9 Crucial Skills You Need as a Marketer
See also: Writing a Marketing StrategyMarketing involves the use of skills to promote a product, service, or idea. These skills should help a marketer define their audience and judge your product, service, or idea.
As a marketer, you should be able to identify your products or service’s most appealing features and sell them to your potential clients.
In addition, refined writing, verbal, and public speaking skills allow you to clearly pitch and attract your audience’s attention and eventually convince them to buy.
With the right marketing skills, you’ll be able to effectively engage and build a relationship between prospective clients and a business. These skills also help you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors through aggressive marketing.
Here are the crucial skills you need as a marketer.
1. Search engine optimization and marketing skills
The only difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO involves optimizing a site to get traffic from organic search engine results. In contrast, search engine marketing (SEM) focuses on getting visibility from organic and paid search engine results using PPC (paid per click).
SEM is ideal where you want to get faster results than SEO. Your goal as an SEO marketer is to boost sales. SEO increases a site's rankings on search engines through on-page optimization, which involves URLs, keyword tags, and internal linking to improve a site's visibility and user experience, leading to more traffic and sales.
2. Content marketing skills
Content marketing skills are an integral part of advertising as marketers need them in almost all marketing strategies.
To be a good marketer, you should create web content that informs and persuades site visitors and create social media content to target new and existing clients. In addition, you may need to write email content for lead nurturing and influencing repeat customers. Marketers should conduct keyword research and add relevant keywords into their content to help the business site rank high on search engines, increase web traffic, and lead generation, boosting sales.
3. Storytelling skills
A successful marketer knows how to take advantage of potential clients’ emotions by telling relatable stories that prompt sales.
Present your product or service values in a way that directly relates to a customer’s needs and pain points to impact lead generation, net sales, and customer experience. The stories you tell your prospects should help them understand why they should care about your brand and inspire them to buy or convert. Narrate stories that resonate with their needs to capture their emotions and push them to take action.
4. Ability to know your customers
To create marketing strategies that will work, know your customers. Look at their purchasing behavior and highlight their needs to develop a product strategy that works.
If you're new in marketing, consider marketing segmentation that involves dividing customers into groups based on their purchasing power, demographics, and others to understand them better. You may also track them to find out where they hang out so you can know the things they like and the competitors they follow, and why. This will help you create marketing campaigns that target their needs and attract their attention.
5. Digital marketing skills
A marketer with digital marketing skills uses digital platforms to build brand awareness and generate leads.
Some of these digital platforms include social media, corporate blogs, and company websites. You should use analytics to measure and identify weaknesses across the digital platforms and improve performance. Since digital marketing is broad, you may choose to specialize in specific skill sets or become a jack-of-all-trades. Additionally, you can use several digital advertising strategies to create brand awareness, reach your targets and customers, increase lead generation to boost website traffic, and increase sales.
6. Social media management skills
As more businesses embrace social media, more potential clients are also turning to social channels for product or service purchase advice.
This is why you need to include social media management in your marketing strategies. Consider using brand influencers to boost your marketing campaigns or create your campaigns based on industry trends to increase customer engagement. You may also gather customer reviews from social media and address any negative reviews as they arise to build brand credibility.
As a marketer, you should know which social media marketing platforms will best suit your products or services and specialize in managing them.
7. Analytical skills
With continuous technological advancements, the marketing industry has also evolved, meaning more responsibilities and more data.
In modern marketing, you can now track, link, and measure everything you do. You also have access to a lot of customer data and ways to boost your marketing campaigns. With all this data, you need an analytical mind to digest and simplify it into actionable insights. An analytical marketer helps you understand your prospects by looking at their demographic data, which builds a buyer persona. It also allows you to make data-driven predictions by detecting trends and shifts in real-time or before they occur and enabling you to create strategies to take advantage of opportunities before the competition realizes.
8. Return on investment (ROI) measurement skills
ROI metrics must be calculated and tracked in order to measure the success of a marketing campaign and its effects on profits.
This helps determine how much marketing efforts are contributing towards a company's revenue. ROI enables you to justify the marketing resources spent, allocate marketing budgets, and measure a campaign's success to establish baselines and change marketing tactics to maximize impact. To improve your marketing ROI, set clear objectives and develop marketing costs. In addition, consider leveraging a marketing analytics platform to track your customers across different channels to get clear insights on the use of their formulas for a more accurate and efficient ROI measurement.
9. Excellent research skills
To create quality content and effective marketing campaigns, a marketer should have good research skills and a keen eye for detail.
Knowing how to effectively research topics relating to products and services you'll market, competitor's marketing techniques, and your prospective clients boost your work's quality, increasing the success chances of your marketing campaigns.
Endnote
Your marketing skills can make or break your company's success, as that's what drives sales. Add these tips to your must-have marketing skills list to become an avid marketer.
About the Author
Harry Wilson is the Head of Digital Marketing Department at Globex Outreach. He helps clients grow their online businesses and occasionally writes blogs to share his experience with other professionals.