Four Marketing Skills One Should Possess In Order to Be Successful in 2015

If you are a small business owner or a seasoned marketer, you probably find it absolutely confounding to how best marketing strategies have changed in the past one decade. To make decisions, customers aren’t using catalogues, direct mail, radio advertising, or trade shows any longer. These days, businesses, irrespective of size prefer social media, mobile apps, content marketing and customized ads for targeting their potential customers. Also, these days, data is not a confidential asset that is closed, guarded by the IT department any longer either, and now big, data is now a necessary and accessible tool for making business and marketing decisions. If you want to build relationships and churn more revenue out of your business this year and beyond, here are the list of marketing skills you need to acquire as soon as possible.

Content Marketing

If you need to be successful from your marketing campaigns then you need content as it is considered one of the main building blocks of online marketing, and offline marketing. When it comes to online marketing, blogging is the widely preferred tool to attract quality web traffic to your website. Many industry experts say blogging is remarkably an effective tool for marketing campaigns, and according to HubSpot, there are 31 percent more bloggers these days than compared to 2-3 years ago.

Blogging is one form of content marketing, and there are content experts who are willing to develop a comprehensive content strategy. According to experts, if one has become content marketing professional, he/she must have a passion for writing, editing and articulating concepts in content. Also, one should have that ability to conceptualize and create visual-based content, developing relevant and real-time stories, and taking a cross-channel approach to telling brand stories.

Social Media

According to many surveys, social media is the most popular internet activity worldwide. When we look onto the year 2015, social media witnessed significant growth than it did three or four years ago. Among social media sites, Facebook is the most popular site with one billion active users worldwide. According to pewinternet.org, around 56 percent of adults have a Facebook account and it is seeing more growth in usage by adults in the near future. However, people are now using more than just one social media site they are using other sites also, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google+. So, marketers need to develop strategies for multiple social media sites.

Due to the recent changes in Facebook’s algorithm which focuses on reducing promotional posts on their users’ Newsfeed, and due to the shift in consumer behavior, marketers need to think more than just creating a really great Facebook post. They need to think as researchers, who know how to find the channels their target customers are using, and build a presence there. They need to focus less on channel-specific skill sets than the social and authentic aspects of social media marketing, and thereby you can reap benefits from your unique marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing

There are people in the marketing industry who say that email marketing is dead, but in reality it is not. According to Exact Target, nearly half of customers make at least one purchase per year based on email marketing, and some 56 percent of marketers plan to increase their email campaign budget in the year to come. While the best tactics of email marketing are likely to continue to change, exceptional campaigns are always highly informative, personalized, and relevant to your target customers. To be successful in inbound marketing, you need to develop the ability to intelligently categorize a list and target email messages accordingly.

Relationship Building and Networking

According to many industry experts, marketers are essentially connectors and really, they are in the business of connecting customers with needed products/services, and their clients with a steady stream of new revenue. For this reason, a marketer’s profession will be much more successful if they are able to build relationships both online and offline. Marketers require the ability to develop and project a consistent personal and professional brand online, via content and social media. Also, they require customer support skills to actively engage with prospects and customers in online forums. According to Content Marketing Institute, offline marketing methods are still effective in promoting brands.

Above four skills are must for those who are going for marketing as their main career, and other skills they need to succeed in included search engine marketing, lead generation, customer service, web technologies and user experience.