How To Succeed As A Marketing Major, What Skills Do You Need

Marketing has always played a crucial role in any business. Marketing helps in keeping a business afloat as it works hand in hand with sales. The tricky part about marketing is that it changes over time. As technology evolves, so are the strategies. 

A few years ago, marketing was solely based on flyers, posters, and other forms of print ads. But in today’s day and age, marketing has become digital, with more of the companies’ advertisements focusing on digitalization rather than the traditional method, which is slowly becoming irrelevant.

So if you are considering a career in this industry, you need to build your skill set to be professionally successful in this industry.

Now, there are two sets of skills that you need to develop to succeed as a marketing major- soft skills and hard skills. Hard skills focus more on your technical abilities, while soft skills focus more on your social, communication, and people skills. It is composed of attributes such as your attitudes, personality traits, social and emotional intelligence.

Let us learn each skill.

Communication Skills

This skill should be at the top of the list as this is the core of marketing. Marketing is about interacting and commuting with your target market; therefore, it is no surprise that one has to improve this skill to succeed in this major. You need to learn how to properly express yourself and convey your message clearly to your audience.

Problem Solving Skills

With all the products and services offered out there, how can yours stand out? It is where your creativity as a marketer comes along. You need to think outside the box to come out with ideas that would entice your target market. You need to have the ability to solve problems from any angle and create an innovative solution, whatever challenge it may be.

Keen Eye To Detail

A marketer’s work would be seen and scrutinized by many people. That is why each component of your ad should be carefully made down to the last detail. It would ensure that your customers are not misinterpreting your message or get lost in translation.

Interpersonal Skills

Marketers work as a team and usually work together with different departments and clientele. That is why you must have a good set of interpersonal skills to develop a good working relationship with many people. It would allow you to work closely with them and, in turn, get better results.

Leadership Skills

Like every profession, you need to establish good leadership skills. Yes, you may not start in management, but eventually, you may have to lead a team at some point in your career. When this time comes, you have to know how to handle and designate tasks and assist your members for all of you to accomplish the tasks at hand.

Adaptability

As said before, marketing is one of the fields that is never constant. It evolves as the world changes. That is why if you want to succeed in this major, you need to adapt to these changes and work in different situations and scenarios. You should handle pressure with ease as you will have to work on tight schedules and project deadlines.

Now let us move on to your hard skills.

Data Analytics and Analysis

Marketing is not just about making ads; you also need to learn how to read and analyze data from various sources and develop a solution. You need to calculate your success rate and ROI for all your marketing efforts and determine which works and what does not. Predicting the future would be part of your task, but it must be based on facts and not just a lucky guess.

Project Management

Most of the time, you would be handling multiple products; that is why you must have good project management skills so that you would be able to keep track of all your tasks and deadlines while delivering excellent results.

Research Skills

As a marketing major, your success would revolve not just around data analytics but also tons of research. To create an effective marketing campaign, one must understand the product or service offered, how the competitor works, or how to create a network in a specific industry. A lot is going on behind an effective marketing campaign, but all of it starts with good research.

Marketing will always be part of our everyday lives. You will see it everywhere. As a marketing major, it is one thing to understand the ins and outs of marketing, but keep in mind that it takes hard work, perseverance, and dedication to succeed in this chosen field.