Six Traits All Good Marketers Have
Contrary to the popular perception that marketing is not an honest profession, I’m here to tell you today that marketing is not about lying.
Marketing is about speaking the truth, but in order to be successful in marketing, you have to tell the truth in a way that makes your product or service sound fascinating enough for your prospects to want to buy into the idea.
The best marketers are those who tell people true stories. The only problem is that plain truth can actually be quite boring, but that’s where the profession of marketing actually begins to get exciting.
What exactly to tell your customers is always a challenge, and that’s why a good marketer needs to have a very robust and colorful skill set.
So that means as you become a good marketer, you automatically pick up skills that you can use in your personal life, in any side-hustles that you do, and even generally in your career.
There’s no limit to what you can do as a marketer. From technical skills like SEO to email marketing, photoshoots, planning, or even heading out into a crowded street with a loudspeaker, there are so many hats to wear in marketing because it’s a profession that caters to all kinds of personalities and skill sets.
All the skills that you are required to master as a marketer are going to turn you into a very diverse, highly social and collaborative kind of a person, which overall just makes your life a lot of fun. And that is actually the real reason why most people enter the marketing profession.
Today we’ll be talking about six ways marketing can be so rewarding and fun.
1. You Become a Psychologist
By being a good marketer, you automatically become a psychologist. Or at least, you begin thinking like a psychologist.
You see, one of the questions that advertisers and marketers have to answer time and time again is: what is it that motivates people?
To be a marketer, you have to understand what makes people tick in order to communicate with them effectively. And this is simply fascinating.
Great marketing is where you are able to make the product intersects with the customer’s life. You need to walk in your customer’s shoes to figure out how to convince them that what you’ve got is going to benefit them.
We use survey data, focus groups, web analytics, A/B split testing, psychology texts, we even talk to friends and family, all to understand why people make the decisions that they make.
Often times we have to indulge in research also and be very creative, in order to continuously get insights about how our customers think and feel, so that we can make our messages more and more compelling to our audiences.
So in other words, we begin to think like a psychologist.
2. You’ll Become a Better Writer
As a marketer, you often need to come up with taglines and advertisement scripts. And if you are more into content marketing, or the product that you’re promoting requires a lot of technical description, then you’ll be even more focused on coming up with write-ups as part of your marketing job.
When you have to think and write a lot, you end up typing sentences over and over again just to get the perfect version of the message you want to send across.
And then, if you have a boss and he/she doesn’t like it, you have to give it another shot all over again.
This whole process gives you so much practice for writing that you end up becoming a better writer.
In marketing, you often watch your art get trashed, but we all know that what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.
Writing for the sake of promoting or marketing a product, or for pitching a service to your prospects is called copywriting. Copywriting is actually the fundamental skill of the marketer. All of us who are marketers are actually storytellers. We tell stories of brands and products to bring them to life, and when a customer sees that a product is alive, they are likely to make a purchase.
So as you progress in the marketing field, you’ll become an increasingly good writer. You’ll write great sentences, most of them might even be trashed, but you will end up with some golden sentences that are going to make you and your product shine.
And marketing is not all just snappy, concise ad and social media copy. Longer form of writing is also part of the marketing toolkit, such as having a blog for your brand or sending out a monthly newsletter to your customers.
3. You’ll Be Good With Money
Marketing will help you become good with money.
You see, in any business, the way the money and other resources are used is what the business is judged on, because the way you choose to utilize anything that you have determines the kind of results that you get.
Now, when a business is able to make smart allocation of its resources that maximizes the return on investment, that means that business has an effective marketing strategy.
So as a marketer, you just have to have the expertise to be able to allocate and utilize all the resources that you have at hand wisely, which means you have to be good at budgeting.
Budgeting is a life skill that every good marketer will master. Not only will you learn find good value for every expense that you make, but you’ll also need to learn what gives you the best return on investment.
Every marketer must analyze the performance of everything they spend money on, whether its on creative services or on stock inventory. Every penny must be stretched. And that’s not an easy thing to do, but this skill eventually becomes a part of you as you struggle in the field of marketing, and it gets you in the mindset of getting the most out of your money in actually every aspect of life.
4. You’ll Learn to Pitch Like a Pro
Marketing teaches you how to pitch like a pro.
Whether it’s about negotiating costs with existing clients or pitching a service to new clients, being an effective in-person communicator is a very essential skill that is part of the whole package of being a good marketer.
Making presentations is a regular part of the job as a marketer, and confidence is a trait that’s continuously required if you want to be successful in convincing anyone to simply buy anything from you, which means you just have to have it.
So if you are serious about progress in your career in the field of marketing, just being a smooth talker isn’t going to be enough. You will also need to have well-research data to back up every word that you say. After all, the first thing that you need to be able to advertise to anybody is yourself. You need to be able to sell yourself so that your prospects can have faith in you and trust that whatever you’re saying is true.
So as you struggle to develop your expertise in branding and marketing, you will first and foremost become able to promote your own personal brand, and then from there, your path to promote any other product, service or brand will get easier.
5. No Two Days Are Ever the Same
You will develop a diverse personality.
As a marketer, one day you could be looking at creative concepts or directing a photoshoot, and the next day you might be planning digital campaigns or writing a sales copy for a new product.
One of the joys of the marketing profession is that you are constantly meeting different creative or analytical challenges as the weeks go by. Now as much as this kind of a job can get frantic, that’s exactly what actually keeps a passionate marketing person going, because they like being on the go, they like being creative, and they like having different kinds of days in a single week.
6. You Can Change the World
As a marketer, you are likely to develop the ability to change the world, and without even knowing it.
You see, even every noble cause in the world needs a marketer to promote it. Whether it’s a charity event or a human rights law firm, any organization that needs to attract people’s attention requires people who are skilled in doing the job of attracting others. And that’s because no organization in the world can survive without good communicators and influencers.
Be it any kind of business or organization, marketers are the ones to reveal its story to public.
For instance, if you in marketing for a museum, your work would play a vital role to conveying the museum’s purpose to the world. Your creativity will take the work of the museum out into the public arena, educating and inspiring people before they even decide to visit the museum.
Or let’s say you work in marketing in the fast-moving consumer products industry, or in corporate banking. You will still be the one making the most difference in creating the image of the product or the company in the eyes of the masses.
So to conclude, marketing is all about making your voice heard, whether that’s in the boardroom, on billboards, in digital advertisements or elsewhere. And even if the truth is boring, it is your job and your challenge to make it fascinating. And as a result of doing that job, you end up becoming a fascinating person yourself!
Originally published at https://opinined.com on August 23, 2020.
