What makes a great marketing leader? The answer for this question has changed over the years. The future of modern leadership is moving away from hard technical skills to soft, transferable skills. Now, more than ever, it’s so important for leaders to properly execute cross-departmental work and build strong teams capable of delivering high quality work. We’ve seen these essential qualities become more important during the global COVID-19 crisis, as more teams moved to remote work.
This shift in valuable marketing leadership qualities has been a steady change over the past few years. However, because of the unprecedented global pandemic that we are now facing, it is more important than ever to align yourself and your team with these following marketing leadership qualities:
How to Become a Better Marketing Leader in 2021
1. Be Customer-Centric
The first thing that all great marketing leaders have is their customer centricity. They focus on the needs of the consumer, and how their brand’s products exist within the lives of their customers. They try to see the brand through the consumer’s eyes at all times, and communicate that downstream to their direct reports. A truly excellent CMO focuses not only on revenue and profits, but on the customer experience as well. However, revenue is still very important, which brings us to the next quality.
2. Hold Both Yourself and Your Team Accountable
All highly successful CMOs have excellent revenue ownership and accountability. They realize that, brand awareness and clever creative ideas aside, their main job is to help the company make sales, and thereby profits. Those leading marketing teams need to be able to communicate that vision with their team to ensure delivery, and to facilitate their efforts in meaningful ways that also align with the organization’s overall goals.
3. Be Adaptable
Another common quality amongst successful marketing leaders is their adaptability. Adapting to your market is key to surviving as a marketer, and thus as a business. You are nothing without the consumers, and it should be your mission to deliver them with not only a product, but to facilitate a meaningful connection with the brand.
Today’s advertising industry seems to change hourly, with new platforms in the digital-consumer marketplace popping up left and right. Advertisers must adapt in order to grasp at these new opportunities. Seth Godin said it well, that “Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but the stories you tell.” In this way, marketers in 2021 understand now more than ever the importance of narrative marketing and having a strong brand that customers can get behind.
This is especially true for marketers in 2021. Because of turbulent current events, brands need to be more mindful than ever of the messages they’re propagating and the actions they’re taking during this time. People will remember the companies who went about with “business as usual” during this highly unprecedented time
Drive Personal Success as a Marketing Leader with Methods
If you want to see an exemplar marketing leader, look no further than Alex Lazarus. Her inimitable career as a marketing leader for some of the world’s top media companies has solidified her position as one of the world’s most successful and influential CMOs. Her new course, that will be out later this week, will give you amazing insight into what you need to do, and the habits you need to start forming in order to drive your own personal success. Check out her new course here:
Resource: forbes.com
