From what little observations I’ve made lately, it seems that everybody wants to be in marketing these days. People I meet at school want to be in marketing because they don’t want to be stuck pushing pencils behind a desk in a four times four feet cubicle, and online it seems that everyone and their mothers are giving people marketing advice. It really does seem that marketing is a trendy field to operate in.
Now I’m by no means a marketing expert, but I do have some experience with internet marketing. I’m pretty sure that I could, if given the proper amount of time and quality material to work with, get any blog or website a steady flow of traffic. Of course, that doesn’t say much about me except that I have a decent grasp of what it takes to market something online. What I want talk about in this post however, is what qualities that characterize an expert in the field of marketing. My experience is limited however, even though I have some experience with online marketing and is a student of the field at University level, so I might miss with this swing I’m taking here. But hey, that’s why I have comments enabled on this blog!
- Creativity – One of the most important traits if you want to be a good marketer. You should be able to think outside the box, and find new ways to promote your service or product. Being book-smart is all good and well, but how will you be able to sell more than your competitors if you’re just repeating the steps they’ve already taken, or will be taking to promote their products?
- Being an early adopter – Closely connected with the first point on creativity, especially when it comes to online marketing, you should be able to spot potential ways of utilizing the latest services and technologies to market your website, service or product to a new clientele. This is particularly useful in gaining terrain compared to your competitors, and always being one step ahead can obviously help you gain valuable shares of your target market.
- Well connected – Possibly the most recognizable trait of a good marketer, online or offline, is that the person is extremely good at making new connections. With this in mind, there’s no wonder that early marketing science lectured that being a good marketer required certain personality qualities, more specifically being an extravert. Of course, in recent times it’s become well established that you can certainly have a successful career in marketing without being that guy that talks to every girl at the bar, but knowing people still helps.
And that’s all you get for now. Yeah, this is one of those dreaded split pieces of writing, where you have to wait a day or two for the second half of the article. The reason of course, is that I want to lure as many of you as possible into subscribing to my RSS feed, just because you want to make sure you don’t miss out on the rest of the things that characterize a marketing expert.
In the meantime however, I would like your opinions as well. I’m sure there are many of you out there who are better versed in the art of marketing who have more qualified opinions than I do, and I want you to share your voices with the rest of us. Post a comment, let us know what you think are important qualities in marketing!
I was going to write something about disagreeing with the title of this post, but given I’m commenting on your blog leaving my sitename and link, it seems I’ve proved your right!
In an ironic way I suppose you actually did, yeah! Appreciate you stopping by and taking the time to read through and commenting however
Totally agree with your three points. Stumbled
Everyday I’m seeing the value of marketing through networking. It motivates me to build up my business contacts.
I felt something important was omitted, analytics. Most wanna-be web marketers simply do not have both a creative and analytical mind on the same shoulders.
Without the analytical ability, it’s difficult to extract conversions from that traffic so their ability to “deliver” is disproven pretty quickly.
Split testing, landing pages, and being able to see everything from the customer’s mindset (from the SERPs to the checkout process) is rare, in my experience. Far too many simply do “ego-design,” shooting from the hip – because it’s easy. There will always be demand for the marketer who knows how to remove risk with testing.
Excellent resource (I’ve no financial ties) http://www.marketingexperiments.com
Dee: Thanks for the comment, and the Stumble, appreciate it
Scott: Yes, that’s a very important point that you bring up. A good marketer will have to be able to analyze the numbers, to find out what works, and preferably have good grips of what works before a campaign is started, too. I am probably one of those people who more or less just shoot from the hip – which is why I don’t work in marketing, yet
But I will certainly mention it in the second part of the article however, which I will be publishing tonight.
[...] this is part two of my previous article entitled ” Everybody is (or wants to be) in marketing these days. ” – In the first part, I brought up three things that I think are typical characteristics of [...]