The Most Valued Marketing Skills For Your Business
Marketing is an essential part of any successful business. It is an evolving process with many working parts that serve to identify customers and communicate with them in the best ways possible. Marketing teams combine multiple skills and methods to devise effective marketing campaigns that meet consumers' interests—knowing where to focus your efforts to achieve the best ROI. This list of valued marketing skills combines modern technology with critical research skills and techniques.
Targeting
A marketing campaign should aspire to only some type of audience. While reaching out to everyone will give you a wider audience, it will likely yield less success. By identifying a target market, your marketing team can focus on creating a marketing campaign for the audience most likely to purchase your products or services.
Identifying your ideal customer base requires a significant amount of research and categorization. Most companies will find that they have different groups of ideal customers. Once you identify your customer base, it can help you target other customers with advertising campaigns targeting each group's needs individually.
Content Creation
Now more than ever, every brand needs high-quality visual and written content to capture the attention of busy consumers. In a world of messages competing for attention, today's consumers seek value in what they absorb. Content must gain the buyer's attention, spark interest and generate a desire for the product or solution. It is essential to master the art of creating the right content for every platform.
Content creation combines four essential skill sets to enable high-performance marketing.
Copywriting: Includes web content, ad copy, company blog content, packaging, labels, etc.
Layout: Skilled layout presents a clear message even while using multiple languages
Media Creation: Digital branding and communication strategies, including web presence
Source Content Editing: Using a range of disciplines to keep a consistent tone and brand message
Storytelling
Engaging stories help draw in customers and hold their attention. Author and marketing professional, Timea Kadar, estimates that storytelling is 22 times more effective than facts when engaging potential customers. You can use storytelling to explain your brand mission and add a human element to your business or make a connection that helps identify your customers' journey. Storytelling can be shared through written content, graphic design, video, and imagery. According to Kadar, every story should have a protagonist, identifiable context, problem or conflict, action, and resolution.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As a marketing professional, you may have heard that 75% of internet users never scroll past the first page of search results. You may have yet to realize that the statistic came from HubSpot research nearly a decade (or perhaps more) ago. As consumers grow busier and attention spans get shorter, the percentage of people browsing Google SERP page two stays the same. Ranking on page one of search results requires your marketing team to be proficient in SEO.
Search engine optimization is the process of creating content that is informative and includes terms for which customers are likely to search. One way to do this is to create content to address customer pain points or answer questions. Content optimized to user needs with essential keywords and phrases and offers valuable information is most likely to achieve a high ranking.
Strategic Planning
Marketing is a team effort combining several professionals' skills for maximum impact. To develop an effective marketing campaign, you need a strategy that will coordinate all of the working parts of a project in a way that brings them to their full potential. Often called project management, this role requires strict organization and the ability to delegate tasks. From the moment a project is accepted through the delivery of the final result, you need an organized professional to consult with every team member and keep things running smoothly.
Email Marketing
While it is true that email has been around for a long time, it is not irrelevant. Emails give you several ways to interact with customers. Perhaps more importantly, they give businesses a way to provide consumers with personalized content at a time when it's more important to consumers than ever. Research shows 71% of consumers expect personalization, and 76% get frustrated when they don't find it. Email marketing provides you with the opportunity to present these personalized communications:
Welcome Messages
Anniversary or Birthday Messages
Abandoned Cart Emails
Limited Time Offers
Social Media Marketing
In 2021, over 4.26 billion people were using social media worldwide, and this is projected to increase to almost six billion in 2027. Social media is not strictly for social connections, either. According to HubSpot's 2022 State of Consumer Trends Report, 22% of consumers prefer to discover new products through social media. Fifty-seven percent of Gen Z have found new products on social media in the past three months, and 71% say it's where they most often discover products.
Effective social media marketing requires understanding different social media channels, trends, and performance analytics. Social media marketing allows you to interact with customers, collect feedback, respond to reviews, and work with influencers.
Localization
Thanks to widespread internet access and improved travel, more businesses across all industries are going global. However, if you think you can simply apply your current marketing plan across international locations, you are setting yourself up for failure. Your content (including text, graphics, communication, culture, etc.) needs to be relatable to your target market.
Localization (l10n) is adapting a product or content to a specific locale or market. It may include translation, aligning geographical content, and adapting to a particular market's local nuances and requirements. This adaption can be accomplished by designing and modifying content and ensuring appropriate and accurate layouts. Localization includes local culture, laws, regulations, and technical details like units of measure and currency. By changing these details to match your target audience, you improve communications with your target customers.
Analytics
More is needed to create exciting marketing strategies. To reach success, you must be able to analyze your efforts. A marketing campaign that was fresh, new, and incredible in a different year may not have the same effect. Marketers must track marketing campaigns' performance to measure ROI and develop effective strategies.
Data is one of a business's most important assets, and modern technology supplies teams with more data than ever. By analyzing various types of marketing analytics, you can determine which channels offer the best ROI and which campaigns provide the best results.
Marketing is not an optional activity reserved for specific industries. With it, businesses can inform customers of their products or services. Contact us at Vistatec to learn more about expanding your marketing efforts.