7 Underused Skills All Marketers Secretly Have

Marketing is a field that is almost constantly evolving, with trends and SEO changes altering the most effective way to host campaigns on a frequent basis. This means people in this profession need to have a sophisticated skill set to adapt to these changes as - or even before - they have an impact.

Often this is expertise that you wouldn't necessarily associate with marketers, but can help them to more effectively deliver to clients and achieve their goals. These are usually buried so beneath the surface that professionals themselves aren't aware that they possess these skills, meaning they may not put the time and effort into developing them.

Here are seven underused skills that all marketers secretly have and why you should be prioritizing them:

Diplomacy

Whether you're aware of it or not, diplomacy is at the core of most marketing campaigns and the professionals behind them. To execute an effective omnichannel strategy, you need to take on the expertise of various different people. Clients often have their own priorities and ideas about how their budget should be spent, while there are also the demands of PR, legal, and C-level executives who will have their own ideas of what success looks like.

In addition, there's a lot of different priorities within a marketing department, with SEO, data insights, social media, content production, and many other specialists having their own objectives. To take all these different opinions and create a cohesive campaign that achieves its goals requires a marketer that is an expert in diplomacy.

Problem Solving

There are rarely any campaigns that go smoothly from start to finish. Whether it's budget or production problems or even a changing brief, marketers need to be able to find answers to the issues that present themselves. This makes problem solving a key element of any marketer's skillset, especially when complemented by diplomacy.

Internal issues can also arise, where specific departments have certain restrictions or requirements, and marketers need to use their problem-solving experience to find a solution, while being diplomatic to ensure that other professionals feel valued on the project.

Innovation

Whether it's artificial intelligence, automated marketing or a 360 customer view, marketers need to be on board with the latest innovation. Even if you're not promoting it for your next campaign - and many clients' budgets won't stretch that far - marketers need to understand this innovation to see how it could impact strategies in the future.

As well as trends and technology, it also includes being on top of innovative changes by Google and other search engines. Algorithms are almost constantly evolving to make users' searches more accurate and reliable and marketers need to have this information at their fingertips to make the best judgements.

Business Acumen

Not only do marketers need to understand the restrictions and priorities of the clients they are designing strategies for, but they also have to have a certain degree of business understanding for their own pursuits.

Whether it's C-level executives or Managing Directors, all marketers have to prove that what they are doing is working for the wider company. This is true whether you're an in-house marketer or working for a marketing agency, so it's essential that professionals in this field are able to understand business KPIs and goals.

Psychology

Getting inside the minds of consumers and potential consumers is complicated as it often depends on a lot of factors, but it's an essential part of being a successful marketing professional. To create a strong strategy you need to truly understand the pain points and motivations of the people you are targeting.

For marketers, this can often mean talking to companies about why their current personas are inaccurate or looking at ways their personas may need breaking down further. Businesses can be focused on targeting consumers they want to sell to rather than the ones actually buying their products, meaning marketers need to be able to understand their personas and guide companies to the right answer.

Data Interpretation

Data-driven marketing is a key part of any effective strategy, but this isn't something that always comes naturally to marketers. The rising use of Big Data and consumer information is making it an essential part of tracking the performance of individual campaigns and identifying ways they can be improved in the future.

Marketers therefore have to teach themselves ways to quickly interpret information they get from other internal departments, as well as any data they may get from their client. It's important to understand what the information means in isolation, but also how a campaign can be evolved to take everything into account.

Project Management

All marketers have to understand an element of project management to excel in their roles. Managing campaigns can be a complicated process, so marketing professionals need to be able to balance the different elements to achieve success. This means negotiating with internal departments, managing the expectations of the client and ensuring that projects stay within healthy budget margins.