In this guest post, Sarah Kelly, APAC marketing director at Partnerize, casts an expert eye over the next skills marketers will need to add to their kitbags…
I recently read Marketo’s Marketing 2025 Research Report, which looked at the future roles and responsibilities of marketers. One line that really stood out was “A marketer today may not recognise the marketing team of tomorrow.” It’s a statement that got me thinking about what skills marketers need to adapt and ultimately allow them to advance in their careers.
We may be in a digital-first economy, but with marketing fast becoming all about customer experience and lifetime value, here are three necessary skills marketing leaders must learn.
Experiential Marketing
If you’re adopting a customer-first marketing strategy, experiential marketing may just need to be your first port-of-call. Experiential marketing, or experience marketing as it’s sometimes called, is about creating genuine experiences for your customers, enabling them to connect with your brand on a deeper level. One of my favourite examples came from Australian retailer The Iconic, which launched ‘The Iconic Laundromat’ at a recent festival. Customers were able to enter the laundromat and climb through the washing machines into a secret party and stage area.It provided a great link between hip culture, the importance of apparel, and the great times unlocked by The Iconic. And no one who crawled through a washer will ever for get it.
Experiential marketing is a great way to create an emotional connection with customers. By mastering this area, marketers can better understand ways to create meaning and improved perception with customers. This can result in better-targeted campaigns and messaging, and stronger customer loyalty. Working with your brand experience and events teams is a great way to improve your understanding of this up-and-coming, in-demand skill.
Partnerships
Partnership is most likely an area you’re already touching, but you might not necessarily realize what a broad and profitable sector it can be. Partnership marketing incorporates everything from brand and sponsorship partners to influencers to affiliate-style partnerships. For marketers, partnerships is one of the fastest-growing acquisition channels, making it an imperative skill to learn.
Adding partner marketing mastery to your knowledge base means you’ll be able to work more easily with multiple teams across the business, including social media, brand development, business development and sponsorship teams. By becoming expert in this area, you’ll be able to better understand the customer’s path to purchase, have experience in multiple areas of acquisition, and be a more well-rounded digital marketing professional.
Coding
Before I delve into this, a note: I’m not suggesting you drop your career in marketing and become a web developer. But there are some huge benefits to learning basic coding that can make you highly attractive as an employee.
At the earlier stages of your career, being able to make small changes to complete simple tasks can radically improve speed to market. Whilst most marketers work with a marketing automation tool, for example, they often have to go to their team of developers to build and edit templates for emails and website pages.
Learning basic HTML, CSS and/or Javascript puts you in the driver’s seat and enables you to update and manage these tasks in a faster time-frame. Gone are the days where we can wait three development cycles. You simply need to get in there and change something. Coding as a skill also gives you a unique advantage over other marketers when it comes to roles that involve marketing automation. On top of all this, coding is becoming increasingly common skillset, and it’s likely to be a must-have skill for future marketers.
At later stages of your career, even basic knowledge of what’s possible can help you conceive, spec out, and manage development projects more effectively, and cultivate better relationships with your technology team.
With marketing evolving at such a rapid pace, it is certainly possible that we may not recognise tomorrow’s marketing landscape. Recognising key areas to upskill today more readily prepares you for tomorrow and can accelerate your career prospects.
