In the field of marketing, there is often no way to guarantee that certain actions will bring the desired results, so leaders in the field need to have a unique set of skills and the right mind-set to provide their teams with the best chance of a positive outcome.
Here are five key traits that all the best market leaders are able to demonstrate:
1. Imaginative
It is hard to be an effective leader in the marketing field if you don’t have the ability to inspire your team with imaginative ideas and creative thoughts. In the saturated consumer landscape of the modern era, marketers need to be able to create material that surprises audiences to cut through the competition. So, you need the ability to look at things through different lenses, or at least have the intuition to recognise a great creative idea when one turns up. Some of the most successful marketing leaders often aren’t that imaginative themselves; however, they know how to motivate their creative teams to generate imaginative market solutions.
2. A Strategic Mind
Planning is generally the most important stage of any marketing project. The quality of planning processes can ultimately determine the execution of actions and the end results. Once you become a leader, it can be easy to assume your days of planning are over as you have people below you to do that work. While that is true to a certain extent, as in you don’t want to actually write the detailed plan of action yourself, you still need to take part in outlining the overall goals. If you fail to provide the key purposes of a project, your marketing team could end up going in the opposite direction to the route you had in mind due to lack of overall guidance from yourself. Taking the time to map out a strategy also offers you the opportunity to place individuals in positions in line with their strengths and allocate tasks accordingly – which is ultimately what being a great leader is about.
3. An Ability to Look beyond Results
Marketing is both a creative game and a methodical game. Nowadays, data and figures are everything – they allow you to see exactly where your audience is at, the material they’re consuming and the effectiveness of your efforts to reach them. It is no surprise that it can often be easy to become obsessed with the results of a marketing project and lose perspective when it comes to the creative processes involved. Great leaders have the ability to see beyond short-term results and look at the data gathered as a tool to provide insight for the company’s next project. Those who obsess over short-term data trends are often too quick to write off a set of disappointing results as a catastrophic failure, which prevents them from being able to extract any positives from the marketing efforts. It is going to be hard to keep a team motivated to achieve an organisation’s goals if, as the marketing leader, you keep disregarding all previous work.
4. Having Lots of Connections
To be a great marketing leader in the 21st century, you need to look beyond just being able to lead your own team. A large proportion of your job should entail driving new opportunities and making connections both in and outside your organisation. In today’s world, people often only want to connect with individuals who they think are informed and influential in their field. It’s one of the key reasons why personal influencer branding has really taken off – leaders need to let fellow marketers know that their voices are worth being heard.
5. Mastering the Art of Delegating
All leaders in marketing jobs need to know when and how to delegate tasks. There is simply not enough time in the day to do everything yourself or constantly supervise your team. What’s more, you won’t inspire trust in your team by not allowing them to operate in their roles without constant supervision. Great leadership comes with the ability to delegate tasks effectively and consequently allowing members of your team the chance to shine. Remember, leaders in all industries are only ever as good as the team around them.
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