9 Skills Essential to a Successful Marketing

9 Skills Essential to a Successful Marketing

Know your market

The success of a marketing organization depends on its ability to understand its target market. The marketer who can understand and effectively articulate what customers and competitors are doing has a foundational marketing skill .

Communicate, negotiate and network

Good marketers are strong communicators and astute business operators. Your team's communication skills will help them make deals with suppliers and service providers, maintain relationships with your customers, and build valuable networks in your market.

Know your strengths and weaknesses

Evaluating and understanding your business' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis) will help you to make informed decisions and deliver your marketing effectively. Know the pros and cons of your business's operating systems, financial commitments, legal obligations and workforce skills.

Collaborate with your sales team

If you are a larger business, you may have separate sales and marketing teams. Your sales team are an essential part of your marketing success and involving them in developing your marketing strategies will help you motivate and focus your salespeople to achieve your marketing objectives.

Understand the 80/20 Rule

Everyone’s heard of the 80/20 Rule, but you may not realize how important it is in the world of marketing. Also known as Pareto’s Principle, in business the rule tells us that eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of your customers. The actual percentages may vary, but essentially it means that you have to recognize where your profits come from and specifically target those customers. Your marketing and advertising budget should take account of this, or you will be wasting time and effort.

Use customer data to make decisions

Marketers now have access to a tremendous amount of data. As a result, companies are able to understand their customers much better than before. Marketers who learn how to collect and analyze customer data in an effort to make better decisions will be in extremely high demand for decades to come.

Critical Thinking

In a 2010 survey by the American Management Association (AMA), a majority of executives responded that they need employees with solid critical thinking skills, but the current pool of workers has not sufficiently developed them. Critical thinking, or the ability to analyze situations or statements and determine their validity, is the foundation on which modern management professionals build their careers. Critical thinking breeds creative thinking, which in turn solves problems. This is exactly what employers need from managers.

Analytical Skills

Successful marketing managers have analytical minds. They know the value of the vast amount of data available today, and are highly interested in what that data can reveal about consumer behavior, efficacy of various marketing approaches and more. The best managers also know how to look beyond the data and pick up on trends and patterns that can lead to better, more successful marketing efforts.

Technical Skills

Because technology will continue to advance and closely influence how marketing is accomplished, it will always be important for marketing managers to be tech savvy. Customer engagement will occur in more ways, and competing for their attention will mean delivering the services and information they want, through user-friendly apps and relationship-building tools. So while marketing managers will depend on technology innovators to create the tools, they must be familiar with what consumers want and how best to deliver it.

Marketing growth strategies

 Intensive Growth Strategies

Ansoff's Product-Market Expansion Grid :

      Product/Market Expansion Grid Strategies

Corporate management's first course of action should be a review of opportunities for improving existing businesses. Ansoff proposed a useful framework for detecting new intensive growth opportunities called a "product-market expansion grid" :

1-Market penetration strategy : is a growth strategy increasing sales to current market segments without changing the product .

2-Market development strategy :is a growth strategy that identifies and develops new market segments for current products .

3-Product development strategy is a growth strategy that offers new or modified products to existing market segments .

4-Diversification strategy :is a growth strategy for starting up or acquiring businesses outside the company’s current products and markets .

The company first considers whether it could gain more market share with its current products in their current markets (market-penetration strategy). Next it considers whether it can find or develop new markets for its current products (market-development strategy). Then it considers whether it can develop new products of potential interest to its current markets (product-development strategy). Later it will also review opportunities to develop new products for new markets (diversification strategy).

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Guerrilla marketing

Guerrilla marketing 

is an advertisement strategy concept designed for small businesses to promote their products or services in an unconventional way with little budget to spend. This involves high energy and imagination focusing on grasping the attention of the public in more personal and memorable level.

The original term was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book ‘Guerrilla Advertising’,  relates to the small tactic strategies used by armed civilians. Many of these tactics includes ambushes, sabotage, raids and elements of surprise. Much like guerrilla warfare, guerrilla marketing uses the same sort of tactics in the marketing industry.

it is awesome way to get you noticed, set you apart from your competition and earn you a reputation for being fun and different--all tailored to whatever budget you have available.

the most important ways guerrilla marketing is different from traditional marketing :

·         "Instead of investing money in the marketing process, you invest time, energy and imagination."

·         "Instead of ignoring customers once they've purchased, you have a fervent devotion to customer follow-up."

·         "Instead of believing that single marketing weapons such as advertising work, guerrillas know that only marketing combinations work."

Types

Ambient marketing

Ambient communication is a complex form of corporate communication that uses elements of the environment, including nearly every available physical surface, to convey messages that elicit customer engagement,  It is a compile of intelligence, flexibility and effective use of the atmosphere.

Ambush marketing

Ambush marketing is a form of associative marketing, utilized by an organization to capitalize upon the awareness, attention, goodwill, and other benefits, generated by having an association with an event or property, without that organization having an official or direct connection to that event or property,  Essentially, a company or a product seeks to ride on the publicity value of a major event without having contributed to the financing of the event through sponsorship.

It is typically seen at major events where rivals of official sponsors use creative and sometimes covert tactics to build an association with the event and increase awareness for their brands. For example, Nike during the 2012 London Olympics, Nike created ‘find your Greatness’ spots where they featured athletes from several locations called London (but without showing the real London or referring to the Olympic games) which helped in building a strong association between London Olympics and Nike.

Stealth marketing

Stealth marketing is a deliberate act of entering, operating in, or exiting a market in a furtive, secretive or imperceptible manner, or an attempt to do so People get involved with the product without them actually knowing that they are the part of advertisement campaign. This needs to be done very carefully because if the participants are made aware of the campaign, it will have a negative effect on the brand and, because of this, can be ethical doubts about its use.

Viral marketing

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions. Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing

Street marketing 

street marketing can be used as a general term for some activities as : Distribution of flyers or products , Product animations , Human animations , Road shows, Event actions .

 

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