6 ways to dramatically improve your marketing career prospects

Marketing’s primary responsibility is to deliver sales ready leads into the business, such that the company makes a profit over production. To do this, you need to understand your primary customer’s pains and gains intimately in order to be able to serve them.

Couching everything you do in terms of your target customer, their world, their problems, their needs and their aspirations makes for more effective marketing strategy and marketing communications.

That leaves those target customers in no doubt as to what you do and how it benefits them.

Senior marketers have to know their numbers. You have to get comfortable with data. You need to crunch the numbers, test and second test everything. Treat everything like an experiment and get getter clarity on cause and effect when you’re trying different things.

But when we talk about numbers at a senior level, you also need to know business numbers and understand the impact that marketing has there too.

Couch everything your marketing function does in the top level business goals and objectives. There has to be a clear link between what you’re doing to advance the achievement of stated goals – whether in positioning, sales, market penetration, CSR, talent management.

Positioning clearly how marketing plans and activities can help deliver on the goals that matter to the C-suite, using their language, is one very tangible way for marketers to create the opportunity for a seat at the table.

The very best marketing marketing directors and CMOs are consummate communications professionals and bring people with them. This means that rather than marketing being an isolated function supporting sales development, it becomes the beating heart of an organisation.

An organisation where everyone understands who the customer is, why they do what they do and how their routine customer interactions are pivotal to long term growth and profitability. It’s your job to bring everyone into the story to help to shape it.

Leave any ego you have at the door and invest in people that fill your knowledge gaps and can contribute to the creation of a truly high performing marketing team.

Let their brilliance shine and the impact and effectiveness of the marketing function will be plain to see by all other departments, especially sales, finance and the C-suite where you’ll elevate the profile of marketing in your organisation as a result.