Marketing Skills: 10 Hard and Soft Marketing Skills

Marketing is the process by which small businesses, nonprofits, and large companies alike advertise their goods and services to potential customers and incentivize them to make purchases. For those interested in a marketing career path, obtaining a marketing degree will likely prove helpful in your job search. Still, if you have the necessary soft kills and hard skills, it’s possible to find marketing job opportunities without degree requirements.

Soft skills apply to various occupations, but they can help you develop a strong marketing strategy specifically. Consider these five soft skills for a career in marketing:

1. 1. Adaptability: As you create content to market your goods and services, you’ll need to adapt to trends, customer needs, and so on with a great degree of regularity. For instance, digital marketing skills are paramount now, whereas print and television marketing was more important in the past.
2. 2. Communication: Cultivating effective marketing communication skills helps you connect with customers and increase brand awareness. Communication is important in nearly any profession, but that’s especially the case in the marketing field. Your ability to communicate predicts your ability to promote your company well.
3. 3. Critical thinking: Given how many unique issues can arise in any given marketing role, problem-solving and critical thinking are important marketing skills. You need to think on your feet to address pain points in your strategy and ensure you optimize your marketing overall.
4. 4. Goal setting: Whether you’re a marketing manager or team member, it’s important to establish metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your marketing goals. This sort of goal setting also helps determine pricing for budgets.
5. 5. Project management: Marketing team members often juggle many campaigns at once, which means you will need excellent time management and scheduling skills. Everyone in your marketing department should keep each other updated on deadlines and the need for additional help along the way.

Successful marketers need a more technical skill set in addition to soft skills. Here are five hard skills to expect in any marketing job description:

1. 1. Basic web management: Modern marketing professionals must know their way around basic HTML, CSS, and content management systems. Although it’s unlikely you will have to design a landing page, the information could be helpful if you ever need to apply updates to one.
2. 2. Data analysis: In the age of internet marketing, analytics skills are extremely important. Marketers need to know how to comb through data to tease out information about their potential customers and how to best reach them. Marketing analytics tools and software make understanding your target audience easier than ever.
3. 3. Research: Effective marketing and public relations relies on understanding your brand, competition, and potential audience. This is why the ability to research is one of the top skills for marketers. Market research analysts can help pave the way toward reaching multiple different demographics with uniquely effective advertising.
4. 4. Social media management: Modern content marketing efforts hinge on social media marketing tools. While these help with marketing automation, you will still need a human touch to understand which social media platforms to foreground in any given strategy and why. Marketers often work with a dedicated social media manager to ease this process.
5. 5. Writing: From email marketing campaigns to press releases, marketers need writing skills to optimize their messaging. This usually leads to marketing teams hiring a dedicated team of copywriters. Additionally, search engine optimization (SEO) relies on writing that effectively and seamlessly includes certain keywords and phrases to boost content in search result rankings.

All you need is a MasterClass Annual Membership and our exclusive video lessons from the likes of Elaine Welteroth (the former editor in chief of Teen Vogue and host of CBS’ The Talk), Issa Rae (the powerhouse multihyphenate behind HBO’s Insecure), Robin Arzón (the lawyer-turned-head instructor of Peloton), and other luminaries who have have embraced the twists and turns on the path to professional success. With their guidance, you’ll learn how to lean into your strengths, follow your heart, and build the career of your dreams.