Are you looking for the right talent or are planning a career in Marketing? Here are the skillsets you will need to be successful in the future. These skills include both hard skills and soft skills. In this article, we will cover both categories of skill sets so you can develop a career in marketing in the future.
Soft Skills
● Communication - This skill is at the core of any marketing role, be it as a part of an in-house marketing team, consultancy firm, or agency. As a marketer, you must convey yourself and essential ideas to the audience in the most convincing manner that is firm yet polite.
● Problem-solving - A certain level of creativity is required when you head into the field of marketing. This creativity not only helps to develop innovative ideas to further the business but also assists in problem-solving.
● Attention to detail - As a marketer, there are a lot of eyes on the work you do. Attention to detail is an essential skill that many companies will be looking for while hiring a marketer. Detail and accuracy are crucial in order to maintain a certain image of the company and to ensure that the customers receive the right information at every step.
● Leadership - This is another quality you must hone as a marketer. Especially marketing consultancy firms or agencies providing a form of outsourced marketing require leadership capabilities to manage projects and the people involved in those projects.
Hard Skills
● Data analytics - Hard skills like being adept at data analytics can increase the chances of a company hiring you. Marketing has become a lot more data-driven, quantifiable, and measurable, hence involving more scientific calculations and measurements. It’s important to have an understanding of the different marketing technology platforms out there and be able to understand, extract and analyse the data to measure effectiveness and drive optimisation.
● Research - As a marketer, you need to develop your market research skills to be able to better understand the market and develop relevant strategies. Furthermore, you also require the ability to understand, analyse and benchmark against your competitors. This allows you to build a differentiated value proposition which is then translated into compelling offerings, unique content and innovative campaigns. Consultancy firms always look for marketers who possess this particular hard skill.
● Social media marketing - Marketing has become mostly digital now and social media plays a massive role in this. You must be knowledgeable in using different social media platforms to market specific products and services. When working in Asia, it’s also important to have an understanding of platforms such as WeChat, Line, etc.
● SEO/SEM - Search engines have become the most common way for people to find your company and products. Therefore it’s important you have a general understanding of how SEO and SEM works and can benefit your business, even if it’s mostly outsourced to external agencies.
Conclusion
Marketing has grown to become a lot more complex over the years and so have the expectations from any business on how marketing can help grow the business. Marketers have to take a leading role in helping businesses understand how they can beat the competition, drive more sales, become more customer-oriented as well as improve ROI. In the current digital age, this means marketers have to be more digital and technology savvy as well as able to drive organisation-wide initiatives. Hence the required skillsets are rapidly evolving and marketers need to constantly keep developing these vital skills in order to stay relevant and up-to-date.