Essential skills for effective marketing

A marketer is a person who knows the tastes and preferences of the audience well and is able to offer exactly what potential buyers need. Let’s see what hard and soft skills a person should have to be a great specialist.

Hard skills

• Conduct business correspondence.

Most of a marketer’s job is communicating with clients, colleagues, and platform support. It is very important to understand the client, be able to clearly formulate thoughts, be polite, and respect people’s boundaries.

• Basic knowledge of analytics.

To understand how effective email marketing is, you need to track the results of your emails. Analyze how effective the mechanics you used in your emails are. Customize audience segments to send more targeted emails. This is impossible without knowledge of special tools: Excel, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Power BI, and others. Of course, HTML, CSS, XML knowledge is must-have.

• Basic knowledge of design, copywriting, and layout.

To correctly set tasks, you need to know what specialists in different departments are doing. This allows you to accept tasks with high quality, understand what the performer did and why, and also be able to fix something yourself if the specialist is busy.

• Strategy Development.

Email newsletters are most effective as part of a single strategy, where there is a place for other promotion channels: SMS, push notifications, messenger marketing. It’s great if you understand how these channels interact with each other. It’s even better when you can build a strategy for their interaction.

Soft skills

• Curiosity.

Digital is a field that is developing very quickly. You have just read the new information, but it is already out of date. You have to constantly run to keep up. You can use Facebook, telegram channels, newsletters of agencies, articles on professional resources as sources of information. The main thing is the ability to sort the information.

• Flexibility.

In marketing, we are constantly faced with tasks that have to be done for the first time. It often happens that there is no one to ask for advice – none of the colleagues have done this before. You have to learn and figure it out on your own, you cannot expect that there is ready-made instruction for everything. You need to be prepared for mistakes and the fact that you will have to deal with them yourself.

• Multitasking.

You have to constantly keep in mind a huge amount of information in order not to miss anything. Working on multiple tasks at the same time is common in our industry.

• Emotional resilience.

This skill is closely related to the previous point. It must be remembered that failure does not make you a bad specialist and does not invalidate all of your experience. Mistakes happen and they teach you to analyze and draw conclusions. It is necessary to learn to perceive the ups and downs as a normal part of work practice, otherwise, there is a high risk of burning out quickly.

• Teamwork.

In every team, several people work on one mailing list: author, designer, layout designer, illustrator, proofreader, analyst. The job of the project manager is to organize this process from start to finish. You need to understand how the work is going on at all stages, control the performers, but not press. Empathy, respect for colleagues and yourself, and building boundaries are very important here. I share the rules of communication in work chats, which we formulated at Email Soldiers to improve processes.

• Time management.

It is about an ability to correctly prioritize and coordinate tasks to performers and customers. It is important to clearly understand what task needs to be done and when. If you put 10 tasks on the executor at once, s/he will not be able to do anything or will do the wrong thing first. Or s/he will do everything, but a person will ‘die’ and the next day will be disabled. A good manager is one who correctly matches client needs and team workload. Like in Tetris.