Being a Good Marketer is Becoming Harder than Ever

Skills are becoming easier to learn. Businesses are becoming easier to open. The ways in which companies can save money are multiplying every day. These are all fantastic things, but they all come with their downsides.

As skills become easier to learn, people head to Lynda and Coursera to go through a few quick free courses on digital marketing. As they look to save money, they wonder whether or not they need to hire someone to handle their marketing for them. And if they do hire someone to handle their marketing, the pressure on the individual or the agency hired, is like never before.

In an increasingly digital world where skills are becoming easy to learn and platform specialisation is seemingly only a few weeks of "trial and error" away, marketing consultants are finding themselves facing increasing pressure to prove their value and worth to companies.

Being a marketer has seemingly become easy, but being a good marketer has definitely become exceptionally hard. And this is an excellent development to have taken place. If you're looking to be a good marketer, there are some key challenges that you're looking at facing over the next couple of years, and here's what you need to steel yourself against on a daily basis.

1. You Need to be Brutally Efficient

If you think you're going to spend your entire day solving marketing problems, you've got another thing coming. Be prepared to spend half your day solving process and workflow problems. As a marketing consultant, it's not enough to provide solutions on what the company's marketing should look like, you need to also put into place a structure that enables the organisation to bring that marketing to life. The final output is as important as the path that the company needs to take to get there. And any bottlenecks that need removing, any approval systems that need to be put into place, also fall under your responsibility.

With this increased workload, the requirement to work faster without compromising on the end result becomes critical. You need to think faster than your clients, faster than your internal teams, and put yourself in a position where you can be smart, selective and quick about the problems that you're going to solve on a regular basis.

2. Your Communication Needs to be Solution Focused

Us marketers have a reputation of being individuals that like to talk their way out of situations, aren't business oriented and only like to add the cherry on top of the cake rather than worry about how to bake the cake itself. As a result, each time a marketer chips in during a business strategy meeting, they're heard with a healthy dose of skepticism half the time, and barely heard the other half of the time.

But solid, researched, data-backed and strategic input can be impactful. It doesn't matter who it comes from. When an interesting thought is put on the table that sounds like a viable solution, backgrounds and titles go out the window. Marketers need to learn to say as little as possible while making as much impact as those limited words allow. Decks filled with buzzwords and chipping in during meetings with jargon-filled two minute rambles aren't acceptable, and only help company leadership show marketers their way out the door.

3. You Need to Explain Increasingly Complex Concepts in the Simplest of Manners

Due to the nature of digital marketing and the hyper-targeted nature of social networks, marketers often find themselves in situations where they're trying to explain what a retargeting pixel or a 28 day conversion window is to someone from Operations. Jargon doesn't fly with these guys. The more jargon they hear, the less credibility they attach with your role in the organisation.

With conversion windows and attribution models, you're dealing with complex marketing terms and processes - and as a result, when something goes wrong with this or when data for specific measurement points aren't available, you need to clearly be able to explain to a team that has no prior working knowledge in this field what they're up against. Their being able to understand a complex issue through simple terms and explanations used by you is seen as a success on your part, and immediately puts you in the light of someone that's in control and will handle the solution. This is seldom the case with most marketers.

4. You Need to be Incredibly Comfortable with Data and Data Interpretation

One of the key areas of questioning in any hiring interviews that I'm part of is the field of data. Their ability to use Excel, their ability to work with Pivot Tables, to look at a table of data and draw insights, or to look at a chunk of data and strip it of the data that needs to be ignored, and that which needs to be organised into a clearer structure based on the objective and goals of the exercise.

Most marketing today is about studying data before making a decision, making an informed decision, and then studying the results of the impact of that decision in the form of data. Most smart marketing begins and ends with data, the extent of which is incredibly important and needs to be defined. The ability to quickly understand and interpret data sets, forming impactful and actionable insights from data sets is an incredibly useful and a very vital skill for any marketer to succeed today.

5. You Need Impeccable People Skills at all Levels

It's not enough to be an intelligent marketer, or a bright one that is an expert with the usage of data. In addition to being technically proficient, marketers today need to also have impeccable people skills. This isn't limited to being able to manage your own team, motivate your people and ensure that morale doesn't run low.

This extends to a critical, and vital area of any organisation - the key stakeholders. Marketers need to ensure that they manage the expectations of the key stakeholders of various disciplines of their own and client organisations, ensuring that they have strong lines of communication with everyone. As people that sell themselves as business problem solvers and bottom line drivers, they need to position themselves as individuals that understand the needs, requirements and complexities of the different departments in the organisation and make stakeholders believe that they will be able to work collaboratively through an understanding of each others' roles.

It's never been easy being a marketer, and it's only going to get tougher. This is a good sign, as it's a clear sign of progress and in the long run will only enhance the reputation of marketers and the discipline of marketing.

What kind of problems have you seen marketers facing on an increasing basis lately?