The marketing landscape is shifting rapidly and marketers will need new skills in order to compete. Customer trust in marketing – whether B2B or B2C – is eroding. A new generation of highly effective AI-driven ad blockers and spam detection engines are making it much harder to reach customers. Customer expectations around their experience are growing. In the age where highly personalized, massively convenient buying experiences have become the norm in our personal lives, the typical email marketing experience is jarring.
Marketing skills that emerged over the last decade became more technocratic and execution-oriented based on general, abstract assumptions about customers and their preferences. Investing in learning particularly broadcast platforms–marketing automation, CRM marketing, LeadGen/DemandGen–was built on the assumption that if you built a big enough top of funnel, you could (eventually, somehow) rely on trickle-down effects to a bottom line.
And yet: when you look around to the implosion of marketing and ad agencies, the fragmenting mass media market, and deep disruption in adtech, you get an immediate sense that things are changing faster than anyone expected.
Customer expectations are colliding with average customer experience. Customers expect tailored, personalized relationships; helpful, just-in-time suggestions; and assistive recommendations.
Marketers must learn to adapt their practice to customer expectations or risk losing to competitors who are. Here are five skills you’ll need to survive the coming changes in marketing. And the good news is that each of these implies a return to a kind of marketing that is more human at its core.
- Empathy: This may sound pretty out there coming from a deep technologist, but it’s the key skill of the future for marketers. Why? Because your ability and willingness to understand your customers is directly proportional to your ability to create a lasting, meaningful (read: high-value) relationship with them. It […]
