In the professional field of marketing, where good results aren’t necessarily guaranteed by good actions, marketing leaders must have certain personality traits and a core set of skills if they want to increase the chances of success from their team.
Stopgap, explains what some of the core traits great leaders in the marketing industry need to possess:
1. A Great Imagination
Motivating a team to achieve success is going to be very difficult if you are not an inspirational leader who has a natural ability to generate creative thoughts and think up imaginative solutions. In today’s cut-throat consumer marketplace, successful marketing is often that which takes target audiences by surprise. Therefore, you need the ability to see things through a different lens or have a talent at harnessing creative ideas wherever and whenever they present. It can be helpful to know that some of the best marketing leaders aren’t necessarily very imaginative themselves – they just have a talent at inspiring teams below them to generate creative ideas and solutions.
2. A Strategic Brain
Planning is without a doubt one of the most important elements of a successful project in any field. The amount of work put into the planning process is generally directly correlated with execution success and project results. As a marketing leader, it would be foolish to assume your planning days have come to an end just because you have a team of people under you. Of course, you don’t have to get involved in the fine print of plan writing, but it is your responsibility to outline the core overall aims of a project. If you fail to inform your team of your overall vision, they may end up taking a commonly different approach to a project to the one you had in mind. Mapping out a core strategy also provides you with the chance to assign people to tasks based on their strengths and talents.
3. Great At Seeing Beyond Short-Term Results
In addition to being a creative game, marketing is also a methodical game. In today’s world, data is everywhere; you can see the demographics of your audience, the material they are engaging with and your team’s effectiveness at connecting to them. As a consequence, it can be easy to become obsessed with project results based on data and lose vision of the creative aspects. Great marketing leaders excel at seeing beyond short-term results and instead focus on data analysis and the insights the data provides for upcoming projects. If you allow your vision to become clouded by short-term data, you run the risk of failing to notice any positive takeaways from an unsuccessful project. Your team is going to find it hard to keep up motivation if you disregard lots of previous good work just because the end figures showed a project failure.
4. Knows How To Gather And Keep Contacts
Marketing leadership in 2019 is about more than your ability to lead a team of people. Over fifty percent of your job can often be driving new opportunities, networking and making new connections in the industry. Today’s consumers often only take note of what influential people in the sector are saying, which is why influencer branding is starting to become a massive sub-industry in the marketing world. Leaders know how to reach out to niche influencers and connect their marketing teams with the right personalities for brand promotion.
5. An Ability To Delegate Effectively
Knowing how to delegate tasks effectively is the cornerstone of all successful leadership roles. As a marketing leader, you simply won’t have time to supervise every action your team takes nor can you complete everything yourself. Excellent leadership comes from having the ability to delegate tasks to the right people and giving those people room to showcase their talents. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of all team members will make you a great marketing leader. Perhaps the most important takeaway to remember, however, is that a leader in any field is only as good as the individuals around him or her.