The Many Hats of a Marketer

When people ask us what we do for a living, we may simply say “marketer.” While that is true, we perform so many roles under this umbrella term. Most think of marketing as creating commercials or pretty print advertisements, and while that all does go under the heading of “marketing,” we do so much more than just that. Today, being a marketer means being a creative, a business analyst, a project manager, a psychologist, a mind-reader, a journalist, and whatever else we can do in a day!

When people ask us what we do for a living, we may simply say “marketer.” While that is true, we perform so many roles under this umbrella term. Most think of marketing as creating commercials or pretty print advertisements, and while that all does go under the heading of “marketing,” we do so much more than just that. Today, being a marketer means being a creative, a number cruncher, a schedule wrangler, a psychoanalyst, a mind-reader, a story teller, and whatever else we can do in a day!

Creative Buff
This is probably the first thing that comes to mind when people think of marketing. This where the mind runs wild with clever ad campaigns and gorgeous advertising. This is the stuff that will get people talking, posting, tweeting, and engaging in general dialogue about your product or brand.

Psychoanalyst
A psychoanalyst, what? Yup. The most important task for a marketer is to incite action, which means that marketers need to understand customers and what their motivations are for their buying behavior. You need to study people and what makes them tick, what they love, their emotions, their passions, their fears, all things that could affect their need to purchase whatever it is you’re selling.

Number Cruncher
Clever ad campaigns and gorgeous advertising are useless if you can’t track the performance of your work. It’s important to seek, extract, and export data to analyze it and make recommendations. Future ads that are made on the creative side are a direct result of what is found in the data from the previous ads on the business analyst side, making data analytics essential to your ad’s success.

Mind-reader
Like I said, a marketer’s job is to incite action. This means that you need to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. You need to predict their path from interest to information-seeking, to purchase. Data and metrics can definitely give you insight on what your customer is thinking, but that’s only one component. Think WWYCD, what would your customer do? And then plan your marketing efforts around that.

Schedule Wrangler
Creating ads is no cheap or easy endeavor. There is always a calendar and a budget that need go hand-in-hand with every project, so this is where the project manager hat is worn. Clients don’t usually like spending above their budget so it is your job to make sure that everything is
being done efficiently according to their timeline, and thriftily according to their budget. A happy client is a happy marketer.

Story Teller
The journalist hat is the hat that tells a story. This hat requires you to sift through research and information, study the consumer, conduct interviews and continuously seek more information that can help your marketing hit your target. Once you have all the information you need, this is where you put it all together to create a story that is going to be used in campaigns, reports, or internally.

These hats can be worn one at a time, or they can be worn all together, depending on the day. Regardless of the hat(s) you are wearing, you are greatly contributing to the success of your overall marketing efforts, which makes all of the research, analysis’, writing, and brainstorming worth it.

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