My first day at my office, straight out of engineering college, diving right into the Marketing job, which was never really my plan! So as it goes, unexpected things happen when you least expect them to! Though marketing had always been my passion because I felt that I could interact through multiple social networks with millions of people around the globe. Passion could be futile unless you have a force to push you towards pursuing it. Thus, I landed in Coviam, which was the guiding force helping me excel in what I always felt was my forte.
I started my marketing career a year ago and trust me, it was not as easy as I thought. But during this span of a year after crossing a number of milestones came a lot of success and failures. It made me realise that it’s okay if you don’t have technical knowledge, you should have the right attitude!
Have the ability to think objectively
Marketers are required to be the most passionate and target-oriented professionals. A marketer is required to have the distract himself/herself from other things and understand what actually will work. One needs to set their emotions aside and make decisions that are more tuned towards meeting an objective. Emotions or disappointments will be aplenty, but learning to control them while still maintaining your focus on your objective will make you successful. This at the beginning is tough, clients can be rough, pleasant, polite or negotiate hard once they have a relationship with you. You need to learn to handle situations without losing focus.
Have the ability to execute and analyze
Marketing is all about implementation and analyzing what actually works. It’s not about working with machines but with people. Machines understand binary and there is a limited set that will work out to solve for any issue, not so with humans. Understand humans, remotely as is required in Digital marketing is still an art. Knowing what the client is looking for and researching the client before the first contact is essential to succeed.
It’s not only about sending flocks of email campaigns but to understand and analyse the statistics from the results. It requires you to have an analytical mindset to move forward and plan strategies around it. Click through rates, times, profiles give a glimpse of intent. Interpreting that intent and lining up next steps requires analytical research.
Have the ability to be creative and strategic at the same time
It is important to talk to your intended audience in a well-planned yet creative way. You can have a basic prepared script around it but an excellent marketer always flexes based on the situation. It is essential to use the right content with right visuals to get the right customer for your customer. As it’s said, it’s important to have “art and science” together to each of your campaign.
In today’s day and age of marketing, it is also very important to listen. Listen to the customer, open the stage with what are the pain points that the customer is facing or understanding the role, industry and personality type, is there a scenario where your product can add his or her job exponential value and how do you enable your customers to visualize it.
Have an ability to be persuasive
Persuasion is still an art. With customers and with your teammates. Marketing is like a relay race, there are teams that do lead generation, client research, the first contact, follow through which can lead to the conviction and fitment case which will lead to closures and payments. Persuasion is required for all stages of the lead, research and customer conviction cycle. These are influence skills you will have to perfect, for backend teams to filter for the best customer case and leads and for customers to be convinced and buy your product.
Be a likeable personality
Marketing involves connecting with people. If you fake it or make it about yourself, people will see through it. Be honest, be sincere, be diligent in your responses and customers will start to believe.
Imagine there are two people pitching to you about the same product, talking to one is like talking to a robot playing a repeating script – I hear you but as I said kind of sentences point to this type – and to other is like pleasant and lively, which one would you prefer to talk to? As a marketer, it is important to be outgoing as a person, it is about developing yourself as a person that can leave an imprint in the minds of customers.
I had heard of the quote ‘Good content isn’t about good storytelling. It’s about telling a true story well’
I wondered what this meant, till I actually went through the experience of storytelling myself. Tying it to your product and the day in the life of a customer. Using visualization and “Imagine this” techniques.
I am still amazed at how I can carry off this art on my own. The reason I call this as art is because it has many soft variables that need to be constantly factored in, while making the pitch, to be able to present your thoughts and ideas in front of people and persuade them to buy your product. Each case is unique, each customer is too. Convincing them that they are the only ones and the product was exactly built to satisfy the use case they have in mind is an art.
One can only speak after experiencing what it actually takes to be good at marketing, and I’d still say that I have a long way to go and many more hurdles to cross.
Stay tuned for more on my marketing journey. Thanks for listening to my story.
Also published on Medium.
