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

When it comes to improving marketing teams, leaders are often looking to upskill their team (and individuals within it) in areas such as communications, organisation, research, comfort with data and strategic thinking. That’s because higher performing teams are generally categorised by excelling in these areas.

What only a small percentage of people realise is that all of these can be improved by undertaking a course of study such as one of the Chartered Institute of Marketing professional postgraduate courses.

This article demonstrates how the performance and productivity of your marketing team benefits when team members complete CIM courses of study.

1. Improving verbal, written communication, and presentation 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.

2. Improving organisation and time management skills.

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.

3. Improving understanding and use of research.

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.

4. Improving data-driven and analytical skills.

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.