Every marketing professional, either firmly established or brand new to the industry, can benefit from revisiting their skill set and enhancing their capabilities.
It like the old expression; if you’re not moving forwards, you’re moving backwards.
Marketing skills can essentially be split up into 3 categories:
- Soft marketing skills
- Broad marketing skills
- Vertical marketing skills
During my time recruiting marketing professionals, as long as the candidate was qualified enough to do the job, then I would tend to place a bigger emphasis on the soft marketing skills of the individual over broad or vertical marketing skills.
Why did I tend to favour soft marketing skills over other categories? Because broad and vertical skills can largely be trained, learned or developed, whereas soft skills represent who the candidate really is and comes from natural personality.
Marketing Skills Overview
| Soft Skills | Broad Skills | Vertical Skills |
|---|---|---|
| Driven | Interpersonal | Content |
| Creative | Design | |
| Ambitious | Data | Social Media |
| Passionate | Strategic | Community Management |
| Imaginative | Teamwork | Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) |
| Determined | Customer Experience | Pay-Per-Click (PPC) |
| Adaptable | Technology | Public Relations (PR) |
| Trustworthy | Numeracy | Mobile |
| Collaborative | Multichannel | Web Design |
| Inquisitive | Negotiation | Web Analytics |
Soft Marketing Skills
- Driven: Motivated by or having a compulsive quality or need.
- Creative: Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative.
- Ambitious: Greatly desirous; eager.
- Passionate: Showing or expressing strong emotion; ardent.
- Imaginative: Having a lively imagination, especially a creative imagination.
- Determined: Decided or resolved.
- Adaptable: Capable of adapting or of being adapted.
- Trustworthy: Warranting trust; reliable.
- Collaborative: To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort.
- Inquisitive: Inclined to investigate; eager for knowledge.
Definition source: www.thefreedictionary.com
Broad Marketing Skills
- Interpersonal: The ability to communicate or interact well with other people.
- Design: A plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is made.
- Data: Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.
- Strategic: Relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them.
- Teamwork: The combined action of a group, especially when effective and efficient.
- Customer Service: The assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services.
- Technology: The branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences.
- Numeracy: The ability to understand and work with numbers.
- Multichannel: Possessing a diverse understanding across multiple online channels.
- Negotiation: Discussions aimed at reaching agreements.
Definition source: www.oxforddictionaries.com
Vertical Marketing Skills
- Content Marketing: Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
- Email Marketing: Directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.
- Social Media: Websites and other online means of communication that are used by large groups of people to share information and to develop social and professional contacts.
- Community Management: Designates the activity of maintaining communication, motivation and efficiency among a group of remote individuals often only linked together by internet.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): The process of adjusting the content, structure, etc, of a website so that it will be displayed prominently by a search engine.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC): A system used to set prices for online advertisements on a search engine or other website, by which the advertiser pays a small fee to the website publisher each time a user clicks on the advertisement.
- Public Relations (PR): The actions of a corporation, government or individual in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers and stakeholders. The art, technique, or profession of promoting such goodwill.
- Mobile Marketing: Marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a smart phone.
- Web Design: The planning and creation of websites.
- Web Analytics: Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
Definition sources: www.dictionary.reference.com, www.contentmarketinginstitute.com, en.wikipedia.org.
Image source: ChannelPro
Can You Demonstrate All 30 Marketing Skills, And More…?
If you’re planning to apply for new marketing roles in the near future, then it would be advantageous to go through your experience and think about situations where you can demonstrate different marketing skills. Employers place high value on being able to prove you have implemented these skills in a similar working environment.
If you’ve recently finished education and don’t have much work experience to relate to, then there are still ample opportunities to demonstrate how some of these skills can be transferable from your education or life experiences.
Whatever your situation, learning is a life long process and periodically taking time to brush up on those marketing skills that don’t get regularly trained or used during working roles can always be beneficial to your personal development.
What marketing skills do you think are most important to your current role?
Which do you think are critical to your professional career development?
Which do you think are the most valued by recruiters or employers?
