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.