The Six Key Skills every Modern Marketer needs to Master to be Successful

A customer-centric way of doing business is focused on providing a positive customer experience throughout the entire process. By putting their experience ahead of the sale, advising and supporting them throughout, you’re more likely to drive repeat business, develop a deeper sense of customer loyalty and improve overall business growth.

It does though mean more than simply offering an above average level of service. It is about completely restructuring how you communicate with them, moving more into the area of serving and acting as a guide, than just being a sales led entity.

Marketers are essential to the creation and deployment of a customer-centric strategy, because they are tasked with understanding customers and marketers but not with selling to them.

Taking the time to really research and understand both met and unmet needs and create innovative ways of genuinely helping customers sets up a completely different customer development process.

Basing marketing communications narratives on solid customer centric insights not only helps position a “win win” but it is far more likely to lead to higher than normal conversion success and satisfaction levels, repeat business and increased advocacy.

The best marketers are life-time learners. This might be practically in opening themselves up to wide influences, reading books, following experts, listening to podcasts and examining why some campaigns by competitors or in other sectors work or don’t. Curiosity drives improvement and can lead to markedly better work.

Think about the leading brands, the award winning pieces of work. They get the kudos and uptake they deserve because they stretched beyond conventional thinking, daring to do or be something different from the rest.

Apple is the gold standard on product storytelling and presentation, Amazon is the benchmark in e-commerce and customer experience. Studying both brands intimately identifies they are supremely successful because they take risks, trying new things in both product innovation and marketing.

Curiosity could even be a thing you take on as a company or a brand. Go where your customers congregate and just observe them. If you work in the city, visit the country. If you only ever watch movies, go to the theatre. Sit in an airport departure lounge or a park and just observe what‘s going on. Travel on a bus or train around your hometown. You’ll get different perspectives and insights.

The ability to see the big picture and set longer term goals helps successful modern marketers position more effectively to customers and their own C-suite.

This is critical as you move up the career ladder or from organisation to organisation.

What are the burning issues in your industry or in different customer segments that you can help your organisation leverage?

In strategy terms, businesses are always asking questions like “Where are you now and where do we want to be?” and “How do we get there?” and “What’s your next step?”

Thinking strategically, in the context of being a curious, customer centric marketing professional means you will reach out to learn new models, new techniques and new ways of working to create market opportunities for your organisation and improve the lives of your customers.

At MMC, we work on annual, quarterly, and monthly and weekly goals across all aspects of the busines. The goals that drive the business actually translate into the daily actions and resource set we have so we make the best use of what we have to achieve the results we want.

So it’s super important that marketers ensure their work feeds into organisational goals implicitly.

This means creating plans across all areas of marketing that speak to market development,
sales and top level company goals. If you can’t see the connection between a marketing activity and a core organisational goal, it needs to be questioned. Equally, if there aren’t any clearly prescribed actions to help achieve goals, resources might need to be deployed appropriately.

This might mean a review of your marketing activity – website content and navigation, blog and content strategy and topics, email marketing, advertising, SEO, events and more – is needed to ensure it is both focused and on message.

This adds the ability to think nimbly in creating plans that speak to strategy as relevant to the modern marketer, as changes might need to be made fast.

It should be a given that being able to tell a story is a significant skill for a modern marketer to have in their arsenal. All the marketers at leading brands trigger attention and emotion, motivate and inspire and stimulate trust long before anyone reaches for a credit card.

There is a truism in business that states “noone wants to be sold to, but everyone needs to buy”.

Storytelling helps this. And there are lots of ways to become a better storyteller in marketing, but the obvious route lies in focusing marketing around your customers and helping them to achieve what they want to achieve.

You might use a simple 3-step formula like that championed by Steve Jobs by asking yourself:

• What does my target customer want?
• What is my target customer’s most urgent problem?
• How does what I offer help them solve this challenge and get what they want? Understand and use data.

Being able to tell stories means you need to be able to write. Copywriting is the way you tell a story and turn the message into action. The intended reader always needs to be clear what they need to do next.