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Written by Professional Academy Guest Blogger Emma Worden
Marketing is integral to business. It’s what promotes your product or services, message, and brand to the consumer. It grabs their attention, attracts them and makes them want to buy from you. And the more people do business with you the more your organization is able to grow to the scale you want.
But marketing isn’t easy. It isn’t simple either. For marketing to work, the people running the various campaigns need to learn key marketing skills to achieve growth for the organization. And to help you, here are seven skills you need to master in marketing to make it work for your business.
The goal of marketing is to convert leads into sales to drive revenue. If a marketer is unable to tie efforts to revenue growth, CEOs or other decision-makers tend to cease their support. So it’s critical for you to know how to demonstrate ROI.
According to John Miller VP at Marketo, Market Mix Modeling is one of the best ways to measure ROI. Using data and statistical models like regression, you can calculate how much sales volume depends on marketing. This is extremely useful when you want to justify the marketing budget or make an elevator pitch about a new strategy.
Marketing success relies on understanding the customer and giving them what they want and how they want it. If you can define the organization’s target audience and understand consumer behavior, it makes it easier to clearly articulate the marketing message.
Knowing how to listen to consumers through quantitative and qualitative data, as well as real consumer stories, lets you create better buyer personas. And with more complete buyer personas, you are able to mold a better buyer’s journey all across the sales funnel.
Not setting goals is one of the most common mistakes in digital marketing. If you conduct marketing without a clear purpose, you can get completely overwhelmed by it and get lost in the maze of your marketing channels.
Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely, or SMART goals set a direction for your marketing efforts and channel your activity into achieving real results. This makes it easier to know what to do, how to do it, measure it, and be more effective when doing it.
The intelligent contemporary consumer is aware of the market, so it’s more important than ever to create an experience that resonates with them. If you can point out the benefits of a product or service, and do it in a way that’s aligned with what customers want, you will have produced an irresistible and memorable experience at the same time.
For example, a digital agency in Sydney does this for more and more businesses by creating online stores and linking them to their website. Because people buy from e-commerce sites already, improving their client’s online customer experience to make it quicker increases sales. It also cuts out middlemen like Amazon or AliExpress, which makes it more cost-effective.
An important part of creating a memorable experience isn’t just focusing on what customers want and giving it to them. It’s also about using a good story. That’s why successful marketers are usually very good storytellers.
Compelling and inspirational stories tap into the emotions of consumers. They identify with them and become more pliable to the main marketing message: “buy our stuff”.
Marketers who promote offers using testimonials or tell stories via their marketing campaigns make their brand more attractive and attention-grabbing. Another key aspect of marketing.
A marketer also needs to be decisive, but you need to base those decisions on fact. With a wealth of usable data, that’s easier than before. So to be successful, you need to use that data to evaluate each effort and check its performance to make it work.
Using analytics tools to track performance is critical in digital marketing. Google Analytics and other software give you the numbers and allow you to perform A/B tests on virtually any aspect of your campaign, from copy to the color of your CTA. Testing everything and assuming nothing is a sign of a results-oriented marketer.
The field of marketing is constantly evolving. Good marketers need to stay on top of these changes if their business is to succeed in the highly competitive modern market. And this relies heavily on continual learning and self-education.
Following recent trends in the industry, investing in automation, learning new software, acquiring new skills and testing out new channels allow you to innovate to gain access to a higher market share. By increasing your individual capacities, you maximize the collective knowledge in your organization and become its most valuable asset.
If you are interested in Sales, Marketing, Management or Digital Marketing then you are in the right hands, Professional Academy will help you progress further into your career! We offer both electronic and printed copies of learning material and the chance to undertake a professional qualification within a time-frame that suits you. If you would like to find out more you can speak to a qualifications advisor today or download a prospectus.