A marketer’s job is a challenging one in today’s always-on, digital-first world. Not only do they have to come up with an appealing brand image and message, but they have to figure out how to adapt marketing collateral to countless different channels and learn best practices for each one.
To keep up with the demands of the modern marketing industry, professionals should consider adopting and incorporating certain habits into their workflow. We asked 10 members of Young Entrepreneur Council what habits they recommend marketers pursue to help them boost their careers. Here’s what these experienced business leaders had to say.
1. Think From The Customer’s Perspective
Marketers should try an interesting mental technique where they visualize their customer and “enter” into the customer’s mind. When they make it a practice to really see and feel what the customer experiences, they can view their own work in a different light. This can help marketers craft better content, make the marketing material more personalized and create more compelling offerings. Stepping into a different zone (i.e. the customer’s mind) can be an exercise in creativity that has powerful and actionable results.
2. Complete Largest Tasks First
Marketers should tackle their biggest tasks and projects first thing in the morning and leave the smaller tasks for later when they have less brain power. You can get the difficult, brainy work out of the way so that, for the rest of the day, you can take it easy. It’s easy to get sidetracked or fall behind in work if you don’t have a work process that works for you. Everyone works differently so you need to find out what working style works best for you so you can produce the best outcomes.
3. Follow The Data
Although marketers are often creative types, it’s important that they also embrace the cold, hard world of data analytics to gain a clearer understanding of what appeals to their audience. Marketing data analytics tools can help marketers find out, objectively, what their audience is more likely to engage with, click on, watch or subscribe to. They also allow marketers to run A/B split tests to determine what efforts are more effective than others to achieve a certain objective. By embracing data analytics, marketers can streamline their workflows and concentrate on efforts that convert.
4. Schedule Blocks Of Time
Maintaining accounts has a relatively low investment in terms of time and creativity, assuming it’s being done frequently and by the same account manager. If, while maintaining accounts, you uncover an opportunity for a project, do not stop working on it. Schedule projects separately from maintenance work—do not mix these worlds. That being said, as part of maintenance, take the time to create very detailed notes so that you can easily jump back in later. When you do finally sit down to work on the project, make sure to leave yourself sufficient time to complete a milestone, assuming there are several tasks within the project you created for yourself. Having this separation of work and scheduling time will help you be more productive, especially in demonstrating greater strategic value to your clients.
5. Understand Current Trends
The most important habit a marketing expert needs to be fostering is understanding what trends are hyped up at the moment and being able to translate for your own company or clients. Marketers need to let go of their ego and understand their opinions don’t matter. The market sentiment rules everything.
6. Simplify Your Message
Write for a four-year-old audience. A lot of times, we overthink everything and assume our audience knows as much as we do. You might even be tempted to sound super sophisticated when selling a technical product to a technical audience. While you have to check the industry buzzwords and properly explain the product, you should as much as possible focus on simplifying the message. If you can explain what you do to a four-year-old, then you’re on the right path. In fact, most of the selling books of all time are written at the fourth-grade level. This doesn’t mean you write like a fourth-grader—it means you write a story in a way that everyone can comprehend. Yes, even very smart people are too inundated with information daily and can easily miss your point.
7. Create A Relationship
Today, people don’t want you to just sell them a product. You need to create relationships that go beyond selling, instead focusing on knowing. It’s about knowing the customer’s needs and making them see how the product or service can help them solve that need or problem in the moment. Generate value. This not only helps in the sales process, but it can also lead to customer loyalty. It is important not to focus on the product when selling but on the customer. Establish a conversation, generate trust, make them feel that it matters to the brand and that their need is a priority. Today it is the customer’s experience that can ensure success in sales and success in the salesperson’s career. – Kevin Leyes, Leyes Media & Team Leyes, by Leyes Enterprises
8. Be Social
Be social. It’s important to take the time to not only respond to your own public profiles, but to also find other companies and people and interact with them on their platforms. As the time-tested rule states, you have to give free value with 80% of your content and only promote the remaining 20% of the time. This is something that happens naturally outside of the digital “social” world as you can say that only 20% or less of your interactions with people are direct selling or promoting your business and the rest of the time you are interacting with people on everything else. It is a great habit to go out and interact and support your followers, and even people who don’t follow you back, on their platforms and engage in what interests them. Answer their questions and engage in their community. – Jacob Tanur, Click Play Films
9. Know Your Competitors
Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. This is a prime example of working smarter, not harder. There’s a high chance that your competitors have marketers just as smart and hard-working as yourself and maybe some of them even have bigger budgets than you. This means that they’re effectively doing all the hard work for you. Look at what keywords they’re advertising for, what kind of copy they’re using, which ads they’ve discontinued, where they are getting mentions and backlinks from and so on and so forth. Do this across all of your competitors and it’ll start compounding fast and keep you plenty busy with work that’s proven to get results. – Travis Jamison, Smash.vc
10. Play For The Long-Term
I believe marketing is a game. It’s easy to make quick bucks by engaging in short-lived techniques and processes, but your strategy should be to progress and survive for the long-term. Start off by building a scalable brand on the internet, promote it and build a customer list. Having a list of relevant customers is a valuable asset. And incorporate some of the strategies like social proof, testimonials, reviews, etc. into your marketing. Also regularly engage with your audience to build trust and relationships, which in return can increase every odd of prospering in the long-run
