Let’s move on to the soft skills
1. Communication:
The most important one is communication. Marketing is essentially a brand’s way to communicate with customers and prospects, so you can drive interest and desire for products and services. So if you’re not able to communicate effectively, your marketing will be ineffective. Now, you might be thinking big, WHOOP. However, the repercussions of poor communication can be severe.
It can impact people’s first impressions of your company damage your brand reputation and lead to wasted time for marketers and anyone else involved in a campaign, like developers, designers, and outsourced teams. Beyond that, marketing also involves developing relationships with customers, affiliates, influencers, and brand evangelists. Fail to communicate effectively and you’ll have a very bumpy road ahead.
2. Problem Solving:
Next up are problem-solving skills. Marketing campaigns rarely go smoothly and you will run into problems and unexpected bumps along the way. The thing is, nobody wants to hold your hand through every single problem. Employers hire employees to solve problems, so naturally a big part of your job will be to solve problems with creative solutions, even if company policies or budgets may play against you. A common example in the SEO world is buying backlinks. A lot of companies have no problems doing this, but if your company has policies against these practices, you have to come up with creative ways to compete.
Leaders in an industry will often have what seems to be an infinite budget. And if you’re working at a bootstrap startup with one 100th of your competitor’s budgets, you’ll have to get extremely creative to have a fighting chance at winning, let alone surviving. The best marketing is when your product and marketing align to solve people’s problems. But that in and of itself is a problem that marketers are often tasked with solving.
3. Creativity:
The next soft skill on the list is creativity. Creativity is incredibly difficult to teach. For those who are creative, it’s going to be one of your greatest assets. When you pair creativity with the hard skills of data analysis, you end up having a very powerful combination of skills that will play in your favor as a digital marketer.
4. Teachability:
The next soft skill is teachability. Now, the reason why I think this is a critical soft skill to have is because marketing is collaborative. And if you’re the stubborn type who refuses to hear feedback from your managers and teammates, you will naturally be an awful team player. In my opinion, teachability shows humility, adaptability, and one’s desire for growth. This is why after doing hundreds of interviews, if a candidate doesn’t seem teachable, it’s a break-it kind of attribute for me. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to be a yes man and make other people feel better about themselves. It’s about being open to other’s opinions and collaboratively coming to the best ideas for your marketing campaigns.
5. Self Motivation
The next soft skill is self-motivation. This is a skill that I think separates the wheat from the chaff. Naturally, there are going to be people who show up to work and do the bare minimum. After all, we all have the guts to make money to pay the bills. But there will be a few individuals who have put in the extra time, effort, thought, and focus simply because they want to produce good work. These are self-motivated people. They’re willing to go the extra mile to make their work great. They don’t define themselves from their salary mentions or accolades, but ironically, self-motivated people with raw talent tend to get paid more and praised publicly. They’re a rare breed, and in my opinion, it’s a skill that’s nearly impossible to fake over the long haul.
6. Dependability:
And the final soft skill is dependability. Because marketing usually happens in a team setting, you need to be able to depend on your teammates to do their part. It makes marketing operations much smoother and the result is a highly effective team.
Now, as I’m sure you caught on, hard and soft skills tend to complement each other. For example, creativity is intertwined with copywriting. Problem-solving helps in SEO, and SEO helps you become a better problem solver. So whether you want to become a better marketing leader, get a performance-based raise, or get started with your first job in Internet marketing, honing these skills is going to help you achieve that.