Skip to contentSuppose you’re in the market to hire the best digital marketing agency. Or perhaps your goal is to become the world’s best digital marketer. What are the attributes of digital marketing success? Would you be satisfied with doing the common thing uncommonly well as Rockefeller says?
After spending many decades developing marketing messages, advertising, and integrated digital marketing campaigns, here are 19 attributes and skills of a great digital marketer that stand out to me. You can use them to help your own self-development or as criteria to find the best agency for you to hire.
Curiosity
Great marketers are like six–year–olds; they always want to know why. Curiosity is the gateway to clarity. As Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.“
Clarity
The difference between a marketer and someone who writes is that the former enlightens the reader while the latter tends to confuse the reader.
Passion
Further down, I’m putting words like “boring” and “trivial” in quotations because, to great marketers, nothing is boring or trivial if that’s what they’re marketing.
Self-motivation
The manager who motivates a marketing copywriter to write by screaming, “WRITE!” has yet to be born.
Self-editing
Arrogance undermines quality. Great marketers know when their own messages stink and treat them accordingly.
Versatility
Some marketers are uncomfortable with the concept of a hard sales pitch; others are uncomfortable with “boring” assignments. Both are uncomfortable when not working on campaigns.
Quick on the uptake
Because of deadlines, marketers often have to learn on the job and on their own – and quickly.
Knows when to ask for help
A good marketer has two choices: struggle endlessly with a vexing problem or get help from a subject matter expert. The latter option improves speed and accuracy.
Has perspective
Great marketers don’t make mountains out of molehills. Those who continually get hung up on small matters of style or approach infuriate coworkers and bosses.
Knows when to skip the rules
Selectively breaking rules is a sophisticated technique for capturing attention. Apple’s “Think Different” campaign succeeded in part by departing from the boring and pedestrian phrase, to think differently.
Understands the business world
The best marketers are those that work best with what they know. Thus, a first-rate marketer understands the business process, customer behavior, and basic business concepts such as features and benefits.
Because great marketers understand the business world, they are able to identify probable reactions from the target audience – and address them in the marketing strategy. In addition, this knowledge enables them to discard messaging points that are not pertinent. An ounce of anticipation is worth a pound of verbosity.
Tells stories
Today’s content strategies have circled back to perhaps the oldest technique of all, storytelling. The ability to spin yarns is essential for grabbing and holding attention as well as influencing audiences.
Listens
Most great marketers I know are better at listening than talking – maybe because they are often introverts by nature. Listening is crucial to many aspects of business, including content creation, because it is the surest way to understand the needs of a company’s leadership and its customers.
Most business writing is aimed at influencing action – influencing prospects to buy, customers to stay, investors to invest, etc. Since business decisions are made in part based on compelling arguments, marketers must be able to lay them out logically.
Influences with emotion
Because business decisions are also based on feelings, marketers must be able to provoke emotional responses in their messages. Warm prospects freeze when exposed to cold messages.
Not a desk jockey
Great marketers aren’t just about reading and writing. Instead, they go out into the real world and talk to employees, customers, and even competitors. Without this, they lose their feel – or never acquire it.
Is imaginative
Although in some business situations, imagination may be seen as a negative, employers should not come down too hard on marketers who appear to be daydreaming or throwing out lots of ideas.
Have a sense of humor
Sylvia Plath and Edgar Allan Poe were brilliant writers, but neither would be particularly effective or happy writing an infomercial script for miracle meat slicers. A lighthearted spirit helps marketers plow through “boring” and “trivial” assignments, connect with readers and work well collaboratively.
What would you add to the list?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of digital marketing. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your digital marketing efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising? Do you have a lesson about making your digital marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, digital marketing, and customer service agents. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
More reading on marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Secrets to Becoming a New Market Leader
Do You Know the 9 Keys to Create Effective Advertisements?