As the marketing, sales and PR atmosphere become more competitive, your company goal should be staying one step ahead of your competition. You have all the latest digital marketing tools, read all the industry magazines, and know all the key players. Now you need a staff to work harder, better, faster, and stronger. You need a marketing guru.
These types of marketers characteristically work at small startups, where a lack of barricades such as IT, organizational politics and the ‘brand police’ allows them to get things done.
But there’s also the kind of marketer who can work happily with large and complex systems in legacy companies. These are the people who can make sense out of millions of data facts, tame large databases that have suffered from integration problems or a lack of governance.
As well as their superior productivity, they can also accomplish levels of marketing measurement beyond anything that has been done before (for example, by instituting attribution models or accurate revenue forecasts).
They can quantify their performance – but also recognize the grey area
Despite the hope for measurement bliss, the reality is not everything can be precisely measured within marketing.
Nonetheless, it is possible to come close once measurement and multi-channel marketing integration is in place. Marketing experts will not only be able to present more performance information than the company has seen but they will also be at ease with the grey areas, caveats and uncertainties that naturally occur.
They take pleasure in creative optimization
We’ve had some great laughs when running digital display campaigns testing a number of different variables.
A few of those variables include:
• Testing the impact of a babies versus animals on a B2B Facebook ad (result differ based on seasons, holidays, and gender but with both, the CTR soars).
• Altering numbers in call to action text – resulting in large CTR.
• Using a champion image of someone on a brick background vs a plain white wall.
They comprehend the importance of structured data – and build marketing campaigns as such
With buzz words such as ‘big data’ still being wildly used, it would be easy to consider the days of structured databases are over. You would be dead wrong.
The bulk of uses of data for digital marketing require it to be in an organized form. This is not only to craft properly functioning campaigns, but also to make sure that systems can be appropriately integrated.
Data mapping isn’t the most stylish of tasks, but refined marketing tech stacks with multiple layers need the right information being passed through, in the right way, at the correct time as a lot of the functionality that vendors sell depends on a certain way of structuring the information. It’s this which fuels excellent cross-channel customer experiences.
They understand vendor weaknesses and tech quirks
Every single technology platform has its peculiarities and weaknesses. Even when two products are seemingly part of a single tech cloud, there are often substantial limitations in how they can be successfully integrated or the warnings that come with the results and functionality they produce.
They automate to win
Superior digital marketing performance comes from producing excellent and profitable customer experiences in an automated way. This not only means their consumers are receiving the right interaction at the right time with the correct message, but also that the day to day workload of the marketing team is rarely repetitive.
Marketing gurus will not only build automated marketing for their leads and customers – they’ll also use digital marketing tools like Zapier to automate reporting.
They speak and understand several business languages such as tech, finance, and operations
In order to build relationships and credibility on the inside, a marketing guru knows what makes other departments beat.
Finance is the language that has a habit of running the boardroom. For this reason, a marketing genius knows how to tie the effects of action at the tactical level right down to the bottom line. For B2B marketing gurus, they’ll recognize how their various marketing campaigns perform on a cost per lead/sale basis, and be able to link activity from the first click through to the deal being completed. For B2C marketing experts, they’ll know the impact of their digital campaigns not just on revenue, but also on margin, normal order values and in-store sales.
To get things done, they need to connect properly with their technical coworkers.
This requires a knowhow of how they work. Marketing experts don’t bother developers at their desks at random times or come with requests that are unclear and vague. They articulate the needs of internal and external users at a suitable level of detail, are happy to submit to the expertise of the team and don’t make ludicrous demands.
For operations, marketing experts know how they work and also have access to mandatory systems for logistics and distribution. In areas such as ecommerce, understanding the logistical bottlenecks that cause your consumers to have a sub-par experience is very critical. Otherwise key metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value can be shattered.
What do you think makes a marketing genius? Do you recognize the features above, or have we left something out? We look forward to reading your opinions in the comments below!