Marketing teams are made up of individuals who wear many hats and possess a wide variety of skills. While it’s common to focus on the hard skills that align with specific marketing tactics such as search engine optimization, copywriting, graphic design or email marketing, there are many soft skills that are essential to building a strong marketing team. Also called people skills or emotional intelligence, these traits distinguish top-of-class marketing professionals from the pack.
Soft Skills for Marketing Success
Whether honing your own skills or building a team, consider the following nine soft skills that prime a marketing team for growth and success:
1. Empathy
People often associate empathy with customer service, but it’s just as crucial in marketing. Understanding your audience’s needs, emotions and pain points helps marketers create more resonant and persuasive campaigns. When customers feel understood, they’re more likely to engage with your brand.
2. Resilience
Resilience refers to how marketing teams deal with setbacks, criticism and failed campaigns. Marketing isn’t always smooth sailing. Campaigns can flop, strategies can fail and negative feedback is par for the course. What sets successful marketing professionals and teams apart from others is their resilience. Rather than let setbacks deter them, a resilient marketer views them as opportunities to learn and grow.
3. Adaptability
Adaptability is a skill that takes resilience to the next level. It means a marketer is ready, willing and able to pivot and take action when inevitable changes occur. This is crucial in an ever-changing marketing landscape. Whether changes are driven by evolving technology, market preferences or customer behaviors, successful marketers combine keen observation with action to stay flexible and ready to meet the needs of their target markets.
4. Creativity
Creativity may seem like an obvious soft skill for marketers, but its power extends beyond simply generating fresh ideas. Truly creative marketers find innovative ways to solve clients’ problems, engage new audiences and distinguish their brand from the competition. Especially creative campaigns that surprise and delight customers are proven to capture attention and leave a lasting impression that kickstarts a long-term customer relationship.
5. Analytical Skills
Analytical skills are powerful in today’s data-driven business, but the ability to garner insights from information is a skill that requires knowledge and experience in the field. Despite the longstanding goal of organizations to leverage data as the new oil, a recent survey by Harvard Business Review showed only 24 percent of respondents regarded their organizations as data-driven. Analytical skills are vital when looking at customer behavior or tracking metrics of marketing activities but also when gathering key insights through competitive analysis, stakeholder analysis or SWOT analyses.
6. Cultural Awareness and Inclusivity
Cultural awareness and inclusivity are key values in today’s diverse and global marketplace. Whether conducting business internationally or working with diverse demographics locally, it’s vital to make recognizing and respecting cultural differences a top priority. By celebrating diversity and creating inclusive campaigns, marketing teams can resonate with a broader audience while increasing brand loyalty with their diverse network of clients, stakeholders and strategic partners.
7. Storytelling
Storytelling is both an art and a soft skill worth investing in for marketing teams. Storytelling taps into and builds the emotional impact your company has in the marketplace by captivating audiences in a whole new way, regardless of your industry. Storytelling can help communicate your company’s values to target audiences and humanizes your business by resonating with clients’ interests and ideals.
8. Collaboration
Collaboration is a commitment to the mantra that two heads are better than one. In most cases, teams that collaborate frequently outperform others and are more likely to develop innovative solutions. In fact, 86 percent of employees in leadership positions cites lack of collaboration as the top reason for workplace failures. It’s important to encourage communication within and beyond teams to maximize productivity.
9. Positivity
Positivity is an often-underestimated soft skill that can take time to master. While B2B marketers tend to deal with serious matters, positivity, light-heartedness and humor can show the human side of your brand to customers and promote a healthy workplace for employees. Even in industries where professionalism prevails, a touch of humor can capture your audience’s attention and speak to their emotions, helping them to associate positive experiences with your brand.
Invest in Creating Meaningful Connections
The difference between a good marketer and a great one can be hard to identify. While education, experience and certifications look good on a resume, soft skills are what make good marketers great. Most of these qualities aren’t taught in a classroom or learned in a one-day workshop. Instead, they come naturally or are honed through years of hard work and dedication. Give team members the opportunity to build their hard and soft skills and remember, it’s the combination of these traits that creates winning results so invest in varied, complementary skillsets to create a powerful, cross-functional marketing team.
