How CIM Marketing Qualifications help build better Marketing Teams (by improving essential skills)

Marketers require strong verbal and written communication skills, as they are required to give presentations in a number of different scenarios and present complicated marketing concepts often to non-marketing minded audiences.

Internally, marketers often need to communicate internally with colleagues, management and even the C-suite. Externally, marketers communicate with customers, gatekeepers and stakeholders such as retailers, distributors, the media. Being able to quickly and confidently articulate concepts helps to build relationships through how you interact as well as what you say.

How CIM courses help marketers improve their communication skills:

Completing a professionally recognised course like CIM means having to seek approval at the outset, negotiating around deadlines, agreeing focus areas for topics and presenting and taking feedback around final assignments.

Team leaders and heads of marketing want marketers with strong organisational and time management skills.

Marketing as a discipline usually involves handling several projects at once. Marketers need excellent time management skills to keep projects moving to meet agreed deadlines.

This also means having a detailed understanding of process and the knock-on effect of delays and changes to project specifications. This is especially important when relying on other colleagues or outside partners to get things delivered.

Successful marketers are able to adapt to changing situations and are flexible enough to prioritise their to do list as things change.

How CIM courses help marketers improve organisation and management skills:

Completing a professionally recognised course like CIM alongside a full time position itself demonstrates an ability to organise competing priorities and an ability to create space to take on more responsibilities in an efficient way.

A huge part of marketing involves research. This might be surveying your ideal customers to really understand their needs, auditing the competition, locating influential third parties, curating product ideas and innovations and assessing market trends.

So, naturally inquisitive marketers are going to be more attractive to marketing leaders when they are building their teams.

And this ability to contextualise your work, critique what you’re being asked to do so you can create more meaningful plans and campaigns is critical in an increasingly fragmented marketing discipline.

How CIM courses help marketers improve understanding and use of research:

Assignments and assessments that form the basis of completion of CIM qualifications are rooted in doing your research and ensuring you can support and validate your recommendations based on the use of established methods and metrics. You actually get the chance to do this during your course.

Comfort with data is closely associated to research. Marketing is arguably more of a science than an art in the 2020’s and when done well, involves a lot of number crunching.

Marketers who are data-driven and “passionately analytical” are going to be of significantly more value to their organisations than those are aren’t.

Increasingly, marketers who can take a data-backed approach to marketing (drawing down any information you can from websites, email, social media, advertising, customer calls) will simply deliver more successful marketing activities.

Why? Because it’s rooted in, and is a response to, what is actually happening.

How CIM courses help marketers improve comfort with data:

CIM courses of study encourage students to think critically and explore all avenues. Different qualification levels introduce different levels of required understanding of the use of data and some courses offer specific modules on the use of data and insight for marketing strategy and planning.

When building or improving an existing marketing team, you want to raise the collective bar so the team works more in tune to the achievement of organsational goals.

Marketing teams that set a marketing strategy and can see the wider context of their activity are more likely to secure greater trust from their Board and deliver a more harmonious programme of activity.

Understanding the impact on sales goals, brand reputation and market position are all important, but so too are things like understanding both met and unmet customer needs.

Remember brands like Apple and Tesla exist to create products that we don’t even know we need – but when we get them we wonder how we lived without them.

For example, if you were hiring a Head of Content Marketing, they would need to understand content strategy and have a deep understanding of how the marketing funnel works.

How CIM courses help marketers improve strategic thinking:

You’ll learn and apply essential strategies that have been used in marketing for anywhere between fifty to one hundred years. Competing courses tend not to offer the strategic rigour that comes with CIM courses of study. This is because CIM is setting you up to manage and ultimately direct. It gives you the confidence to answer questions you’ll field from colleagues, management and third parties.