If you do a search for qualities of a great marketer, you can cobble together a pretty decent list of items that have been aggregated by various individuals and organizations over the years. Among those, you might find that these high-performing marketers are often described as:
- Data-driven
- Storytellers
- Revenue-driven
- Relentless testers
- Great copywriters
- Technologists
Those are all certainly important. But I think it’s somewhat superficial to suggest that just because you’re say, data-driven or revenue-driven, you’ll be good marketer. And that’s because simply listing out certain qualities misses a deeper connection that marketers have to make with audiences. In fact, I would go so far to argue that perhaps the most important quality for being a good marketer is simply being a good human being.
Now, you might think “good human being” and “marketer” is an almost oxymoron. Indeed, I think the picture many people have of marketers is that they, like the common stereotype of salespeople, would use every tactic in the book to sell to people. Or, others might point to someone like Steve Jobs, who, by any standard, wasn’t exactly a great human being to a lot of people, and still is considered perhaps the singular best marketer in history.
But those examples and stereotypes still miss point for reasons I’ll outline below. So, why do I argue that good marketers are good human beings? Here are 4 reasons:
- Good marketers are empathetic. In order to sell to any audience, you have to know what challenges and pain points your customers face. In other words, you have to have some empathy for life’s struggle. And it’s not just people who look like you, act like you, or are in the same demographic as you. Oftentimes, you have to market to people who aren’t at all like you. So, having a bit of empathy for their situation, the struggles they face, what drives them, will inevitably help you sell to them. What it means, in reality, is that you have to be curious about other people. All kinds of people. Certainly, this is where data can help you better understand those who aren’t like you. But if you’re not curious about others who don’t resemble you to start with, then you might not be as effective at marketing to them as you think you are. This is where someone like Steve Jobs was actually brilliant. Yes, he wasn’t a great human being to staff, but here in this way, he exhibited great qualities of empathy toward audiences. He knew them well, and understood what they liked and didn’t like.
- Good marketers ask questions and listen. The best marketers talk to people. You’ll often hear the cliché that it’s important for marketers to get out in the field to talk to real people. But many never do. They don’t jump on sales calls. They don’t attend focus groups. They don’t even look at comments from followers on social media. In general, the best marketers look for feedback from audiences. They listen for what they like about products and services and what they don’t. They ask further questions about how people made decisions, what their process was like, how they came to know about the brand. And based on that, they craft a better, more relevant journey for future customers.
- Good marketers focus on others (the audience), not themselves. I’ve been in lots of organizations that claimed they were truly client/audience-focused. But when it came to actually conducting themselves in a manner that aligned with audiences, often politics got in the way, or there were internal stakeholders who needed to be appeased. And what suffered? Well, the marketing did. So, the marketing ended up helping an internal stakeholder versus actually providing something useful and relevant to audiences. And, to be honest, no marketing job is without politics or powerful stakeholders who have often differing views. But great marketers are always able to shift the focus back to the audience’s wants and needs, not the internal needs. If you need any further proof of this, check out many companies’ websites, which often still reflect an internal, organizational view of the menu structure versus reflecting what customers actually want and need.
- Good marketers help people. Many outside the field don’t realize that a lot of marketing energy is spent helping customers find solutions to the problems or challenges they have. Good marketers develop infographics, checklists, and whitepapers that help people do their job. They provide timely blog posts, videos or how-tos that help customers figure something out. Or, those marketers simply make people feel better about themselves, by producing a memorable or entertaining piece of content that brands the company as being thoughtful. Which in turn, makes customers more loyal to the brand as a solutions provider.
In the end, I’d argue this isn’t just an academic point. I do believe – and I’ve found this to be true at organizations that implement this – that, taking this philosophical approach, companies will be rewarded with greater customer loyalty and greater revenue. And even if you consider the full list at the beginning of the article, many of those things are outgrowths of these 4 qualities. If you think about it, being data-driven means that you are curious about other people and their behavior. Relentless testers are, at their core, are asking questions to customers and listening in real-time. Great copywriters have to focus on the customers and not themselves, and need to help people when they write.
But maybe the larger point is that this shouldn’t apply to just marketing either. At a time we have a global pandemic and protests around Black Lives Matter, shouldn’t we incorporate more of these 4 qualities of human decency – empathy, asking questions, focusing on others, and helping people – into our daily lives? After all, the rewards of everyone doing a little bit more of that would be a lot greater than everyone simply focusing on themselves.
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