When hiring a new member for your marketing team—from the CMO on down—it’s important to consider not only the skill sets that are necessary today but the ones most likely to be in demand tomorrow, next week, even years down the road. That’s because marketing is incredibly fluid, changing quickly and constantly; the ongoing success of your marketing team depends on your ability to be nimble and to adapt to these changes as they come.
All of this begs the question: What kind of person makes an ideal marketer in 2017? What kind of person makes an ideal CMO in 2017? What are the skills and personality traits that will serve your marketing instrument well, now and for the foreseeable future?
The Marketer of Future Must Be Data-Driven
We have two answers to this question. The first is that a good marketer must be data-driven. In fact, there are many within the industry who predict that more than a third of all CMOs will come not from advertising, but from the data and analytics side of things, starting in just a few years.
The reason for this is simple: Big companies cannot thrive solely on ideas and creativity. They need actual information to back up their decision making and provide them with a road map for their ongoing marketing efforts. They need a clear indication of what works and what doesn’t work, and of how they can best allocate their marketing dollars for solid ROI.
Creativity alone does not provide this level of strategic assuredness. Only an immersion in data and analytics can do that.
The Marketer of the Future Must Be Balanced
With all of that said, the more humanistic side of marketing remains relevant. With data to drive it, creativity can help marketers to better connect with people and to tell the story of their brand in a persuasive way.
The savvy marketer will seek to balance the more rigid, data-driven approach with creativity—and in doing so, will leverage all the different tools and platforms that exist for digital advertising. This means taking a truly integrated approach to digital marketing—pulling together SEO, PPC, content marketing, and beyond.
In short: The marketer of the future will be guided by data, but open to using whatever creative means are necessary to act on that data.
The Digital Advertiser Approach
At Digital Advertiser, our two guiding concepts are data immersion and integrated marketing—which means that we lean heavily on analytics but also develop comprehensive, holistic strategies based on these analytics.
We would love to speak with you about how this approach can benefit your marketing department. Contact Digital Advertiser today to learn more.