7 Marketing Skills You Need to Get a Promotion

Are you vying for a promotion? If so, you should make sure you're doing everything you can to impress your boss. Whether you're not as efficient as you could be during the day, or are having trouble hitting your numbers each month, there's always room for improvement.

One thing to keep in mind: No matter how talented you are, you only have 24 hours in a day -- and hopefully you're not working for all of them. Being an effective marketer isn't about how many hours you're putting in -- it's about making smart choices and making the most of the limited hours you do have.

If you can master these marketing skills, you'll be in a much better place when management considers who to promote.

1) Plan your blog content in advance.

An ineffective marketer tries to brainstorm, write, and publish blog posts all in the same day, gets overwhelmed, and ends up neglecting her content marketing strategy altogether.

An effective marketer plans ahead. She brainstorms multiple blog topics at once, and has an arsenal of topics to choose from when she has time to write.

Being organized about your content strategy can be as simple as maintaining an excel spreadsheet.You can download a simple blog planning calendar here.

2) Create unique and valuable offers to generate leads.

An ineffective marketer creates a bunch of generic "contact us" landing pages on his website and thinks the leads will automatically start rolling in.

An effective marketer recognizes that website visitors typically won't provide their contact information unless they're receiving something of value in exchange. He creates several offers for different stages of the buying cycle that will make his prospects' lives easier, including educational ebooks, checklists, webinars, free consulting calls, or whatever fits his audience's needs. Then he creates a landing page for each offer so website visitors can complete a form in exchange for the offer.

Creating an offer can be easier than you think --you can download five free ebook templates here to get started.

3) Understand your business's buyer personas and segment accordingly.

An ineffective marketer sends a weekly email newsletter to her entire database of leads without truly understanding the challenges and interests of her audience.

An effective marketer segments her audience using demographic information, location, vertical, or interest, and develops detailed personas for each segment. She shares this information with her colleagues both in and outside the marketing department so everyone can communicate effectively with each segment.

Establishing buyer personas for your business will help you create stronger marketing campaigns.You can download a template for creating buyer personas here.

4) Try creative new tactics instead of being afraid of change.

An ineffective marketer uses the same types of content over and over on his website, email marketing, and social media channels. Since the content is bringing in some leads, he's afraid to mess with what's working.

An effective marketer always seeks improvement, constantly experimenting with new types of content to see if something will resonate even better with his audience. If he was creating text-heavy blog posts, he publishes a few infographics to see if they get shared. If he was sending newsletter-style emails, he creates a few heavily personalized emails for his lead nurturing campaigns to see if the clickthrough rate improves.

Not sure what kind of new content to try?Download these free infographic templates, customize one of them, and publish it to your blog.

5)测试一切。

An ineffective marketer switches around her strategy or content without bothering to run organized tests.

An effective marketer wants to prove her results by running A/B tests using the original strategy as the control and the new strategy as the variant. She uses an A/B test calculator to determine the statistical significance of her results before declaring a winner. Then she's able to show off how she increased the ROI of a campaign, or halt the test when the variant performs worse, optimize a new variant, and restart the test. This saves her from wasting time on changes that don't work.

You can A/B test anything from landing pages, to calls-to-action on your website, to emails.学习基本的A / B测试工程师ting here.

6) Report on your success metrics in a way that's easy to understand.

An ineffective marketer doesn't track his progress month-over-month, so struggles to impress his boss, prove his value, or determine next steps for his campaigns.

An effective marketer does monthly reporting to determine the success of his campaigns and efforts during the previous month. The report follows the same format each month, so it's easy to input new numbers and update his graphs. He also includes insights and recommendations based on the data so his boss and colleagues can easily understand the takeaways.

Reporting can be one of the most tedious parts of your job, but it's also one of the most critical. Your metrics prove your work's worth: How much traffic are you driving to your website? How many customers did your marketing efforts generate?You can download a monthly reporting template here.

7) Plan budgeting early, and stay on or under budget.

An ineffective marketer goes over-budget on campaigns, often due to a lack of planning or organization.

An effective marketer creates a budget for eachfacet of marketing she needs to manage, from branding and creative, to paid search, to product marketing, to hosting events. She is able to determine how to use paid marketing to supplement organic growth, so when the money runs out, the marketing keeps going. She monitors her spend carefully and stays on or under budget.

With so many marketing campaigns to manage, your marketing budget can disappear unbelievably quickly.Download these marketing budget templatesto easily manage your marketing spend.

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