Marketing has changed rapidly in just the past year. That said, marketing has always been an ever-changing field, and a good Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) should know how to adapt to it. In some cases, the strategies of these marketing professionals have been the make or break difference between why companies do and don’t succeed.
In this guide, we cover 15 essential skills for any CMO and marketing leader.
If you’re ready to take this marketing skills list and the grow your career, the CMOx Accelerator prepares you for becoming a fractional CMO.
15 CMO Skills every professional should have
1. Leadership
As a CMO, leadership skills are essential to your position. You provide the organization and motivation needed to ensure your team and marketing efforts stay on task. Good marketing leaders lead by example, so being a reliable source of information and expertise is also vital for the success of your team.
2. Data Analysis
Your marketing efforts should bring in key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ll need to decipher. Understanding this data is essential for the success of your marketing campaigns, and you’ll need to be able to draw the right conclusions from the data.
3. Market Analysis
In addition to being adept with data analysis, a good CMO has a solid understanding of their market. If you don’t know your target market, your strategies will never work well, which is why it’s essential for any CMO to do thorough market research. You’ll need to know your consumer’s needs to best connect with them, and you’ll need to know their preferences, so you may best interact with them. Additionally, you need to identify market trends to get an idea of what the future looks like. These factors are essential for developing strategies that work.
4. Strategizing
Consumer behavior, regardless of your industry, is constantly changing. An effective CMO needs to know their end consumer inside and out to continue to make a profit.
Being one of the key skills every CMO needs, you should have the ability to conceptualize and implement effective marketing strategies for your business. You or your company’s CMO should have the skills necessary to take data and develop strategies and quarterly planning goals that prioritize and target your KPIs.
5. Creativity
Even if you have the data insights to create marketing strategies, you’ll still need the ideas to get them off the ground. Creative thinking is a core skill all marketers need to have because it distinguishes your marketing efforts in an oversaturated market. A creative marketing strategy is also more likely to grab the attention of your final consumer, which is the goal.
6. Teamwork
A lot goes into marketing, and now more than ever, there are aspects outside of your department that influence your business’ effectiveness. It’s important to be a team player and work well with others across your organization and within your own team.
7. Communication
Effective communication skills are essential for every aspect of being a successful marketer. This works two-fold: first, you need to be able to reach your audience, and that comes with understanding the best ways to communicate with them. Second, you need to communicate your goals, strategies, and ideas to your team; without that, the effectiveness of your marketing efforts may become segmented or not as effective.
We recommend using apps like Zoom or Slack to maintain effective communication with your team. In addition, communication is vital for ensuring campaigns, posts, ads, and other marketing communications activate at the right time.
8. Learning
Marketing is an ever-changing field, which means you’ll have to be up to the challenge to stay ahead of the curve. As a CMO, your goal should be to streamline your processes from a leadership perspective. Ultimately, you’ll want a team to work like a well-oiled machine to make implementing your marketing strategies that much easier. This includes anything from streamlining the process to starting up a social media campaign, collecting data, sales, and much more.
9. Humility
Humility is a good trait to have in any profession, especially in marketing. Marketing is a constantly changing landscape, and when things change, it’s ok not to have the answer right away. As a good marketing leader, it’s a good practice to admit when you don’t know something and actively learn from your team when possible.
10. Technical Tools & Knowledge
Now more than ever, effective chief marketing officers need to have a solid grasp of technology and how it affects marketing efforts. If you’ve seen our page on the software every CMO needs, you’ll know there are plenty of amazing types of software to accomplish every type of marketing task. While you may not be the one directly using these software tools, it’s important to implement the right tools for your business and marketing team.
11. Perseverance
Inevitably, there will be challenges that affect your marketing efforts. It’s important to be ready for the changing landscapes and preferences of your consumers. One of the major takeaways of the current global pandemic is that conditions and circumstances can change at a moment’s notice. It has shown us that your strategy must reflect the needs of the end consumer, so regardless if sales or interactions are down, you must be able to rise to the challenge and adapt.
12. Organizational
Needless to say, organization is key for any role, especially a CMO. As a leader, you’re directly responsible for the effectiveness of your team or department, so you need a solid grasp on where things are, where they’re going, and where they should be. This involves organizing everything from your day to your data collection.
13. Agility
As a CMO, you need to be ready to adapt at a moment’s notice. In the highly digital landscape a lot of marketing takes place in, a good marketing strategy can be manipulated and altered to the needs of your consumer. As your consumer’s needs change, you’ll be able to keep them in your marketing effort’s sights.
14. Storytelling
At the end of the day, marketers are storytellers. CMOs and their teams develop narratives to their products or services to relate to their end consumer. Storytelling is often considered the “why” to marketing, and ultimately it may be the deciding factor to why someone does or doesn’t buy your product. For that reason, being a good storyteller is essential for any marketing role, including the CMO, since their leadership and strategy guide the rest of the team.
15. Understanding the Buyer's Journey
One of the main goals of any CMO is to create campaigns that convert and to do that, you need content that falls along your potential customer’s buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is your customer’s path to purchasing your product or service, so your content should tailor them toward that conversion. The content you create campaigns you design, and ads you run should all be geared toward this path to purchase.
Summary of Chief Marketing Officer Skills
Being a CMO is a comprehensive position with a lot of responsibilities and moving parts. The skills needed for marketing officers we’ve covered will help you in being a more effective CMO. Ultimately, your biggest takeaway for becoming a CMO is to practice humility in the ever-changing world we call marketing. Things change rapidly, and the strategies that worked yesterday may not work today, so we can’t stress the importance of being flexible enough.
If you want to learn more about how a fractional CMO at CMOx can help your business, contact us today for a free consultation at (219) 804-0797 or fill out a contact request form here.
