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4 minute read
Some experts say that as soon as you start your new job, you should already be planning for the next one. Just make sure that you’re working hard enough in the current job so that you can succeed and excel in that position before looking for a promotion.
In the past, it was much easier to get promoted. As long as you mastered your job and did what your boss wanted, you were almost certain of promotion within a few years. The same cannot be said about the present day where factors such as technology, globalization, and flatter organizational structures have had a huge impact on who gets promoted, and when.
Today’s marketers have a bigger responsibility to drive growth to their organizations. Marketers are now expected to connect their companies’ core business arms – sales, engineering, product, IT, analytics and many others. They’re no longer limited to just support and brand-building functions. Instead, marketers are implementing programs that drive revenue.
The good news is that this
Data skills
In the information age, almost everything revolves around data. In most organizations, data is the connective tissue linking products, sales, finance, analytics, and IT teams. No matter your educational background, you need to get formal training in concepts that will allow you to communicate better with other teams. You need to be able to answer basic questions about statistical significance, sampling biases, and weighted average.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to become a data scientist; it simply means that you should be in a position to understand how data flows around you. Data skills will empower you with a competitive edge within your organization.
“Marketers need to speak in their executive’s language of demand, revenue, and the bottom line,” says Ellie Mirman of Hubspot. That language requires metrics and analysis. Through data, the marketer will be able to show if and how they achieved their goals and where to invest in the future. That’s exactly what executives want to hear.
Design skills
A great deal of marketing involves communication. You are required to convince the customer that your organization is the best they can find. And, you can only do this by creating persuasive conversion funnels and designing marketing materials that make an immediate impact.
Web Marketing Today lists three critical design skills that every marketer needs in order to be successful: visual communication, eye for design, and learning design tools. Visual communication is all about conveying complex ideas through simple pictures to improve general effectiveness of your communication. By using simple shapes and symbols to represent ideas, you’ll be making is much easier for the customer to understand your proposition.
You also need to have an eye for what works and what doesn’t as far as design is concerned. And there is no better way to do that than by learning new ideas and acquitting yourself with new design tools. Again, you don’t have to be a professional Photoshop designer but if you can use it produce simple graphics on your own, you’ll be much better off.
Management skills
Often, employees are promoted because they’ve excelled in their current roles; not because they’ve demonstrated certain skills that may make them suitable for the new role. In fact, when you’re promoted to a new position, your employer will expect you learn on the job.
For marketers, a promotion usually means being elevated to a managerial position or to the CMOrole. Unfortunately, you may never have been a manager in your life before. Probably you were just an excellent marketer who knew what to do to win sales for their organization. However, management demands a little more. First, instead of relying on your own skill set to succeed, your success will now be determined by your ability to harness the abilities of each member of your team. If one of the members fails, you've somehow failed too!
This is why every marketer needs to be a great teacher and mentor as they prepare for promotion. You need to learn how to lead your teammates through the experience of performing to the best of their abilities.
Influence
The role of marketers continues to evolve. Initially only expected to lead brand-building operations, marketers are now a critical component of their organizations and some of the key drivers of growth.
As a marketer, part of your responsibilities will be to pitch new ideas across multiple channels within your company. Some ideas might instantly excite the company, but many others will also be met with resistance. To be truly successful and push for even greater responsibilities in the future, you need to be able to convince your team that the idea you’re pitching is the best possible course of action. You need to be an influencer who knows how to convince.
Organizations love employees who are not only creative but also able to bring their ideas to the table. There will always be obstructions on the way but that’s where you also need to utilize your “influencer” skills to get your point across.
Commercial awareness
Finally, the best marketers, and the ones who will quickly get a promotion, are those who demonstrate their commercial awareness. Different employers define commercial awareness differently. But at the end of the day, they all expect you to fully understand the organization, your role, and the expectations that come with our position. More importantly, they expect you to understand the marketplace, your competitors, and how they differ from each other.
You will be expected to understand how major players in your particular market are performing presently and help your organization to intelligently speculate about the future. This means you need to keep up to date with major news. You should also be able to understand the past and use it to predict future trends in a bid to strategically position your organization for future growth.
Summary
All these five skills are very practical and clearly visible in the workplace. Your boss will see them and if you can demonstrate that you’ve mastered most of them, then it might only be a matter of time before you get a promotion. However, even if you are not promoted by your current employer, these skills are enough to get you a more lucrative job at a different company. So, just keep working hard.