The 5 Most Important Skills to Cultivate in Your Marketing Department
This article discusses what qualities in a marketer help make a marketing team stronger, as well as how to narrow down an overwhelming list of resumes to make the right hire.
Jonha Richman
When it’s time to bring in a new addition to your marketing team, finding the right person can be an arduous task. This article discusses what qualities in a marketer help make a marketing team stronger, as well as how to narrow down an overwhelming list of resumes to make the right hire.
Finding the Right Fit with the Right Skillset
Hiring good people is often a daunting task. In fact, an astonishingly low percentage of new hires do well; just 19 per cent succeed in their role, with the majority lacking the minimum level of coachability required of them. Incorrect hiring choices lead to a difficult training process — one that is often costly and, ultimately, wasteful.
Hiring exceptional marketers is imperative: Your marketing department is your brand, identity, voice, and reputation. They are the heart of any organization as they directly connect the consumer to your company. Much is at stake when bringing a marketer on board, so it is crucial to hire the best of the best.
Thankfully, hiring and training exemplary marketers is possible. Focusing on a few key skills can help guide you from the first steps — like sifting through resumes and conducting face-to-face interviews — to the last stages of onboarding and mentorship. It takes quite a bit of work to capture top talent, but if you devote yourself to the process, your marketing department will certainly be rewarded, regardless of today’s KPIs.
Here are the five most important skills to cultivate in your marketing department.
Versatility
The overwhelming majority of new hires fail due to a lack of adaptability. According to Leadership IQ, 26 per cent of them fail due to an inability to incorporate feedback from their bosses and coworkers. The smallest percentage, 11 per cent, were unsuccessful due to technical incompetency. By far, it is most important for workers to possess the unteachable skill of versatility: the ability to learn new things, excel at new tasks, and respond to failure.
Superb marketers aren’t necessarily ones with long lists of qualifications, certifications, or degrees. They have the ability to implement criticism into their work. They assess their own weaknesses and strengths. Most importantly, they are able to pick up new skills and technologies with ease.
Curiosity
In order to excel in the ever-changing, rapidly expanding world of digital marketing, you need an unending love of learning. Again, more important than the number of technical skills listed on a resume or the amount of jargon memorized is the drive to learn. Content marketers must constantly adjust their strategies according to social media trends and changes in Google’s ranking algorithm, for example. A good marketer must be able to track moving targets, which requires training, taking advantage of mentorship opportunities, and self-guided learning through online resources, books, manuals, and guides to stay up-to-date.
Leadership Potential
Everyone on your team should have leadership qualities. A team comprised of self-motivated individuals who effectively cooperate and communicate will undoubtedly outperform those made up of unmotivated ones. Many new hires fall short of expectations because they struggle to manage their own emotions or muster up the motivation to perform at a high level. If you hire self-starters, however, you avoid this problem. It can be difficult to ascertain if someone has the ability to lead, but there are certain qualities to look for when searching for leaders.
Leaders:
- Make promises and deliver on them
- Offer solutions
- Extrapolate specific tasks from larger goals
- Think abstractly but act concretely
Writing Skills
Marketing well means communicating well. Writing is the basis of all your marketing communication. Everyone in your department, whether they are a part of the editorial, acquisition, or monetization team, should understand the basics of copywriting and content creation. A successful marketing department knows how to speak to its target audience. Every pamphlet, email blast and Facebook post should tell a compelling story that encompasses your brand. In order to do this, every marketer needs to be part-author or editor.
Analytics Prowess
Marketing is driven by creativity, but that creativity must be guided by metrics. You need someone who understands how to gather data, extract its meaning, and apply it to increase ROI. They can look at open rates for email campaigns, cross-reference them with previous ones, and adjust headlines, content, and images to increase those rates and drive conversions. They read a website’s Google Analytics dashboard and implement changes to reduce its bounce-rate. The most skilled marketers incorporate market research in their advertising efforts, and can discriminate between meaningful metrics and superfluous data. They use relevant numbers, charts, and percentages to make important creative decisions.
Build a Strong Marketing Team, Strengthen Your Brand
Adding someone new to your team is a great way to embolden your marketing department’s senior members and strengthen your company’s culture. When coached properly, a new teammate can help fill gaps in your marketing strategy by learning from, pivoting with, and contributing to a growth-oriented team.
Versatile, curious, self-driven hires will ensure all your employees are committed to learning, refining, and synthesizing input. Invest in employees who have copywriting skills and understand data-driven analysis in order to guarantee their success down the road. Hiring and training will always be a time-intensive task, but by focusing on these key skills you can help make certain your efforts are not in vain.
Make sure your marketing efforts between your blog, social media, and other channels are coordinated. Watch a demo of our Marketing Cloud platform to see how you can take your marketing to the next level.
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