courses, in addition, learning how to communicate any message effectively will set a great marketer aside from the rest.
There are tons of tools that can help marketers automate low-level tasks and improve customer service for any brand. However, knowing how to use the skills properly is a skill in itself. Creating steady workflows and understanding how to analyse the corresponding data to enable the desired result is vital. Fortunately, there are plenty of free and paid online courses that can teach you as a marketer, how to use popular automation tools, such as Hubspot and Marketo. Knowing what works and what doesn’t and mastering these tools will make you indispensable to most companies.
Soft Skills
Our founder Catherine Adenle emphasises the importance of establishing good working relationships, as it can affect your ability to work in a team or relate well to others. Not to mention, knowing how to build an understanding of your consumers and being able to effectively communicate that with your coworkers is vital to create strategies that work well. If you’re already good at this, great — but if not, try to improve your communication skills by attending seminars or reading articles online.
Infographic: 6 Essential Skills Every Exceptional Marketer Needs
As a marketer, you’re never going to be working on just one project at a time. A lot of marketers wear a lot of hats, especially if they’re on small teams, so practice building your skills in this area. What goes hand-in-hand with multitasking is knowing how to prioritise tasks, so you can attend to the most important duties first. Ask yourself what activities or tasks will make the largest impact on the business, or what is most important with the imminent deadline. Remember that as a marketer, you will be judged based on the value you add, so make tasks that add value a priority.
Marketing is continuously growing, and while all these 6 essential skills every exceptional marketer needs are necessary, knowing how to adapt to changes in the industry is a skill that’s highly valued. This means staying on top of the latest trends and looking at new ways to meet the needs of your consumers and clients. For some people, this is a hard skill to have, especially if they’re stuck to their own beliefs and processes — so being willing to unlearn what you know and make new mistakes to learn from is a great way to keep moving forward in your career.
Now that you have explored these 6 essential skills every exceptional marketer needs, what else can you add? Leave your comments below.
This post is exclusively written for catherinescareercorner.com
By Jillian Newton
