Become an Indispensable Marketer with These 5 Competencies

There are many thoughts around what it takes to be a top marketer, from a long list of hard skills like content creation, data analytics, SEO, and social media, to so-called ‘soft’ skills such as agility, collaboration and listening.

Today's marketers are expected to be:

While the responsibilities and expectations of the marketing department keep expanding, CMO’s are under tremendous scrutiny to ‘prove’ the value of their department and role, day in and day out. But when marketers are so focused on their internal audience, they have little time left to focus on their customers.

According to LinkedIn, for the second year in a row,  Creativity is the number one most in-demand skill amongst business professionals.

Yet, our own research into several different industries has found that many companies lack originality. Instead, they are just copying and pasting what their competitors are saying and doing. Thus, creating a “sea of sameness” for their prospective customer to wade through - or what is often referred to as "copycat marketing".

As the world continues to adjust and adapt to a crazy year of events, organizations are now presented with a tremendous opportunity to break free from the ‘sameness’ in their industry.

Standing out requires more than just creativity

If all that was required to differentiate your brand and product offering was a dash of creativity, everyone would rush out and hire the most creative artists they know. But in fact, it is a bit more complicated than that...

In preparation for our book, Stand-out Marketing, my co-authors and I interviewed and surveyed over 100 business, marketing and sales leaders across the globe to understand what it takes for companies to stand out from the competition.

What we found is that sameness is caused by several factors including strategic herding, branding conformity and lack of professional competence. So, while company culture, leadership and attitudes are critical to ignite innovative thinking, the actual competencies of individuals on the team are what determines whether an organization will be successful at differentiating itself from the competition.

In the book, we reveal the five key competencies that successful marketing and sales professionals must develop to differentiate their organizations and deliver value to customers. So, it is no surprise that these competencies line up to the word VALUE…

The V-A-L-U-E competencyTM framework

The good news is that skills and competencies can be learned. If you are a marketing leader dedicated to your personal growth, you will receive internal recognition, higher marketing budgets and better results from these marketing programs.

V = Visionary

When we think of a visionary, we think of someone who can paint a picture of a future world. In the marketing context, being a visionary requires imagination, creativity, business savviness and being able to see the forest through the trees. Too often organizations are inwardly focused, and they ignore the signals from the market, their customers and what competitors are doing.

In our book, we provide a framework with lots of examples and ideas to improve your visionary abilities, but one thing you can implement now is to seek perspectives from different points of view.

For example, if you are only relying on the sales team to tell you what is going on with your customer base, it is time to set aside some budget to conduct 1:1 customer research and interviews.

A = Activator

If visionaries set the strategy, activators make it happen. As a marketer, this means first and foremost the ability to get buy-in for your ideas and mobilizing the rest of your organization towards executing the plan. Yet many initiatives fail because the various departments that are needed for successful execution are not bought into the plan.

One of the common pitfalls we see here is that many marketers do not understand how their programs fit into wider business goals and priorities.

For example, the marketing team may be working on developing marketing content to promote a product that neither the sales team nor customers want to buy. The action here? Learn the business. How does your company make money? Which customer segments are the most important? Which products are the most profitable?

L = Learner

You’ve probably heard of a learning mindset, which is the ongoing commitment to learning new things and being open-minded and curious. If 2020 taught us anything, it has shown us that being a learner is not optional!

For marketers especially, there is a need to constantly have your pulse on what your customers are experiencing and thinking. So, if you have conducted customer research once, your job is not done. This is an ongoing process. A simple action you can take is to dig deeper and ask WHY?

Do you know why your customers choose to buy your product or solution over your competitor's?

U = Useful

Being useful is about differentiating in a way that is relevant, practical and resonates with customers. Think of the swiss army knife. It is a highly practical tool that can be used in a lot of different scenarios from opening a bottle of beer to cutting open a package.

You want your marketing content/programs to be like the swiss army knife. This means you must understand how to translate what your product does into how it will help your buyers. It is especially important here to understand how your customer also consumes information.

I’ve seen way too many examples of marketers chasing tactics (podcasts, blogs, TikTok etc.) without first doing the research to see if it’s actually a relevant way to reach their target audience.

E = Evaluator

Finally, the evaluator can assess whether something is working and how to interpret the data they have collected. Collecting data only leads to descriptions and classifications, it never leads to insight and understanding.

Can you effectively balance what is good for the customer with the ROI for the business? Can you evaluate the success of your marketing programs and determine what is working best to produce results?

Adding VALUE leads to differentiation

We agree with the Davos Manifesto that was issued in December 2019, stating that the purpose of a company is to engage all its stakeholders - including employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and society at large, in creating shared and sustained value.

There is a widespread acknowledgment from marketing and business leaders that companies who ignore their customers, create surface-level value propositions and focus only on their own profits, will suffer.

B2B buyers are already demonstrating that they have no tolerance for working with companies that do not add value when interacting with their marketing and sales teams. Naturally, heads are turning toward the marketing department as the source of deep customer understanding.

So, if you weren’t investing in enhancing your marketing competencies and skills before, the time to do it is now - as the gap will only continue to widen from those that ‘get it’ and those who don’t.

To learn more about how you can be a standout marketer, check out our new book, Stand-out Marketing.