What’s in this article:
- The most important soft skills marketing professionals should cultivate to create healthy customer relationships
- By incorporating these soft skills into your day-to-day, you’ll be able to better understand and connect with potential customers while staying on top of emerging trends
Behind every successful marketing campaign is a team of communication experts who understood how to translate ideas into tactical strategies. This takes more than the hard skills and experience you’d typically find on any marketing pro’s resume.
To truly connect with potential customers, marketers also need an array of soft skills. Here are the most important soft skills marketing professionals should cultivate.
Soft skill #1: Be empathetic
At its core, marketing is about making a connection with people, and that requires understanding. By empathizing with your customer base, you can better serve them personalized, thoughtful campaigns that really get noticed. This is especially important as we enter a new era of post-coronavirus marketing, and brands are putting empathy at the forefront of their efforts. No longer simply a “nice-to-have,” empathy is now perhaps the most necessary soft skill for marketers.
Soft skill #2: Be flexible & willing to adapt
Digital marketing has always been a frenetic, fast-paced industry. As technology evolves and new platforms emerge, marketers have to let go of old ideas and shift gears to the new. Marketing pros also need to re-evaluate and change campaigns that aren’t sending the right message, intentionally or not. That requires flexibility and a willingness to adapt that not everyone can handle.
We’re seeing this happen in realtime right now: between the COVID-19 pandemic and the worldwide protests for racial justice, customer expectations are changing. If marketers can’t also shift to meet those expectations, they’re going to be left behind. Communicating what they want to hear means creating solid relationships with existing customers – which ultimately leads to overall growth for your business.
Soft skill #3: Be able to multitask
Anyone who’s ever managed multiple campaigns across multiple channels can tell you how essential this one is. A skilled marketing professional needs to handle deadlines and a packed meeting calendar while keeping on top of changing initiatives, brand messaging, and other deliverables. Multitasking goes hand-in-hand with our second soft skill. Flexibility really comes into play when you’re managing all of this while adapting to industry changes.
Soft skill #4: Be curious
Yes, being in marketing requires staying up to date with the latest technology, social media, and emerging channels. But it’s not enough to begrudgingly incorporate them into your campaigns; you should be genuinely curious about where the industry is going and actively want to be part of the evolution. This curiosity will serve you especially well when trying to reach the Gen Z demographic because Zoomers engage with brands in ways previous generations haven’t. A sense of curiosity will only strengthen your marketing repertoire.
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Soft skill #5: Be a team player
Let’s be honest: there’s almost no profession in which being a team player isn’t a key aspect of the job. This is especially true in marketing. Managing marketing campaigns means working with several individuals from different departments and even outside organizations.
You’ll need a good sense of teamwork to make sure everyone’s on the same page, from the creative designers to the copywriters and beyond. With that teamwork in place, you’ll also be better positioned to prevent and manage crises — you don’t want to wait until something goes wrong to wish you’d developed this soft skill.
There are a number of tangible hard skills marketing professionals need in order to be successful, but in many cases, the soft skills are just as important. By incorporating these soft skills into your day-to-day, you’ll ultimately be able to better understand and connect with potential customers while staying on top of emerging trends.