Five Of The Must Underrated Modern-Day Marketing Skills

By Paroma Sen, Director-Strategy at iTechSeries/MarTechSeries

Marketers and martech: at a time when martech is considered to be the basis of everything that’s connected to marketing, it is crucial for marketing leaders to look for certain skills in their marketing teams (or boost existing skills) to adapt to an ecosystem that is widely digital-first and inspired by the use of various tech and martech.

With martech at the core of marketing in the modern-day ecosystem, what matters most is not the use or adaption of ‘’too many’’ marketing technologies, but, the mix of right skills and processes to enhance existing methods and business output.

This is where it becomes key to pay attention to a few skills that are often not talked about enough, some of these skillsets are often considered to be underrated concepts as well.

For marketing leaders who are looking to drive a greater difference in today’s complex digital market ecosystem, what type of skills should they try to hone in their teams or look for in new marketing hires? Let’s start with a set of five:

The Ability to Write Copy and Content Across Multiple Online Channels

What works on LinkedIn will not work on Twitter, unless it’s dovetailed to suit the platform. In a marketing time where marketers need to identify the channels that work best for them and double down on improving ROI from those channels, using the right content, on the right channel, at the right time becomes key to moving the needle.

Larger enterprise B2B tech marketing teams may have the resources to hire and retain a different set of team mates who dedicatedly focus on each channel (example: a Social Media Marketer / A LinkedIn Growth Marketer). But smaller to mid-sized teams might need to drive optimization with leaner resources.

The ability to write copy suited to various online channels that a brand wants to focus on can enable a better and quicker ROI from marketing initiatives. In many cases, a profile like the Head of Content or Director of Content or Head of Copy typically keeps core messaging ready while having resources dovetail that key message in various ways to broadcast across multiple platforms and channels with a specific theme at its core.

For smaller teams, marketing members within the team will have to take on the task without having dedicated writers, this is where AI generated content or tools can come handy, to keep quantity going while having the human element add to the finesse and accuracy of each message or marketing post.

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The Ability to Write Marketing Content and Copy, Fast!

The B2B tech market is evolving at a rapid pace, with the spate of layoffs worldwide, marketers are more pressured to do more with fewer resources and reduced budgets and deadlines.

While writing content and copy to suit different channels is key to improving growth, the secret lies in having a team undertake this activity with shorter turnaround times, given that the dynamics of today’s marketplace demand that brand marketers and sales people stay ahead of their competition by being a first mover.

Keeping core collaterals, an editorial content calendar for the month as well as a social media calendar ready in advance is one way of trying to ‘’be ready’’. The other lies in understanding current market trends and needs of customer-facing teams and creating relevant content quick enough based on it.

What helps here is keeping templates and frameworks ready and customizing other sections based on real time needs.

The Need to Action Real-time Adjustments to Multi Channel Campaigns

A marketing team could be running a campaign to drive webinar attendees: while this activity usually lasts for a month or two (depending on the goal of that webinar), market changes may happen during that time.

Real-time changes to multichannel campaigns are necessary in order to capitalize on ‘’moment marketing’’ concepts while also using dynamic angles to pull the right and most relevant traffic and registrants profiles.

This applies to any kind of content framework in a fast paced industry, more so in B2B tech where changes are rapid and the industry is constantly evolving with new technologies, mergers and features redefining core tech and martech adoption practices.

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Proof Reading with Care

While many marketers may say that a typo or two actually boosts the human element behind the brand, several others would disagree and feel that every marketing message, article or post should be perfect. Basic mistakes can be avoided using tools like Grammarly or by having a proof reader dedicated to take care of the task.

What can help: The team or person that writes a piece of content or copy should have another member look at it because it is always easier for an external party to spot an error given that the person spending time on that material might miss it despite being the one to create or write it. This is partly why in traditional publishing models of yore, editors would be separate from the writers.

Knowing How to Use the Martech you Have

One of the biggest martech challenges today is that teams are exposed to too many tools but don’t use all of its features in an optimized manner. While some B2B tech brands will have a full-proof onboarding to enable new customers to do this part better, others might not have a strong onboarding process in place.

The ability to self-learn is crucial, because a new martech provider you have just adopted may just share  many knowledge resources with you as they can, without taking you through the platform best practices, using online tutorials to understand how to use the platform to your benefit are key to driving a more balanced martech and marketing growth process.

Marketing teams will need a variety of martech to fuel different purposes. Identifying near term goals then using the right martech capabilities to drive those goals are the typical part of any modern-day marketing process.