Always had a keen eye for adverts? Do you naturally find yourself studying the intricacies of advertising campaigns? If so, then you should consider forging a career for yourself in the field of marketing. In fact, there’s no need for you to stop there… go the whole hog and become the best, most successful marketer that you can possibly be!
For advice on how you can reach these lofty heights in your chosen profession, be sure to read on.
Get yourself a Marketing degree
Ignore the fact that you do not need a degree to enter into some niche areas of the marketing profession — if you want to be a successful marketer, you need to get yourself a marketing degree whether it is necessary for you to do so or not. Doing so will provide you with the credibility you need to be a relevant, leading, and sought-after voice in the field. Obtaining a marketing degree can also help you secure a job from startup jobs in DC. Once the employer sees that you have a marketing degree, this can be your edge over other applicants who don’t have an education background in marketing.
To truly hone your craft before you enter into world of professional marketing, you should resolve to enroll yourself on a Master of Marketing course. On such a course, you will learn all about how marketing tools can be leveraged to solve a number of business and customer issues, you will get up to speed with the latest technological advancements (particularly with regards to the way in which people are communicating), and you will develop soft skills that will help you to become a leader in the contemporary world of business.
Worried that taking such an intense and demanding course would distract you from bettering your career? Many educational institutes, such as RMIT, offer Marketing courses that can be taken 100% online. By enrolling on such a course, then, you would be able to perform your studying as and when it suits you, meaning you’d have more control over your schedule.
Cultivate and showcase a number of important skills
A shiny new degree won’t be enough to convince employers to take a gamble on your marketing abilities, though. For that to be the case, you need to cultivate and then showcase a number of skills.
In general, all of today’s best advertisers are highly skilled when it comes to:
- Driving revenue
- Knowing their customers and markets inside out
- Creating customer experiences that live long in the memory
- Telling stories (regardless of how much time they have to tell them)
- Testing everything rigorously
- Never assuming anything or taking anything for granted — an advertising campaign isn’t successful until it brings in a new customer
- Picking up new tricks and never being afraid to try something different
- Using data when it comes to making important decisions
- Working with the latest marketing technology
- Managing their schedule and basing it around the needs of their customers
- Writing great copy
- Listening more, talking less
- Delivering results that are specific and identifiable
If you want to become a successful marketer, you must seek to cultivate as many of these skills as you can… and you must showcase them as best you can on the interview day.
Understand buyer persona
To be a successful marketer, you need to get to grips with the fact that buyer persona is far more important than demographics. It doesn’t matter how old a person is, where they live, how much they earn, their sexual orientation, or their ethnicity — if they want to buy something, they’re going to buy it. It is more important that you understand your customers on a much deeper level. What specific products do they tend to buy? How do they choose these products? Who/what is it they trust to guide their buying choices? Do societal attitudes impact their buying decisions? You need to ask these questions and then seek to answer them by cultivating a deeper understanding of your target buyer persona.
To garner this understanding, you’re going to have to go above and beyond when it comes to formulating and then asking crucial customer questions. When surveying customers, don’t just ask them their age, where they grew up, or what their job title is. Ask them about their passions and hobbies in life, and enquire (subtly, without prying) about how they spend their free time.
If you want to stand out in the field of digital marketing specifically, it’s important that you are able to determine online buyer persona. To garner such an understanding, you should ask your customers about their level of digital competency, what online sources they turn to for news, what search engines they make the most use of, what social media platforms they use the most, and what their favorite blogs are.
Become better at pattern reading
Pattern reading is at the very core of the marketing industry. To be a successful marketer, you’re going to have to have a keen eye for what types of advertising have and haven’t worked in the past, you have to become astute when it comes to identifying consumer tendencies, and you have to know how to manipulate trends for your own gain.
To become better at pattern reading, you might want to consider playing strategy video games, or even cards game in your free time. This might seem like procrastination, but it’s not. The more you play this game, the better you’ll become at studying the actions that your competitors take. Almost naturally, you’ll then find it much easier to base your future decisions around what you’ve seen take place in the past. Cultivating this in-game skill and then translating it to your career will allow you to hone in on what has and hasn’t worked in the field of marketing in the past, and then make more informed decisions with regards to your own campaigns going forward.
If it’s your life goal to become a successful marketer, then you should be sure to put the advice laid out above into practice. Get yourself a degree, cultivate and then showcase a number of key skills, garner a deeper understanding of buyer persona, and become more astute when it comes to pattern reading. Do all of that, and you’ll be sitting pretty at the top of your career ladder in no time.
