by Usman Sheikh5 Ways A Marketer Can Stand Out At Work
5 Ways A Marketer Can Stand Out At Work
You’ve made up your mind that you want to pursue marketing as a career.
You have all the academic qualifications to kick-start the career journey.
The zeal in you feels like it will take you just a couple of years or months to become a world-class marketer.
First, congratulations on defining your career path and bracing yourself to defy the odds to become an outstanding marketer.
What Is Expected of You?
The key role of a marketer in an organization is to develop and implement profit maximization strategies when it comes to the promotion of a product, a service or a brand. The marketing professional focuses on ensuring that the necessary promotional message reaches the target audience and triggers as many profitable sales as possible. So, a marketer is an integral part of any form of business.
That’s why the February 2020 CMO Survey projects that businesses are likely to spend 11.3% of their overall budgets on marketing.
Image Source: 2020 February CMO Survey; Slide 8.
Possible Challenges
Marketing is a highly sought-after skill and could be very rewarding if you get it right. However, it is important that you appreciate the fact that it is not all rosy- It has its own fair share of challenges. It’s unfortunate that marketing is regarded as among the most stressful fields of work.
So, what makes marketing an uphill task sometimes? Well, here are some of the challenges you are likely to encounter as a marker.
Traffic and Lead Generation
Sales lead generation and traffic generation are the key tasks of a marketer. However, according to the 2018 State of Inbound reports, the inability to generate sufficient sales leads and traffic is one of the top challenges that marketers face worldwide.
Image Source: Hubspot’s State Of Inbound Report
When you become a marketer, you’ll realize that your target audience might not be as receptive to your message as you’d expect. The reason is that these people are bombarded with so much information that they’re confused which to consider or overlook. When your content doesn’t get the intended level of attention, it means that the targeted lead generation level may not be achieved.
Consequently, the business will not be able to attract enough prospects and new customers to sustain its growth. That’s one of the toughest moments in a marketer’s life.
Inadequate Resources
From sponsored ads to content creation, marketing involves various activities that require money to be spent. However, in some instances, marketers find themselves between a rock and a hard place when they are expected to deliver to certain levels, but their budgets are insufficient. Companies expect their marketers to account for every marketing dollar by showing the return it has brought. Therefore, as a marketer, you have to show the best results for the little resources you’ve been provided with before your proposal for a budget increase is approved.
Identification of The Right Tools
There are a wide range of tools that are particularly design to improve marketing efficiency, each one of them addressing a particular relevant issue. However, according to HubSpots’s State of Inbound Report, 24% of marketers find the identification of the most suitable tools for their specific marketing activities quite challenging. You are likely to find yourself in such a situation as well.
How to Stand Out
Do the above challenges sound discouraging? Remember, every job has its own challenges, and that doesn’t mean that you can’t rise beyond them. When it comes to marketing, you can employ strategies to help you overcome the aforementioned challenges, among others, to become an outstanding expert.
Here are some of the ways in which you can position yourself as an exceptional marketing professional:
Develop an Analytical Mindset
Marketing ought to be a response to the happenings in the external environment. It should highlight the solutions that a business has to offer to address particular needs affecting people.
So, a thorough need assessment is a key step for marketing success. As a marketer, you need to look for answers to questions like:
“what to these people need?”
“what is likely work as solution and why?”
“What can turn away my customers in my marketing approaches?”
The more accurate answers you get for such questions, the higher the chances of attaining your marketing goals. This is where marketing data analysis comes in handy.
The modern day’s marketing experts spend much time on data analysis to gain an in-depth and accurate understanding of their respective niche markets and identify the best strategies for their campaigns.
For instance, when it comes to the recent SEO statistics, you’ll find that 4% of today’s marketers actively employ search engine optimization (SEO), according to Hubspot.
According to Steelhouse, landing page targeting and testing can see conversions increase by 300%. However, only 17% of marketers use landing page A/B tests for conversion rate improvement.
The above statists tell you that although SEO is a popular marketing strategy, there are some inadequately tapped potential (in landing page testing ) that you can leverage to boost your conversions.
Essentially, you must be able to use the relevant raw and processed data available to you to develop actionable strategies if you want to become a distinguished marketer.
Be Sincere
One thing that you need to acknowledge while marketing your brand, product or business is that your target customers aren’t short of alternatives. There’s a high possibility that tens of businesses with solutions like yours have approached them.
The current market is very competitive. A customer is fed with too much varied information that they don’t know who to trust. According to Edelman, only 48% of the U.S customers trust businesses in 2018. So, every serious marketer needs to strategize on ways to earn trust from their target customers.
A recent survey shows that84% of marketers worldwide believe that future marketing efforts will focus on trust-building. No wonder many companies have resorted to hiring online reputation managers on a full-time basis.
Humans have the tendency to trust seemingly sincere people. A sincere marketer has higher chance of developing long-term trust with customers as compared to when marketing efforts are crowded with deceit and dishonesty.
When customers perceive you as a trustworthy person, there’s a high likelihood that they’ll give you the attention you want, and eventually respond positively to your call to action.
Sincerity is also a major determinant of the kind of relationships you’ll have with your bosses and even colleagues. Learn to admit mistakes when you commit them. Avoid lies to cultivate long-term professional relationships. Genuine employees are not easy to find. So, rest assured that your sincerity will take you to unimaginable professional heights.
Stay Well Connected to Your Surroundings
As earlier mentioned, a marketer serves as a link between the needs in their surroundings and the solutions that a business has to offer to the problems of their customers.
So, one of the things that you can’t afford to ignore is the awareness of the environment surrounding you.
Get involved in the community where your target audience lives or frequents.
As for the physical surroundings, attend and actively participate in the events that bring together your target customers to get to understand their needs. That direct interaction is priceless.
Leverage it to position yourself as a person who truly understands their needs and has the best solution to them.
In the online world, identify the platforms where your customers tend to visit and let them feel your outstanding presence. You can achieve that by sharing valuable content that’s relevant to their needs.
The most successful marketers are those who are heavily engaged in their communities. Follow suit, and you’ll see your marketing career become more successful day by day.
Be Open to Trying New Things
Customers’ needs are very dynamic. You’ll become irrelevant if you don’t adjust your marketing tactics accordingly.
For instance, the digital era has seen a reduction in the consumption of print media, as people shift to digital information platforms. This leaves a savvy marketer with no choice but to invest heavily in digital marketing.
Even in digital marketing, things are changing really fast. What used to work a couple of years ago might be ineffective today.
Considering the changing nature of customer’s needs, you need to constantly review how you convey your messages. Find out the kind of content that your customers want. If it’s something that prompts you to try a new thing, then don’t hesitate to take up the challenge. The best marketers face challenges head-on; they don’t escape.
Ensure that you are always keeping up with the most recent marketing trends and changing your marketing tactics accordingly.
Maximize Your Budget
Marketing accounts for a significant percentage of business expenses. If not well checked, marketing expenses might hurt the profitability of a business. That’s why CFOs demand results from marketers regularly.
If you want to earn the heart of your boss, you should prove to them that you can deliver the best results from your lean budget. Learn how to set, allocate, troubleshoot, and adjust your marketing strategies in a way that portrays your ability to bring marketing efficiencies to the organization.
Be always on the lookout to identify and utilize tools that can boost your marketing efficiency.
Make the best of the little you have and the CFO will rarely have a second thought while approving your marketing budget increase proposal.
Parting shot…
Marketing is a challenging task that requires creativity, sincerity, proactiveness, an analytical mindset, and great interpersonal skills. When you get these right, you won’t be any other marketer; you’ll be an exceptional one.
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From a start-up helping local small businesses, over a span of 5 years, Usman has built Web Worx Labs to be a leading provider of digital marketing solutions that employs 15+ full-time employees and has customers in over 30 countries.
Outside of work and his passion for all things digital, Usman is a proud father of three, loves running and is an avid reader.
Follow Usman on LinkedIn or Twitter as he is always sharing tips on strategy, branding, marketing and analytics.