TOP 5 Skills Every Marketing Team Needs Successful
A marketer needs successful marketing skills in an ever-changing business environment. He plays the role of data analyst, engaging storyteller, digital marketing expert, and sociologist, to name a few. As markets change, trends change, and new technologies emerge, marketing teams must adapt quickly and enhance skills for successful marketing, or they run the risk of being left behind.
Of course, one person cannot possess all the various skills required to keep up with today’s world, and that is why you need a marketing team. One of the prevailing problems is that team members are hired based solely on their technical skills, without any regard for other core skills required, which leads to skill gaps.
5 skills in successful marketing
How will you find the missing skills in your marketing team? And what are you going to do about it? Here are 5 essential marketing skills that every marketer and marketing team needs right now.
1. Marketing strategy
Marketing has shifted from focusing on the product to focusing on the audience, so marketers today must be able to develop and implement appropriate and scalable strategies, and implement integrated campaigns that efficiently address your core audience. You will not benefit from having a technically skilled team if they do not have the skills needed to produce perfect results.
It’s also important now that marketers can devise strategies that support business goals. Marketing once struggled to prove company value — it’s not easy to track Brand Value in a spreadsheet, but now we have a wealth of data at our disposal, and it’s much easier to track campaigns directly to the results that are important to CEOs: sales and revenue. But don’t forget that more exposure means more accountability, and marketers need to know how to achieve these results.
2. Data analytics
Data analysis is one of the most powerful skills of successful marketing in the modern era. Marketing today is all about data: how many visitors to your site, what click-through rate (CTR) you have, how many interactions you have on certain content, and so on and so forth. Data analysis is one of the most important skills for successful marketing today.
There is now a wealth of information readily available via a variety of marketing and analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. This data can be used to provide deep market insight, make informed policy decisions, and track campaign success – all one has to do is understand it and apply it appropriately.
This is why your team needs an analytics professional who can interpret data correctly, and translate those interpretations into actionable goals.
3. Content Creation
It’s true that marketing is a numbers game now, but that doesn’t mean old-fashioned creativity isn’t important anymore, in fact, it’s more important than ever, especially with so many different platforms now available. Marketers can seamlessly transition from writing blog articles and technical reports (white papers) to writing short posts and tweets on social platforms.
4. Social Marketing
The social media monster is bigger than ever, and gone are the days when “social media management” meant posting a status update or uploading a photo every once in a while, there are just too many platforms to market to, and it seems almost impossible to keep up. All of them, and whenever you think you’ve got your back, a new update comes out, a new algorithm change, or a new platform launches.
Almost everyone agrees that social marketing is pivotal to the success of any company. There are currently 2.8 billion active social media users worldwide – that’s a penetration rate of about 37%. And these numbers are continuing to rise. Therefore, social media marketing is one of the successful marketing skills that should not be ignored.
5. Mobile marketing.
If you thought there were a lot of people on social media, you would be stunned to know that about two-thirds of the planet’s population now have mobile phones, that’s 4.92 billion people! This is not surprising, since more than half of the global web traffic now originates from mobile phones.
That’s why your core marketing team needs to know how to get the most out of mobile technology, whether through mobile-friendly web design, mobile ads, or mobile apps.
Do you lack one of the skills of successful marketing?
If you think that you have found a few gaps in the marketing team or that you are personally lacking as a marketer, don’t worry. Here are 3 steps you can take to give your team what it needs.
Recruit new team members
Hiring a person (or people) with the necessary skills is a useful solution—assuming there is the necessary funding to support the new employee.
If you decide to choose this path, be sure to look for candidates who have core capabilities, such as analytics, strategy and content creation, and not just technical skills, as these can always be studied or learned by doing.
Invest in training
If you do not have enough funding to hire new employees, training programs are another way to fill the gaps in the marketing team and learn the skills of successful marketing. While this option is cheaper than hiring new members, it does require a significant investment of time and money, especially if there is an opportunity cost associated with people having to stop working to be able to receive training.
You should also be prepared for some challenges that are inevitable. While training programs provide a good overview of skills, your employees may struggle to apply their new skills specifically to your business and clients at first.
Outsourcing to a marketing agency.
Outsourcing to a marketing agency has become the usual path taken by many companies. Having a marketing agency means that you will have a ready team of experts with extensive experience and modern marketing techniques, which will give a strong advantage to your business.
Being successful in marketing today requires a whole host of different skills, and those skills change over time. One example is the recent rapid and sudden popularity of video marketing, which has forced marketers everywhere to add “video marketer” to their resumes. Successful marketing skills are all your business needs to succeed in today’s market.