Developing the Skills Necessary for Today’s Marketers

As the mar­ket­ing land­scape con­tin­ues to change at a rapid pace, with new tech­nolo­gies appear­ing every few weeks and busi­ness­es requir­ing new approach­es all the time, mar­keters are in a unique role in their organ­i­sa­tions. It’s often up to them to lead the way through change by get­ting every­one on the same page. Today’s mar­keters need lead­er­ship skills to do their jobs well and guide their com­pa­nies to con­nect with cus­tomers bet­ter than ever before. Sev­er­al of our con­trib­u­tors on CMO.com have touched on some of the skills and strate­gies required of today’s marketers.

At the Mar­ket­ing Society’s Glob­al Con­fer­ence in Lon­don, sev­er­al speak­ers touched on the impor­tant role of senior mar­keters in the rapid­ly chang­ing dig­i­tal world. Nigel Vaz, glob­al chief strat­e­gy offi­cer at Sapi­ent­Ni­tro, men­tioned the need for busi­ness­es to be adap­tive, espe­cial­ly in how they com­mu­ni­cate and build rela­tion­ships with their cus­tomers. Avi­va CEO Mark Wil­son described how he approach­es run­ning his busi­ness with a sense of dis­rup­tion, using some­thing he calls the “propo­si­tion tweet” to deter­mine whether or not he’ll kill a prod­uct. The need to be bold and dis­rup­tive was a com­mon thread run­ning through­out the conference.

Thomas Bar­ta, CMO lead­er­ship thought leader, keynote speak­er, and author, shared some of the skills he believes are vital for any cus­tomer expe­ri­ence leader. Bar­ta con­sid­ers the shap­ing of a company’s cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (CX) to be “per­haps, the biggest lead­er­ship chal­lenge of a busi­ness.” The prob­lem is that CX lead­ers often lack tar­get­ed lead­er­ship train­ing. Accord­ing to Bar­ta, CX lead­ers need a place at the table with a company’s top lead­ers because the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence jour­ney is vital to the busi­ness as a whole.

When new plat­forms are intro­duced, it’s tempt­ing for mar­keters to dive right in and begin using them to push con­tent out. For some brands, this makes sense, espe­cial­ly if the brand’s cus­tomer are accus­tomed to inter­act­ing with it on a vari­ety of chan­nels. For oth­er com­pa­nies, a new plat­form may not be rel­e­vant to its cus­tomers, so imme­di­ate buy-in doesn’t make sense. Rachel Hat­ton, chief strat­e­gy offi­cer, OLIVER Group UK, encour­ages mar­keters to be more like Ein­stein when it comes to new plat­forms. This means ques­tion­ing every­thing and approach­ing them with an atti­tude of “pur­pose­ful play.” The best new plat­forms relate to real life.

Chris Tay­lor, CIO of the Tele­graph Media Group, spoke with CMO.com about the role of inno­va­tion in a com­pa­ny. Instead of task­ing only a few peo­ple with­in an organ­i­sa­tion with com­ing up with new ideas, Tay­lor advo­cates for inno­va­tion to be a part of everyone’s job descrip­tion. “We seek to make it clear to every­one in the organ­i­sa­tion they have licence and sup­port to be inno­v­a­tive,” Tay­lor said. Fur­ther­more, he added the impor­tance of being pre­pared to take risks and try new things so peo­ple will feel they have the space to be inno­v­a­tive with their ideas.

David May­er and Simon Glynn, senior part­ners and direc­tors of EMEA at Lip­pin­cott, shared how impor­tant it is for a brand to build emo­tion­al bonds with its cus­tomers. Emo­tion­al bonds, they say, help cus­tomers devel­op not only loy­al­ty to a brand, but love for a brand that allows them to for­give mis­takes in oper­a­tion. A brand might per­form flaw­less­ly, but with­out any emo­tion­al bonds in place, cus­tomers tend to align with the brand they love over the brand that per­forms bet­ter. May­er and Glynn out­lined some impor­tant steps for mar­keters to bet­ter dri­ve a brand’s emo­tion­al agen­da with its customers.

We hope you’ll spend some time this week engag­ing with our exclu­sive con­tent on CMO.com. Please let us know what you think.