From its inception with the industrial revolution in the 1800s to its supercharging by the internet in the late 1990s and the more recent rise of social media, marketing has become a vital tool for creating awareness, excitement and sales for popular products and services.
Whether it’s the occasional Instagram post or full-blown content, social and email campaigns, there’s barely a modern business that doesn’t partake in some form of marketing practice. And with one report predicting the global marketing and advertising industry to be worth as much as $786.2 billion by 2026, building a career in marketing has never been more exciting or lucrative. Indeed, this is particularly true in the US, which has more active internet users – and therefore a more captive marketing audience – than almost anywhere else on the planet.
If you’re thinking of breaking into the marketing world, there’s clearly never been a better time to do so. To help, here we’ll follow up our popular post on how to become a digital marketer with a deeper look at the skills needed for marketing, and how you can go about acquiring them.
What skills are needed for marketing in 2023 (and beyond)?
For a long and lucrative career promoting products and services, there are really two kinds of marketing skills you should be looking to acquire. One is ‘soft’ skills, which are general competencies that can help you do many different kinds of jobs, and can underpin the more measurable ‘harder’ skills. The ‘hard’ skills themselves are things you can study and, in many cases, gain a professional certification in.
For ease, we’ve listed five of the most common soft and hard marketing skills we think you’ll need below.
‘Soft’ marketing skills
- Attention to detail: It’s often the small details that can make or break a marketing campaign. A comma in the wrong place, a simple spelling mistake, the wrong headline in a presentation or a missed decimal point in a financial promotion can be the difference between outstanding success, looking foolish to colleagues and clients, or even huge financial losses.
- Creativity: Another of the essential soft skills needed for marketing is the ability to think different. Take Steve Jobs, for instance. He was a marketing guy who had the vision to realize how Apple could develop into new areas with music and phones – and the creativity to guide artists, writers, designers and tech-minded workers to an incredibly successful outcome across product, media ads, and more besides. Our advice? Speak up with your creative ideas in meetings early, work with your creative team closely on ideas, and let as much of their process seep in to your own thinking as humanly possible – you’ll be glad you did later on.
- A growth mindset: If you want to go from marketing assistant to marketing manager, you have to be focused on growing. That doesn’t just mean climbing the career ladder at work, it means applying yourself to accreditations in your spare time and learning new technologies and tools that can help to push your company and industry forward.
- Communication: A marketing department may have its own dedicated copywriters, but even in a non-creative marketing role you’ll have to do plenty of communicating to help bring projects to life. From emails to written briefs and hosting meetings to giving presentations, communication is one of the most crucial soft marketing skills you can cultivate, and ultimately comes with practice the more you do it.
- Leadership: For a long and successful marketing career you’ll also need to grow your leadership abilities. That may seem daunting and not all that relevant when you’re a marketing assistant, but as you gain experience and seniority people in your team and others, as well as clients and agencies you partner with, will all look to you for direction. It’s therefore always wise to be a sponge in your first few years, soaking in as much experience and getting as much advice from more experienced marketers than you. Adding an accredited management course or two to your CV definitely doesn’t hurt, either.
‘Hard’ marketing skills
- Strategic thinking: One of the first ‘hard’ marketing skills you’ll need for a truly successful career in marketing is the ability to identify and take advantage of strategic opportunities. For instance, if you have a particular product to sell, the strategic part might be in selecting the right audience to target and identifying the most effective channels to get your message across in a compelling fashion. The ability to implement a strategy and business development plan can come with experience, but taking a course like a Masters in Strategic Marketing could be of enormous benefit.
- Social media and email marketing management: Two of the pillars of digital marketing campaigns, social and email communications allow brands to build strong bonds with a captive audience who are, by and large, already subscribed to receive their content. As a marketer you may work with writers and designers on the content or you may create your own, but either way you’ll want to make use of industry standard social management tools and email campaign management services like MailChimp.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC): Another crucial skill for a successful marketing career, SEO is what allows your content and campaigns to show up in search results, effectively making sure your products and services find success through maximizing their online visibility. SEO can be organic (getting found in search results without paying for it), paid (where you run Pay Per Click digital ad campaigns that target specific demographics and search terms), and you can even target people in specific locations like those local to you. There are any number of ways to learn this, so our advice would be to spend some time in the Google Analytics dashboard, read a lot, and take any and every course that you find helpful.
- Social media and email marketing management: Two of the pillars of digital marketing campaigns, social and email communications allow brands to build strong bonds with a captive audience who are, by and large, already subscribed to receive their content. As a marketer you may work with writers and designers on the content or you may create your own, but either way you’ll want to make use of industry standard social management tools and email campaign management services like MailChimp.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): We mentioned optimization above under data analytics, and CRO is how you do it. By adding this skill you’ll gain a valuable understanding of A/B testing, conversion funnels, and your engagement metrics. There are any number of CRO courses available online, so it’s really just a matter of picking one that works for you, diving in, and seeing your marketing career soar to new heights.
Marketing at Church & Dwight
Visit our marketing team page to learn more about marketing roles here at Church & Dwight. Thinking of breaking into marketing with us? Browse our open roles to see if we’re recruiting for your dream marketing role.
