Most people can easily recall a digital campaign, app, or other creative work shared across social media platforms. While such examples contain elements of modern marketing, it’s actually much bigger than this. Modern marketing is achieved by a company being able to provide an excellent customer experience, and in turn, drive business growth.
With technology constantly evolving, marketing is always changing with added tools, strategies, and techniques from which to choose. Hence, the modern marketer needs to play two roles: a scientist and an artist.
Why is A Modern Marketer Part Scientist and Part Artist?
Now, you’re probably wondering how being a modern marketer relates to being a scientist and an artist. Allow us to explain. To create effective marketing campaigns, a marketer must use imagination and creativity in conjunction with analytics to calibrate and measure the campaign’s success. Let’s take a look at the reasons the experts over at Salesforce believe this to be true.
Part Artist
Of course, every marketing campaign begins with design and creativity. So, it’s vital that the modern marketer understands some key artistry skills such as:
Written Content
Writing provides a foundation for nearly every other thing a marketer does. So, without strong writing skills, everything else will be lacking.
In terms of marketing, writing is used when marketers create social media posts, ad copy, press releases, do search engine optimization and much more. So it’s important for marketers to use these skills to convey their message to consumers effectively. In fact, inbound marketing is a go-to strategy for today’s modern marketers, so writing is a premium skill.
Visual Assets
Visual content marketing is another valuable technique that every modern marketer should use. This approach uses visual assets such as memes, GIFs, videos, and other images to influence, engage, and inform specific reactions or actions from the audience.
Yet this type of marketing goes beyond just the inclusion of a photo or other visual assets, as it’s more intentional. Marketers use motion or sight to supercharge their advertisement and give it more impact and meaning.
Social Media
Traditional marketing was a bit more challenging in the past because it didn’t have one of the biggest tools we have today, and that’s social media. It has changed how marketers can interact with their audience, making it necessary for any modern marketer to understand how to manage digital relationships.
Knowing how to use social media for marketing is useful because it can be used to connect with an audience, build brand awareness, drive website traffic, and ultimately, increase sales. Popular social media platforms used in modern marketing are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Email Marketing
Email is still a standard within most modern marketing departments. In fact, email marketing is considered one of the most effective digital strategies. If you’re unfamiliar with the technique, it’s when companies send out emails to prospective leads in hopes of turning them into customers.
Hence, the creation of effective email marketing campaigns is an essential skill for today’s marketers. The good thing is that there are lots of software available that make creating a campaign quick and straightforward. One popular example is none other than Salesforce, the CRM that makes it easy to engage with customers.
Part Scientist
Now that we’ve discussed the creative artist side of marketing, it’s time to talk about the scientist part. While this may seem a bit far-fetched to some people, the truth is that when a modern marketer can master being an artist and a scientist, they’ll be able to adapt and thrive in their ever-changing industry. Here’s a look at the scientist skills required for effective marketing:
Performance Tracking
The success of any business or campaign comes from managing and tracking the performance. And the modern marketer needs to know how to track all marketing campaigns and related activities, so they are not a cost center.
When it comes to doing this the right way, it’s important for the marketer to understand the KPIs (key performance indicators) associated with the industry or product they’re marketing. So, even though a marketer knows how to create paid ads and get customers via organic searches, true growth and lead generation occur when these concepts are optimized together.
Operations
With fewer resources and more responsibility, it’s important for a marketer to be efficient with operations and budgeting. So, investigating the performance of everything they do will tell them which strategies work for which products or services, and vice versa. Tracking and knowing this information will prevent the modern marketer from wasting money on advertising that doesn’t work.
In the long run, this will not only increase the marketer’s profitability, but it will also set them out in front of the competition. Having a portfolio that displays successful campaigns will speak for itself to prospective customers.
Analytics
Anyone who has ever run a website before understands that analytics are everything. These are the numbers that tell you how many conversions were made, the reach of the campaign, and more. So, when marketers learn to use these tools, they can easily see which advertising channels are working and those that aren’t.
Just keep in mind that data alone is just a collection of numbers. It’s only useful when someone knows how to interpret and use it; thus, being a data scientist is just as important as the data itself.
Campaign Performance
As we’ve mentioned, understanding a campaign’s performance is vital for modern marketers. A marketer can run a hundred different campaigns and never achieve success with one of them if they don’t understand how important it is to see the campaign’s effectiveness.
Simply creating a campaign and releasing it to various channels is great, but it will be much more profitable in the end if the marketer tracks how well it’s doing. This is because watching what’s going on with it will allow the person to make changes as he goes. Whereas, if you don’t monitor the numbers, advertising money may end up wasted.
Additional Skills Every Modern Marketer Should Possess
Since technology is always changing, there are many useful skills in modern marketing. Sure, we’ve discussed the big ones already, but there are lots of others. Here’s a quick look at other skills every modern marketer should possess:
Effective Communication Skills
While most of a marketer’s job is done in the background, he or she must still be able to communicate with team members and customers alike effectively. In fact, some marketers may even need to possess public speaking skills.
Organizational Skills
The modern marketer wears many hats and balances lots of projects at a time. Hence, they must be organized. If these skills are lacking, one misstep could lead to a large sum of money getting wasted. By staying organized, this can be avoided because the marketer and their team will see anything that’s coming and be able to create a plan.
Active Listening
Everyone knows someone who can’t wait for their turn to speak, and these types of people generally let information go in one ear and out the other. A marketer, however, cannot afford to ignore their clients or team passively, so active listening skills are a must. These skills will ensure that you’re getting the full message and, in turn, can create a perfect campaign that converts leads into customers.
In the end, being a modern marketer isn’t as simple as most think. In fact, there are many skills required that can make a person or firm fail if lacking. The good news is that the skills are not hard to obtain and knowing them is the first step!
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