10 Skills Every Marketer Needs to Succeed

1. Storytelling –The first skill and one of the most important jobs of a marketer is telling a brand’s story and expressing this so consumers can understand and relate to it. Using a narrative or appealing to emotions is one of the best ways to communicate a brand's message and resonate with your target audience.

Creating a human element to a brand can allow you to produce genuine care for your product amongst the consumer base.

2. Teamwork –If you wish to be a successful marketer, in the long run, you can’t place your entire workload on yourself. It’s important to trust in the team around you and communicate amongst the different departments within your team to ensure the work gets done.

Research indicates that 97% of employees and executives believe a lack of alignment within a team can directly impact the outcome of a project. Therefore, utilizing the different skill sets in your workplace can help ensure you provide the best services to your clients.

3. Social media –Over the past decade, social media has grown to become one of the most effective tools in a marketer’s arsenal. With almost every brand on the planet boasting an online presence you must understand how to effectively market through social media.

Understanding how to apply current trends amongst the different social media platforms will allow you to provide the best services to your clients, and if utilized correctly can help you to provide a competitive edge against rival brands.

4. Communication –This section can be broken down into three key parts:

- Understanding how to communicate amongst your team will help to ensure maximum efficiency within the workplace, allowing tasks and objectives to be completed to the highest standard and ahead of time.

- Communicating with the client will allow your team to stay on track and create an end product that satisfies the client and provides them with the services they need to enhance business performance.

- Knowing how to communicate with your audience. As a marketer your main role is to create a message that resonates with your target audience, therefore effective communication is a necessary component in producing a successful campaign.

5. Writing –A large majority of your time will be spent taking your clients' ideas and transforming them into the written word.

Knowing how to coherently write out the different components of your campaign allows your client to understand exactly what you’re trying to communicate. Furthermore, expressing key messages to your target audience will require you to be malleable in your writing, such as adapting your tone to match the client’s persona.

6. SEO –Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of improving the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through enhancing search results. Understanding how to appropriately apply this technique as a marketer will aid you in creating heightened consumer engagement for your clients.

Improving website ranking, increasing website traffic, and improving organic visibility are just a few ways to expand your clients' digital brand presence. Here are some more ways to improve your SEO adoption.

7. Time management –It’s very unlikely that you’re ever going to find yourself having the time to completely dedicate yourself to one single project. Therefore, a crucial skill to possess is the ability to divide your time up amongst tasks. Or more importantly, knowing which activities require more attention and when they require the most time spent on them

Here are some tools to help you stay on top of your tasks and manage your time.  

8. Design –You may not be a graphic designer yourself but as a marketer, a key part of your role will require working closely with the team around you, especially the design team.

Having a basic understanding of design illustration tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud will provide you with a greater understanding of how design impacts the message you’re trying to create for a brand. Allowing you to communicate effectively with the design team to achieve the client's end goal.

9. Research –There are times when working for a client you may be faced with writing a marketing strategy for an industry you have absolutely no knowledge about. Or perhaps tasked with the job of marketing a product to a target audience you know nothing about.

It is essential that during these times to you can research efficiently. By significantly reducing the time you spend on this task you are allocating you more time to build the most effective strategy for your client.

10. Innovation - The final skill you will require as a marketer is your ability to see into the future. This doesn’t mean you have to be a psychic (although that may help) but adopting a forward-thinking mindset will ensure you are continually adopting the latest trends into your services, allowing you to always utilize the most effective methods in your work, which can provide services that achieve optimal results for business performance.

Combining these skills

Now it may be unreasonable to assume that each of these skills will be leveled up in the course of a few days or weeks. However, by taking time out of your life to consciously work on each of these skills you will find significant gains within your workplace performance.

Moreover, many of these skills will directly translate over to other aspects of your life, helping you to improve your interactions with others and how you handle the many stresses that life may present to you.


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