Any marketer worthy of the name is a skilled communicator, wordsmith, and out-of-the-box thinker. The trick to standing out even in a field as competitive as marketing is to invest in skills others lack or wouldn’t even begin to associate with your craft.
This article examines six non-marketing areas in which you should start improving. Doing so will increase your value as a versatile marketer and make you a more well-rounded person to boot.
Data Analysis
Shifting their perspective to coincide with the company leadership’s single greatest advantage any marketer can gain. C-suite executives concern themselves most with the impact marketing campaigns have on the bottom line. Things like engaging copy, striking visuals, and maintaining the company’s voice are only as relevant as the revenue they help bring in.
Successful marketers will craft their strategies to satisfy this goal. Equally important is their ability to prove marketing’s usefulness, and mastering data analytics is the most practical way of obtaining provable results.
Data analytics involves making sense of large quantities of data collected during your marketing efforts. A thorough analysis can reveal anything from customer demographics to focus on through emerging trends to opportunities to outperform the competition.
After you master a few of the most popular data analytics tools, like Google Analytics to calculate concurrent users, you should also work on the presentation. Being able to distill your conclusions into concrete talking points that appraise the higher-ups of your successes and challenges that need overcoming makes their continued support much more likely.
A Holistic Approach to Marketing
Our first suggestion touches on a broader mindset you should adopt as a marketer. Some of the most successful marketing specialists come from adjacent, financial, and even technical backgrounds. Their strength is the ability to recognize the needs of different stakeholders and try to fulfill them through marketing efforts.
Sales is an excellent example. Marketers with sales backgrounds thoroughly understand what it takes to discover leads and close deals. They can use that knowledge to create campaigns that attract the right kind of customer. Marketing efforts targeting people already interested in your niche will pave the way for easier and more successful sales pitches.
It’s similar to customer service and product design backgrounds. Understanding the two helps marketers take a customer-first approach. It addresses their pain points, emphasizes custom-made solutions, and reassures prospects that your company will respect their rights.
What if you’re a marketer with no adjacent experience?
Then, you should rely on curiosity. Curious marketers excel since they have a genuine interest in all aspects of business operations. The more they know about everything it takes to keep the company running, the easier it is to come up with more impactful marketing solutions.
Curious marketers are also lifelong learners. They don’t shy away from shadowing their colleagues and learning more about the inner workings of finance, HR, product design, or any other department to further their marketing goals.
Leveraging Current & Upcoming Tech Trends
Marketing is both a beneficiary and a driving force of innovation. It’s been at the forefront of communication developments from the newspaper to the World Wide Web. Trailblazers who recognized new opportunities before others also got to reap the benefits. The same is true in our times.
While not the only trend to follow, artificial intelligence is the one marketers will want to seize first. AI can help in numerous ways, from generating persuasive copy to augmenting our data analytics endeavors.
AI’s ultimate marketing implementation focuses on the field’s Holy Grail – specialized marketing campaigns tailored to individual customers’ preferences, worldviews, and spending habits. We’re not there yet, but tech giants are contributing their clout and considerable sums towards advancing AI’s development. It’s advancing at a breakneck pace, and you do not want to be caught off guard.
It’s important not to lose sight of more mundane advances either. Keeping tabs on your industry’s newest advances or upcoming features of your most frequently used digital tools ensures you’ll stay ahead of the curve. Foresight and adaptability are vital to your continuing success.
Using Cybersecurity Best Practices
Marketers regularly take on large projects with tight deadlines, so additional requirements come off as hindrances. All too often, cybersecurity falls under that extra weight category. It should underpin whatever else you’re doing in the digital space instead.
The nature of your job exposes you to sensitive information. On the one hand, marketers deal with personally identifiable data like their customers’ contact and payment data. On the other, they handle information unsuitable for public release. This includes patents, trade secrets, or info on products currently in development.
Failing to secure such information can lead to a financial and reputational disaster. Data breach costs frequently reach seven digits and are often the result of careless human behavior. Lack of judgment and cybersecurity awareness is an even bigger problem when it comes to social engineering attempts like spear phishing. These turn employees into unwitting accomplices in some of the most successful thefts carried out today.
Your IT department bears the brunt of responsibility regarding cyberattacks. Even so, due diligence on your part helps uphold security and integrity. If you aren’t already, start using only the latest software versions. Encrypt sensitive files and stay away from public Wi-Fi when conducting company business. Make sure you’re using long & unique passwords and reliable password managers (not Excel table) to store them another lock away.
Awareness of Legal Requirements
The best marketing campaigns combine impactful copy with memorable images & videos. It’s tempting to speed things up by using assets you find on the internet or have generative AI like Midjourney whip up for you. While convenient, these potentially open your company up to legal liabilities.
A working understanding of copyright and other laws will help you develop best practices for content sourcing. It’s best to create your own, even if you shoot it through a smartphone camera. If your company already has a dedicated following, ask your customers to contribute content, too.
Close to four-fifths of consumers value user-generated content more than a company’s formal marketing. Authenticity is a major factor in steering their choices. Yet, consumers find that only half the content companies put out qualifies. Focusing on more authentic marketing while leveraging your loyal customers’ contributions is a winning combo.
Consumer Psychology
You can think up the fanciest, most SEO-friendly campaign and still fail to attract enough attention to meet sales goals. People won’t care about your products if the presentation fails to strike a chord. That’s where knowledge of consumer psychology comes in.
Consumer psychology seeks to understand and benefit from people’s behavior in a consumer role. It uncovers their motivations for purchasing something, their perception of the world, and their attitudes towards products.
Implementing consumer psychology will let you leverage people’s beliefs, habits, and how they gain confidence in a product to sell yours more successfully. If you’re selling in the global market, you’ll also want to develop an understanding of different cultures and their mores. That will help your campaigns resonate with locals while avoiding insensitivities.
Conclusion
As a modern marketing specialist, you need to broaden your horizons to stay on top of your game. We hope the insights you gained from this article will jumpstart your journey!