Most Desirable Marketing Skills

In a rapidly advancing media landscape, a marketer might be wondering what skills are going to be most desirable for employers in the years to come. Never fear! This article will go through:

• Important marketing hard skills
• Important marketing soft skills 
• Ways for you to up your game

It’s a competitive world out there, and sometimes it can feel like the most difficult task of all is marketing yourself to employers. But if you can learn some of these highly coveted marketer skills and articulate them on your resume, it has the chance to expedite the job search process. 83% of Chief Marketing Officers say they are likely to hire because of growth in the next year. If you have a job in marketing but want to stay current and up your skills, knowing these can be a game changer for you as well!

Hard Skills

What is a hard skill? This is specific, technical knowledge that can help you perform your job. There are numerous technical skills that are highly desirable for marketers, and learning some of these can be a boon for your career. 

Web3.js

Web3.js is a javascript library to help developers interact with the Ethereum network. Javascript is a common programming language while the Ethereum network is a decentralized platform for authenticating and recording transactions. You might know Ethereum from their cryptocurrency, Ether, but the technology is more than that – it’s a blockchain network that can handle complicated financial transactions. 

Why does this matter to a marketer? Let’s break it down further. Web 3 is quite literally the third iteration of the World Wide Web. It’s different and newer from the web today in a few key ways:

• Web 3 is decentralized: This means ownership is between builders and users, not centralized entities. 
• Web 3 is equal access: Everyone can access content equally, without exclusion.
• Web3 has cryptocurrency tokens: Instead of relying on larger banks for payments, Web3 uses cryptocurrency to handle transactions.
• Web3 is user owned: The more cryptocurrency a user owns, the greater part of the network they own. Web3 also allows users to decide how their data and information is used. 

Understanding how the eventual evolution and implementation of Web3 will affect user data collection, financial transactions, and accessibility is crucial for a marketer trying to stay ahead of the curve. 

So we get back to web3.js, which we now see is a Web3 Javascript (js) library with the code to help you connect to Ethereum technology. It affects so much more than financial transactions – it could be the future of how companies market. Knowing how to integrate this technology into your marketing efforts is in extreme demand.

SaaS Sales

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a form of cloud computing where the provider of the service sells web-based software to clients, who can turn around and give it to customers via the internet. The provider of the SaaS maintains the physical hardware, reducing headache and costs for the clients, and in return they get a steady stream of subscription based profit. 

SaaS has exploded in recent years, and the industry is expected to top 307 billion dollars by 2026. As such, demand for SaaS marketers has rapidly increased. There are unique challenges of SaaS sales, such as learning to pitch and answer questions about a highly technical service. It is also a subscription based service, meaning that marketing relies heavily on retaining and upselling existing customers. 

However, the field is relatively accessible, and SaaS sales is a great skill to have on the resume. 

Multimedia Proficiency

The best marketers are adept in many forms of technology. They are able to effectively utilize all the major social media sites, design pleasing web pages with easy user interface, and create content in many different formats. 

Research shows 50% of companies said that visual content like videos and infographics are the top form of content in their marketing. The most desirable marketers can create engaging videos and interesting graphics just as well as they copywrite and interact with consumers in comment sections. Some skills a marketer might want to learn to help with this could include:

• Video Production
• Editing
• Strong Visuals
• Scripting
• Lighting and Composition

Social Media Strategy

Social media is quickly usurping the role of search engines as more and more consumers flock to the Instagrams and TikToks of the world for brand information, highlighting the need for an effective social media strategy. 

Learning how to interact with younger generations that expect different things from companies, and understanding how to create social media specific content that is unique to the strengths of each platform is an important marketing skill that looks great for employers, who almost uniformly view social media marketing as an essential skill. 

SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, will continue to be an in demand skill for marketers. This can be technical SEO, which is optimizing websites to be detected by engine web crawlers, or it can be knowing the best practices for your content to skyrocket up the organic rankings. 

While SEO typically refers to traditional search engines like Google, the best practices can be applied to social media, which similarly sort by keywords in their results.

SEM

While Search Engine Marketing (SEM) sounds like it’s the same as SEO, they are different skills that have unique benefits for a marketer. While SEO aims to increase the organic growth for a website or brand, SEM refers to using paid advertisements to drive traffic.

One of the most effective uses of SEM is Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements. When you search for products or information on a search engine, you might notice that certain results are artificially pushed to the top. These are PPC advertisements from companies that paid the search engine to display their content. 

One of the best features of PPC is in the name – you only have to pay when a user clicks on your content. Knowing which products to feature and when the cost/benefit analysis is in your favor for PPC advertisement is an important skill for a marketer. 

AI Knowledge

This category almost feels routine at this point, despite how quickly AI has pushed to the forefront of the digital marketing scene. Still, hearing that you have to “learn AI” is daunting. While most marketers don’t need to become experts in machine learning, it can be useful to become acquainted with some of the more common tools and how it can supercharge content creation and organization. 

Some useful Generative AI tools include:

• Clickup
• Narrato
• Lately
• Jasper
• Copy.ai
• Synthesia
• Murf
• Canva
• Podcastle
• Beautiful.ai

2 in 3 business to business sales organizations are using generative AI, so knowledge of any of these systems or similar ones is a great addition to the resume.

Soft Skills

When you hear “soft skills” or “human skills,” you might be tempted to think “unimportant” or, even if you do realize their importance, think that they are entirely personality based and there’s no way to improve these like you can with hard skills. Both of those fallacies are dangerous.

Soft skills are arguably more important than hard skills, because without them it’s hard to effectively get by in the workplace. Good soft skills also help you deploy your hard skills to their fullest capacity. When employers have to size up multiple candidates with identical hard skills, they’ll choose the one that is easiest to work with.

You can also improve your soft skills just like you can your hard skills. To get anywhere, though, you have to start with a growth mindset. Working on teamwork, or relationship building, isn’t admitting weakness – it’s an opportunity for personal and professional growth. There are numerous online courses you can take to work on your soft skills.

Adaptability

This is the “skill of the moment,” according to LinkedIn research. Adaptability is probably the most highly coveted soft skill during such rapid change in the way the world operates and business is done, including the sudden growth of AI. 

Especially as a marketer, being able to adapt to changes in the market and the increase of tools at your disposal is necessary now more than ever. 

Strategic Thinking

Strategy is a defining feature of marketing. We hear the term “advertising campaign” quite often, because companies understand that one-off advertisements don’t have the same impact as a coherent long-term strategy. Learning how to architect advertising strategy is a great skill to have. 

Strategic thinking also includes learning how to integrate seemingly unrelated things together. For example, with how many different digital platforms there are, good marketers have to discern the best way to send a unified message across a bevy of online spaces. 

Within a company, employers value strategic employees. 67% of CMO’s say they will likely restructure within the year, so understanding how your role plays into the larger picture is crucial.

Collaboration

There pretty much isn’t a single marketing role where you work on your own. Knowing how to take your skills and put them to use in a functioning team will help you get further than you realize.

Customer Relations

In a world more interconnected than ever, younger generations expect more communication from brands and organizations. Great marketers understand how to relate to consumers and can keep their credibility and authenticity while still promoting a product. 

At the core of this, and at the core of anything in marketing, is the ability to create meaningful relationships. Your message will only come through if there’s a relationship to undergird it. Honing that skill, more than anything else, will help you take your marketing career to the next level. 

Market Yourself

There are lots of desirable marketing skills to learn, and this list is a great place to start. However, even if you don’t have every box checked yet, don’t be afraid to market yourself and learn how to articulate the skills you do have.