The majority of successful marketers in the world today were not born with those skills. They had to work at it every day in order to eventually get to the top of the marketing success ladder. And even then, the skills that make you a successful marketer are ones that you have to keep honing continuously thanks to the ever-evolving marketing landscape.

If you want your marketing efforts to be as effective as possible, then it’s time to practice and hone the skills listed below.

But before we jump into the skills that make you a better marketer, it’s important to realize that these are not things that you can do only once and then magically become more successful.

This takes time and the process requires consistent effort.

But once you’ve made the decisions and start following through on the actions that will determine your success, then it’s downhill from there.

The seven skills that you need to hone are as follows:

7 Skills To Help You Become A Successful Marketer

• Focus on content creation that is multi-faceted
• Optimize your current marketing channels
• Create powerful customer relationships
• Get a better understanding of your analytics data
• Chase problems, not money
• Stick to the plan
• Be patient and work hard

Now let’s take a look at each of these in a little more detail:

1. Focus On Content Creation That Is Multi-Faceted

This is a challenging concept but it brings potent results. Don’t obsess over finding one channel to be the key to your business’s success.

In truth, you may need to manage a wide range of channels for you to run a successful marketing campaign.

You will (obviously) need a well-designed, well-maintained website and you will also need to publish new, valuable content on a frequent and consistent basis.

This not only helps you to attract traffic and build an audience, but it also makes you appear extremely relevant to your prospects.

There are many ways to extend this effort such as posting on YouTube, maintaining a powerful brand presence on social media, and so on.

You can re-purpose the same content and format it for various social media networks.

There are lots of free and paid tools that you can use to automate a lot of the tasks involved with this, and make the entire process of publishing and managing content much easier for you. These tools include Hootsuite, Buffer, and MeetEdgar.

Because the guidelines for the different social platforms are different, you may have to tweak or alter your Twitter posts (for instance) to suit publication on LinkedIn or any other social network.

This means that even though you create the content once, you may still need to make it interesting to the audiences you have on multiple platforms.

When it comes to keeping those multiple channels populated with fresh content, the most efficient and effective way is to reuse the same content.

This works very well, as long as you craft quality content that positions you as an authority.

2. Optimize Your Current Marketing Channels

The second skill that you’re going to have to focus on if you want to become a successful marketer has to do with knowing the best time and means of optimizing the marketing channels that you’re currently using through the use of tests and audits.

The previous success of a channel doesn’t guarantee its future performance.

Boost your efforts using the following tactics:

Regular Website Audits

A frequent review of your website pages with the aim of looking for those with certain aspects that need fine-tuning will help you keep your pages performing well.

The ultimate goal is to have important pages on your site performing great, each with a call to action and a high conversion rate.

Make a plan for fine-tuning any of the elements that could do with improvement, and remember, the rules for search engine optimization are always changing and your techniques need to be designed to incorporate those updates.

Reflect on Your Marketing Strategy

You need to plan, review, and reflect on your strategy.

Your business’s overall campaign objectives should be the basis for creating all your content, special offers, free downloadables, your sales messages, and advertisements.

Refine Your Message

Use analytics and A/B tests to refine your message.

Find out where your audience is hanging out when they convert, what type of message resonates with them, and so on. You can use Google Analytics Content Experiments for testing the variants of your landing pages.

 3. Create Powerful Customer Relationships

Building strong, organic relationships with people and forming a loyal customer base is one of the best ways of making your marketing more impactful. As a marketer, it’s vital that you cultivate ongoing relationships with customers. You must know all their needs and cater to them.

You also need to address their concerns and listen to feedback.

This last part is important to understand because a lot of marketers don’t really get that there is an opportunity to grow and improve your business even in negative feedback.

But you must be open to taking in those negative comments and complaints and then reviewing your strategy.

Your customers are hammered by sales pitches and ads each time they go online, and they don’t need more of that. What they want instead is connection and an improved experience.

Your perception of what your customers want can be very different from what the reality actually is. Find out exactly what your customers desire so that you can provide products, services, and content that is relevant to them.

A lot of marketers get this part wrong, and they don’t even know which ones of their offers are most important to their customers.

A great way for you to benefit from this kind of approach is to use customer satisfaction surveys regularly to find out what your customers appreciate the most about you, your business, products, or services.

Once you have these answers, it’s easy to incorporate them into your content development and overall marketing strategy.

4. Get a Better Understanding of Your Analytics Data

A lot of highly successful marketers spend a huge portion of their time focusing on data and analytics, and if you’re going to be just as successful, you’re going to have to get a better understanding of your business’s analytics, too.

The secret here is to closely review and reflect on what your data is showing you because you will gain deep insights into the behavior of your prospects and customers as well as the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of your current marketing campaigns.

This is a vast subject that cannot be covered fully in one blog post, but here is a quick rundown of five ways in which you can use data from Google Analytics Reports to keep an eye on the behavior of your incoming leads.

Filter all social media traffic

The ‘Advanced Segments’ tab will help you view your website traffic and your visitors’ behaviors as well as understand the goals and sales actions that are completed.

Keep an eye on conversions

‘Conversions’ and social reports show you how your marketing activities are impacting your sales conversion. This way you get to find out which of your content has the most effect on your target audience.

Quantify traffic to your social media venues

You can create custom events for every link to social media venues and determine the type of prospects that are landing there based on key indicators like their behavior.

You can set this up using the Event Tracking Guide from Google.

Implement ‘Content Experiments’

This previously mentioned tool-set will be invaluable in helping you understand the type of content that leads to conversions in your business.

Connect marketing efforts to sales

When you understand and leverage the link between the two, you will see a significant boost in your sales figures.

Use the Multi-Channel Funnel Reports to see how your social media is interacting with other elements of your marketing strategy.

This can include the lag time from your prospect’s first visit to conversion, as well as the common paths that the prospects take toward the desired action.

5. Chase Problems, Not Money

Most people who struggle in marketing do so because they are after one thing only: The money.

But marketing is a relationships business, which means that in order to truly succeed, you have to be able to help people solve their problems and get them to trust that you can provide solutions to whatever issues they are experiencing.

If you’re able to provide value to your prospects in that way, whenever they are ready to buy, you will always be the first person that they think of. You need to consistently ask yourself what problems your audience is faced with, as well as how you can deliver better, faster, or cheaper solutions than your competitors.

When you can craft content and create offers based around this, then it’s going to be very easy for you to convert prospects into customers, and to turn those first-time customers into loyal, repeat customers who will rave to everyone about your business, products, or services.

Whatever your marketing strategy, make sure that your main objective is to provide the best solutions to your customers’ problems and you will never have to worry about the money side. All that will fall into place as long as you’re providing real value to your audience.

6. Stick to the Plan

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Stick to the plan. But in reality, even after you’ve made your decisions and drafted your route to marketing success, sometimes life happens, plans change, and you drift away from your goals.

If you’re going to become a successful marketer (or a better anything, for that matter…) then you have to be ready to sacrifice a lot of your time, money, and/or energy to work on and ultimately achieve your goal.

Just remember to be realistic in your expectations. Have a long term plan, with lots of short term milestones along the way.

Don’t expect to achieve the same level of success as someone who has been in marketing for 20 years in your first couple of years in the business. When you start comparing yourself to others out there, that’s a surefire way of demoralizing yourself and losing confidence in your ability to succeed.

Focus on achieving things that are realistic and deliver value to you at this moment.

When you get to the point where the value delivered by that thing is less than the resources that are required to achieve it, then you can move on to the next thing.

This way, you get to slowly but surely work your way up the ladder of marketing success. So stick to your plan!

7. Be Patient and Work Hard

It’s next to impossible to launch a successful marketing campaign overnight. The marketing arena is constantly changing at a very fast pace, which means that most marketing efforts aren’t going to be instantly successful.

You need to be observant, patient and become a master at testing and continual improvement. This is especially true in this age of social media where you need to allow your campaign an adequate amount of time to grow.

You also need time to get feedback from your prospects and customers so that you can make better-informed decisions regarding your business’s marketing strategy.

You must be observant enough to see which areas need improvement and be able to identify any problem areas in your ongoing campaigns immediately so that you can start to make changes.

But remember, just because a campaign isn’t immediately successful doesn’t mean that it’s a failure.

In Conclusion

Honing your marketing skills means that you will be better able to drive more sales and revenue to your business in new and unique ways that most of your competitors haven’t even heard of, let alone tried yet.

A new point of view will help you to keep ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving marketing landscape. Start adopting and implementing these tips in your business right now to help you become the best marketer that you can be.

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published September 24th 2018