Top 3 Skills Needed by Marketers Today

Top companies understand the value of marketing in retaining their edge in the marketplace. Most of them rely on marketing strategies to position the company to meet market demand both now and in the future. These businesses see marketing as an investment, not an expense, making sure their departments are answering customers’ needs, growing engagement, monitoring trends, and making sure the company looks beyond the here and now into the future.

A marketer’s primary job is to ensure that the company’s brand is well positioned, creating the right products, priced correctly, placed in the most strategic locations, and promoted appropriately. This requires understanding the market’s needs and interests and how to meet those needs and interests with the right products and services.

Employers both large and small are becoming more and more sophisticated with data—especially big data. Today’s marketing headhunters Austin are placing candidates who can think analytically and creatively solve problems. In the end, they’re looking for three critical skills that seem to be in high demand in today’s workforce.

Ability to Conduct Market Research

When it comes to smart, strategic marketing, it’s critical to understand the marketplace, customer behavior, trends, and data in order to develop your marketing strategy. Comprehensive market research helps merge secondary data with primary data to help companies develop insight. It enables them to see what their industries’ customers are doing and compare that data to how their own customers are behaving, which enables marketers to improve campaign performance.

An ideal marketer should have the skills to search secondary resources and understand qualitative and quantitative market research and how to derive insight from those findings. In some cases, a marketer should know how to conduct a small-scale survey that could help them understand a very focused problem. For example, they may have launched a new product with a new feature set and they want to gain customer feedback on just that feature’s performance. While the survey may not be extensive, it allows the marketer to quickly understand whether the feature is an immediate success or if there is a problem that needs to be addressed in the next iteration.

Ability to Interpret Analytics

Most company decisions, such as those regarding production, strategy, and distribution, significantly rely on historic data and metrics to make forward-thinking decisions. Employers look for marketers who can identify a company’s key performance indicators using analytic tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Optimizely, and Google Tag Manager and then merge those datasets with sales and inventory reports.

Most marketing automation software and applications have made it convenient for marketing professionals to measure and track a specific campaign’s progress and success closely. But it’s crucial to have the ability to interpret an analytical dashboard, derive insight from those analytics, and develop future strategies that improve on the key metrics.

Ability to Manage Inbound Marketing

According to HubSpot, one of the leading inbound marketing software platforms, “Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.”

Most businesses today are looking for more efficient ways to provide personalized content based on where the customer is in his or her buying journey, which shortens the sales cycle. For example, a customer who is at the research stage of the journey needs content that provides information about a product category, which is not the same need a customer who is looking to purchase immediately would have.

Marketers should either understand inbound marketing or have inbound marketing skills to develop strategies that will match content to where their customers are in their journey and quickly advance them to the next steps.

At Brookwoods Group, we’ve been providing the perfect-fit marketing professionals to companies in the Houston area for more than 30 years. When small and large businesses are looking for marketing leaders who have the right skills and experience, and who are pre-screened to fit within the organization’s culture, they turn to the top communications and marketing staffing agency in Austin: Brookwoods Group.

We can help you with direct-hire or contract professionals in virtually any area of your business, including marketing and communications, business operations, accounting and finance, science and engineering, healthcare and life sciences, and quality and Health, Safety & Environment. Contact us to begin your search now.