No business can succeed without appealing to at least a targeted consumer audience, if not everyone in general. The logic and creativity required for this goal is the essence of marketing. It is both an art and a science to be able to understand your customer and cater to their innermost desires without anyone saying anything outright. Of course you can sometimes get people to offer a helpful tip or two by asking them to fill out surveys, but a great marketer cannot base their entire career around this tactic. There are a few main qualities that every good marketer must have: thick skin, a strong sense of logic, the ability to think outside the box, and a personal connection with the customer.
Analytical and Creative Thinking
In order to understand your business you must be able to understand the numbers behind it. Even if you have no direct connection to sales made on a retail level, you still need to be able to tell when the marketing decisions you make are working well or causing profits to plummet. This type of analytical thinking can be attained either by taking some business courses at a local college or from experience in the industry. Most sales associate jobs will help you learn how the numbers work and what they mean. The higher up the ladder you go, the more metrics you’ll be exposed to and expected to understand.
The other side of the coin is forward thinking. You have to test your abilities to think outside the box in problem solving. Sometimes you’ll be faced with all your efforts simply failing and you won’t know why. It’s these times that challenge a true innovator. Finding creative solutions to problems is a core element of business marketing and you can’t survive without this skill. If you learn to master it, it may even lead you to become a mogul in your industry.
Empathy
Without the ability to sense your customers’ desires, wants and needs every marketer would surely fail. There is no business without customer satisfaction, and there is no customer satisfaction without making a sense of connection between the cold corporate walls and the customers’ feelings.
This is one of the oldest core elements to any type of marketing, and it is too often forgotten, but it remains the most important. A lot of times as marketers grow too set in their ways they let slip their sense of empathy. You can sometimes see this when companies begin to age and their business starts to dwindle. More often than not you can pin this on the marketers losing their edge for customer connection.
Resilience
As every marketer goes out into the cold unforgiving world of business, ready to tackle every day with a strong understanding of sales and figures, a bright new idea to revolutionize the business, and an unbreakable bond with the customers, things will go wrong. Sales will at one point or another drop, higher ups may blame you, and you may become discouraged. If you learn nothing else in your ventures into marketing, the one thing to always have is thick skin. Don’t let yourself be easily discouraged, and treat every shortcoming as merely a personal challenge to improve yourself and do better.
There is nothing in this world without business, and no business can exist without good marketers behind it. If you’re looking to take on the challenge to be an innovator, a creator, and a charismatic engineer, you’re ready to be a marketer. Never give up, and always look forward to tomorrow.
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