Top 30 Skills for the Modern Day Marketer

This is a long list, so buckle your seat belt.
The modern day marketer needs to have a vast skill set for success in today’s digital age. The marketing industry as a whole has completely changed in the last decade with social platforms being at the forefront of communication with consumers.
A modern day marketer is a complex position, and to be successful at it, it’s helpful to have these skills (no particular order):
- Data Analyst: Data fuels your marketing department; you need to know how to work and sift through extensive data and read/report on analytics. You are tracking everything, so there are many data points you need to follow and constantly improve upon. The days of reporting on follower count are over. It’s a plus if you know your way around SQL and are able to write basic queries to pull helpful information. Make “select * from” your friend. Do you know what a Regular Expression is? Finally, an Excel plugin is useful to have. And in general, you’ve got to know the basics on pivot tables, tables, and V-Lookups.
Resource: Digital Analytics for Marketing Professionals: Marketing Analytics in Practice on Coursea
2. Writer: If you hate writing, don’t be a marketer. A HUGE portion of your day-to-day is writing copy, especially in early stages of your career. You must be able to write compelling content that truly captures the brand’s voice and tells an accurate story of your brand. On top of good writing, you should be good with keyword placements for SEO purposes. It’s important to know a thing or two about formatting as well as constructing good titles. Knowing how to select attention grabbing visuals for your posts is a must as well.
Resource:8 Free Courses on Content #Marketing and #Writing
3. Editor: We recently posted a blog post about our copy editor and why every business should have one. However, many small companies do not have the luxury of a copy editor on staff. It’s important to have editing skills since the modern day marketer should be proofing all external facing materials. . You don’t need to be able to point out the objective clause in a sentence, but it’s important to stay up to speed on your grammar rules. Best practice is to have a blog post edited by one to two other people within the company.
Resource: List of Free Online Editing Courses on Study.com
4. Speaker: Modern day marketers are not bound to a desk. He/she is often presenting the company’s branding guidelines to coworkers at the quarterly meeting, presenting marketing analytics to the C-Suite, attending networking events for the company, or hosting a webinar for lead gen purposes. All that being said, being a good speaker will propel your career. Ask a colleague to count the numbers of “um’s and uh’s” at your next presentation, or join a public speaking group like Toastmasters to help develop your skills.
Resource: Find a Toastmasters club near you
“ According to IBM , marketers have a huge responsibility: they have to convert data into intelligence and then turn intelligence into action.”
5. PR Skills: PR skills are a must in modern day marketing. You will be working face-to-face with media representatives, influential bloggers, clients, staff members, and brand evangelists. Good long-standing relationships with these groups are key, so use all of your connections to make new ones (in a genuine way). Likability is currency in this realm. This is also where you spread the news of your company’s accomplishments via Press Releases, digitally, and through traditional media outlets. Always have your PR hat on as a modern day marketer, because if you don’t, many opportunities will pass you by.
Resource: 5 free Social Media and Public Relation Courses
6. Teacher: In the most simplistic terms, as a marketer, you are informing a group of people about something in the hopes that they make the decision to buy your product or service. Nowadays a successful marketer must provide tons and tons of relevant value to a potential buyer so that when the need arises for the product or service, you are top of mind. With so many saturated markets, providing good quality and value to a potential customer is what will separate your company from competitors. You are not only “teaching” the public about your business, you are often teaching internally on a variety of subjects like: social media etiquette, best networking practices, and being a brand ambassador in your off hours. Have fun with it!
Resource: 6 Strategies to Become a Better Communicator Article
7. Observer: As a digital marketer, it’s crucial to know the landscape. You can only do this through observation. Observe your competitors’ online presence. Observe how they interact with their clients. If you can secret shop your competitors, do it! For there to be any online success, you must observe the market before you start posting, know what you’re getting into, and come up with a way to incorporate some level of observation into your daily task load.
Resource: Features, Advantages and Disadvantages of Observation Article
“Marketers need to be able to stay on top of industry trends and key insights.” Inc
8. Social Media Expert: Every social media platform you work with must be active, responsive, and backed by a killer social strategy. Platforms like HubSpot can help greatly with multi-platform management and tying messages to campaigns for tracking and analytic purposes. What is the purpose of social? To represent the best interest of current clients, increase brand awareness, improve customer loyalty, and reach a new segment of potential customers. Social media is also a great way to highlight company culture and share accomplishments.
Resource: Certification Courses on HubSpot
9. Strategic Planning: As previously mentioned in the “Social Media Expert” section, there must be strategy behind everything. Planning out campaigns is the best way to do this. Campaigns can support blog posts, social posts, events, paid advertising, and tracking. First pinpoint what common problems potential clients or customers currently have and build campaigns that are solution based.What would a prospect want to download from your landing page after putting in their contact information, and what would make them frequent your site for more of that content? A marketing strategy should be done high level for the year and approved by your CEO for vision and direction. You can then bang out the nitty gritty per quarter and per month. I’ve found that with a one-man marketing team or small teams, one really good campaign per month with supporting documents and events are the most successful.
Resource: Strategic Planning and Execution
10. Paid Search Marketing Skills: Get to know the ins-and-outs of paid searches. Even if you have the resources to outsource this, it’s important to be able to conversate with the team that is leading up paid marketing efforts. Get a small budget to start testing Google Adwords and see what works, and as you become more confident in the results you can incorporate these techniques into part of your marketing campaign mixes (PPC, pay per click, is the best way to get started). There are hundreds of resources out there to show you how to get started, as well as resources to continue on to achieve expert level status as a paid search guru.
Resource: Google AdWords certification
11. SEO Expert: This includes anything and everything that is Google: Google Adwords, Google Tag Manager, and dominating original content. For an added bonus, learn how to implement conversion pixels in Google analytics. It’s also helpful to learn the difference between Title, Description, H1, and Meta tags on a page.
Resource: 2016 guide to free online SEO training courses
12. Researcher: Being a good researcher can be useful in almost any modern day job. Good research can be the difference for truly understanding your target market so you can put together a competitor analysis that goes above and beyond. Think of this part like college work; dig deep and find valid sources, always source your research, and find interesting ways to present findings (data visualization). While many teams give researching tasks to interns, and this isn’t a bad idea, nothing compares to a seasoned marketer digging deep into the interwebs for the next big thing. Researching doesn’t include on-off projects; a modern day marketer must always have a finger on the pulse of his/her industry. Start your mornings with 10–15 minutes scanning the market and current events. There isn’t an excuse not to be informed in this field of connectivity.
Resource :Market Research and Consumer Behavior on Coursea
13. Coding: Be able to inspect and change HTML code at the bare minimum. It’s helpful to know basic HTML, and Sublime is a helpful tool for this. You also need to know your way around Wordpress in order to configure, update, and manage themes and plugins. Know the difference between HTML, CSS, and Java, as well as how they all work together. As an added plus, learn how to create a basic online form in one coding language.
Resource: Codeacademy.com
“All in all, a successful marketer is part artist, part scientist. Once these professionals learn how to get closer to a beneficial left brain-right brain balance, their success is guaranteed.” Social Media Today
14. Customer Service: Good customer service skills are a MUST. Especially with social media where you will be in direct contact with the customer. You must properly represent your brand, provide value to potential customers, and constantly delight current customers. Have written action plans in place for how you and your team will deal with complaints on social, negative tweets, or bad press. Having a preemptive plan and best practices in place will save you and your company a lot of time and effort should the time arise to handle an unhappy customer and quickly bring the conversation offline to address the issue. It’s important to say sorry quickly and only once (depending on the scale of the problem) and then quickly move towards a solution.
Resource: Marketing: Customer Needs and Wants on Coursea
15. Intuitive Skills: Good business men and women have great intuitive skills. This skill becomes more refined with years of experience and will benefit both your company and clients. The longer you’re in the field, the more you’ll hone in on these intuitive skills, but remember, it’s always good to have data or a past experience to back up decisions. You can’t just justify a decision with “gut feeling” in most companies. This skill will also give you tremendous confidence in your day-to-day and showcase a feeling of expertise with people who work with you.
Resource: Human Intuition Vs. Marketing Data: Forging A New Alliance Article
16. Website Management: Remember the “Coding” section above? Being able to manage a basic website means being able to roll up your sleeves and jump into source code now and then for minor adjustments that aren’t worth your developer’s time. Platforms like Wordpress and HubSpot make this really user friendly for you. Remember, if you are in source code, always save a copy of the original code just in case you break anything, so you can revert back to the original. Also, working on website updates on off-business hours can be helpful too to minimize disruptions, and it’s always a good idea to preview before you publish.
Resource: Web Development courses on Udemy
17. People Management: Even if you are a one-man marketing team, you will still have a level of people management required with your day to day, whether it’s with vendor management, sales support, or working with a new intern. If you have a team, that’s an even better reason to keep your people management skills sharp. Constantly ask for feedback and give feedback since this is the quickest way to develop as a people manager. There are countless books, lectures, online courses, and seminars on this topic that can help develop you further. Show your boss that you’re committed to developing your people management skills whether it is company paid or not and it will speak volumes of your commitment to growth and investment in the company.
Resource: Managing and managing people course on OpenLearn
“In the race for buyers’ attention marketers cannot escape the law of diminishing returns and must start thinking about value, not volume.” WHICH-50
18. Networker: What better way to build brand awareness and create long lasting relationships than networking. Networking is almost a taboo word these days and many people cringe at the thought of it. Networking is not sales, which is why the marketing department should be involved in any events that are relevant to them. This also encourages employee loyalty, and mingling with like-minded people or diverse industries could also spark your next big idea. Don’t look at networking as handing out business cards. Just have genuine conversations with people with your brand in mind. If there is mutual value for you and a person to continue talking via email, great! If not, you’ve made a meaningful connection with someone without having to recite your company’s elevator pitch.
Resource: Meetup.com
19. Time Management: Time management is a must in this industry as it is with most others. As you can see, the day-to-day of a modern day marketer is complex, fast paced, and multi-faceted. Have a daily plan of what needs to be accomplished and keep in mind your weekly and monthly goals and your OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results). If you can get into a daily schedule, then this can be helpful with time management, but many cannot due to multiple projects and action items that land on a marketer’s desk to be completed by EOD. Prioritize accordingly, shut your office door when you need to (or put headphones on), or track your time with an online tracking tool to help you stay on track.
Resource: Time Management Toolkit
20. Extremely Curious: Extreme curiosity is what separates the amateurs from the professionals in this field. Do you see an insanely successful marketing effort that went viral this week? Why did that happen? What did they tap into to make their message go viral? You should always be asking questions both internally and externally. You can ask your customers for the NPS (Net Promoter Score) now and then to get a sense of their satisfaction or lack thereof. If you have a good relationship with a client and they leave you, you should try to figure out why and what you could have done better. Extreme curiosity with feelings aside will only accelerate your company’s growth.
Resource: Ted Talks
21. Critical Thinker: We have been taught “critical thinking” since elementary school, but how does its real world application work in relation to marketers? You must constantly think: How is success defined? What are the primary metrics? How do we collect data? How do we measure ROI (return on investment)? Also, it’s important to define the problem before finding a solution, and finally, engage in active discussions with your team and managers to fuel critical thinking.
Resource: Luminosity.com
22. Leadership: If your goal is to be a CMO or eventually VP/President, you must be a business leader first and a marketer second. Leadership also starts with knowing how to delegate items to your team, not only knowing a human’s limits, but being an inspiration to them and encouraging their professional and personal development. As a marketing leader, you will also need to manage the marketing budget have. Know your numbers, as they will be tied in with reporting and performance.
Resource: 12 Podcasts That Will Make You a Better Leader
A good marketing leader = revenue ownership and accountability
23. Wire Frame Knowledge: First, know what UI/UX is. Second, learning how to build out a basic wire frame will be very important in communicating with your web designers. This can be built in sketch or Photoshop. This will make you more cross communicational to other teams and ultimately enhance users’ digital experiences.
Resource: Wireframing Training and Tutorials on Lynda
24. Know A/B Testing: This is helpful for conversion rate optimization. Don’t rely on other teams for A/B testing; you can do this on your own. You can work with A/B testing in email campaigns, paid advertisements, direct mail, and many more outlets. Make sure you have a good way to track results and pivot when necessary. A/B testing is always relevant, and what worked last quarter may not work now, so it’s imperative to continue to test and be agile.
Resource: A/B Testing by Google Course on Udacity
25. Photographer: As a marketer, you have to have a “good eye” when it comes to all things design. Photography plays nicely into this. As a startup or small business, you will add tremendous value and save money by taking many photos yourself. If you have access to an SLR camera, even better, or have the company invest in a low cost, high quality camera. Watch a few tutorials on taking professional looking photos and take note of competitors with awesome Instagrams to get pointers from them.Taking photos at company events is a great way to showcase company culture on social sites and can even assist with recruiting efforts. Even snapping a daily photo for a photo bank is helpful to have when you just can’t decide what to post on a Monday. Photography is fun and rewarding, so jump in!
Resource: The Best Free Online Photography Courses and Tutorials
“Few things in life are black and white. The more you can question, scrutinize and analyze, the more information you will have to do your job effectively. As marketers, we need to make the effort in order to produce better results for our clients.” — Marketing Land
26. Editing and Video Production: Social shareable videos are on the rise, and they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Get familiar with shooting short videos and editing them. This is a huge value add and money saver for your employer. It is also a project to take on to break up the work week and get away from your desk. Ps. you don’t need any fancy video equipment to get started. A new smartphone with a clean lense is enough to get you started.
Resource: Video Editing Training and Tutorials on Lynda
27. Graphic Designer: I recommend getting the Adobe Suite if you’re going to be responsible for a lot of graphic design. If you’re doing light graphic design there are many online tools. Make sure you present many designs, and variations to the decision maker and get tons of feedback to save you tons of time.It’s crucial to know how to resize and compress images. Know all file types you may be frequently working with (example PNG,JPG, AI). Finally, please know how create and edit screen captures. Keep in mind, DPI= Dots per inch.DPI for printed material (300 DPI is recommended) and PPI = Pixels Per Inch, but 72 DPI recommended for all digital/web. Also, don’t confuse image size with file size.
Resource: 10 Sites to Find Free Graphic Design Courses Online
28. Influencer: Your brand should be an online influencer and thought leader in the industry. You can perfect this through high quality original content, participating and speaking at industry events, hosting webinars, writing and posting ebooks, partnering with company’s or individual to increase brand awareness, host lunch and learns, speak on panels, host events in your space, answer industry Quora questions, and engage with thought leaders online.
Resource: Why You Need to Take Advantage of Influencer Marketing Article
29. Personal brand expertise: This point ties in with being an influencer. For credibility purposes and exposure it’s helpful to master your own personal brand. Many marketers have their own website that showcases their projects, writing samples, or vlogs. Their are some marketers out there that are always online and tapped in, and want to be completely off social media in their private life. This is ok too! However, when hiring, many companies like to look at an individual’s online brand to see if it will be a good hire. And hey, if you’re marketing for a company, why not market yourself simultaneously.
Resource: The Complete Guide to Building your Personal Brand Infographic
30. Quick Learner: The landscape for marketers is quickly changing and adapting, to stay relevant you have to be a fast learner. You will be pulled in many directions and expected to be proficient in a many skill sets, therefore, find a company you love, work really hard, and learn quick, and excel forward.
Resource: Life.
Note: Do I need all these to be successful? Obviously not, but it definitely won’t hurt your success.
This piece was written with inspiration from:
Personal experience
Photo by Mike Wilson on Unsplash
Original Article posted on: Work Better’s Blog
