The Journey
Marketing plays a pivotal role for any business to ensure revenue generation and sustain profitability by identifying and meeting customer needs.
Marketing is genuinely about sharing your passion, and the journey towards becoming a good marketer starts with listening to the market pulse with ears firmly to the ground. The marketer, also known as a growth hacker, needs to have a strong customer focus and must continuously strive to achieve high customer satisfaction levels.
Listening to and understanding the need of the customer is of foremost importance in this journey. It starts from awareness and interest through continuous engagement to deliver a superior experience towards expansion and offering possible benefits as per the needs of the customer. In this journey, the marketer balances the relationship between the customer and the brand while engaging with the customer to understand, capture the essence, and create the most relevant messages targeted towards the audience. Therefore, it’s essential to understand the challenges of market dynamism and work towards offering a unique version to address them.
Forecasting the market trends enables the marketing professional to provide the solutions sought by the customer. Giving the utmost attention to the minutest details and enhancing the customer’s whole experience paves the way toward success. A trustworthy marketing person fulfills the customer’s needs and arouses further desire in the customer’s mind to learn more about the products and services offered by the brand. It is all about providing distinctive solutions for robust customer engagement to increase performance.
The Art of Story Telling
Marketing is truly the art of storytelling, and the brand is a story unfolding across all customer touchpoints. It’s a skill of holding the attention and weaving the story and sharing it in such a captivating way that the audience is wholly entrenched and engaged in it. The story offers the tease, a glimpse, indulgence, and immersive experience for the customer by highlighting the benefits of the brand. First, the story establishes a strong relationship with the customer, and then the relationship further builds trust, and in turn, faith drives revenue.
The marketing professional has to be charismatic in the storytelling and should work on the brand life-cycle by creating it, enhancing it at every step, and channelizing it through various mediums, adding value to it, and constantly work on the sustenance of the brand positioning and its benefits to the end consumer. They not only work on the engagement but also work extensively on the strategy for retaining the customers.
Qualities of a Marketer
The skillset for the marketer can prove to be a game-changer, high on dynamism, with excellent communication skills, flexibility, curiosity, and creativity. It is also essential to stand out in the crowd and have an inspiring personality to connect with people. Leadership and mentoring skills are also vital to motivate others in the right direction and guide them towards the path to achieve the goals.
There has to be a fine balance of knowing the current market scenario and futuristic trends to offer the solutions in making the brand and taking it to the next level. A marketer’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day. The latest practices and methods must be followed to achieve the results backed by cutting-edge technology, marketing automation, and data tools for accurate insights. It is vital to develop the quality of flexibility and marketing capability for data management, analytics to drive strategy & ROI, creativity, and continuous optimization. The marketing professional also leads and works on integrating marketing and sales and their alignment to maximize the performance by using different channel expertise.
It’s imperative to be a team player and listen so that those goals can be achieved by picking the ideas from the best minds around you. Brainstorming is an effective tool to harness ideas and keep the team’s spirit high. It is also essential to liaison with other functions to achieve the desired result. Adaptability is also one of the critical strengths of marketers, as change is the only constant, and they accept it and thrive on it to make the best of the situation. They have an appetite for risk and don’t shy away from experimenting, and relentlessly focusing on getting better at their game.
But the most essential quality of a marketer is to keep broadening the horizons and be highly efficient in hands-on execution, to effectively lead a team and ace the marketing game. In addition, he or she needs to have the drive and zest to continuously evolve and upgrade on skills and acquire knowledge to bring newness and great ideas to the core. A great marketer is an avid learner and always looks for newer strategies, tactics, and tools to get the most out of their efforts. The new breed of these growth hackers and marketers are also coming with startups and entrepreneurial ventures.
To reinforce the above it may be appropriate to reiterate what Albert Einstein had stated: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.”
