5 Alternative Marketing Skills You’ll Need to Succeed in 2021

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“Thanks to” COVID-19, the year 2020 has become challenging for most of us. Regardless of niches and skills, all specialists had to think of new business plans and strategies to stay afloat.

2021 is coming, and most experts predict it to be even more troubling for businesses. As a marketer, you understand the need to adjust your projects to a new, post-COVID reality. And no matter how experienced and skillful you are, this reality requires some alternative knowledge and skills to control everything and succeed.

In this article, you’ll find five soft skills for every marketer to master in 2021 for even better work on projects.

1) Transparency

When working with a group of people from different departments, transparency is key to gaining trust and respect. Your staff needs to understand what happens in the company and what CEOs or departments plan to do next.

Honest communications across all departments will help everyone focus on the shared goal and find the best marketing strategies for its implementation.

Transparency is also about your ability to accept personal flaws as a marketer and start working on your growth as a specialist. It can encourage a learning culture within your department and facilitate your team members’ upskilling too.

2) Adaptability

This one is, probably, the #1 lesson we’ve all learned in 2020: Adaptability to different situations is what determines business and marketing success today. Your skill to adjust plans and strategies to a fast-changing world and rules on the market is a must-have now.

Learn to analyze everything real quick and be ready to introduce a few alternative marketing strategies if necessary. Finally, always have a few argumentative essays in a pocket to prove your position to your boss, clients, or team members.

Speaking of team members:

Adaptability is also about your skill to work with different people. You need to understand that one style of management and communication doesn’t fit everyone. As well as your different customers need an individual approach for your marketing success, people in your marketing team need it too.

Learn to analyze and adapt to different modes of management for individual situations. Make adaptability a powerful tool to ensure you get the most out of each member of your marketing team.

3) Risk Management

For any marketing campaign to succeed, managers need to ensure enough budget, instruments, and specialists with smart strategies in a pocket. Modern time and project management tools make it easier to estimate everything and perceive risk, but in 2021, you can’t count on the numbers only.

To grow your risk management skills next year, make sure to consider the human aspect when making calculations. Numbers alone can’t guarantee that your plan or strategy will work out. (Another lesson to learn from 2020, huh?)

As a skillful marketer or project manager, do your best to anticipate all the possible points of failure across the sales channel and have a few alternative plans on how to mitigate them on time. In 2021, you need to be ready to make critical decisions before a problem derails the project.

4) Positivity

Marketers often focus on technical or strategic skills and try to get new knowledge in the niche to balance the needs of the business and the wants of clients. But, besides tailored marketing processes, you need people who will work at them. And that’s what will help you shape the marketing processes around your team’s skills and keep them motivated:

A positive approach to everything you do.

It’s not about that unhealthy optimism when you keep smiling and saying that everything’s fine while your project sinks. Instead, it’s about your emotional intelligence and mindfulness as a specialist, ready to get your hands dirty to understand the cause of the problem and focus on its solution, not on whom to blame.

5) Communication Management

Professional marketers need to understand the communication chain from all sides: their team, leaders, partners, and customers. The clarity of this communication and the ability to listen and respond are keys to business success.

In 2021, you need to focus on growing your communication skills and understanding the psychology behind communication management. Your ability to maximize the impact of marketing messages, respond to criticism, or communicate bad news in the right manner can influence the overall results of your work by far.

It would also help if you organized all the communication channels so that colleagues could continue collaboration if you’re sick or leave the project. After all, when your team wins – you win.

The list of hard and soft skills for marketers is endless. Being transparent, ready to adapt to a situation, and managing risks and communication are just a few to master in 2021. Together with a positive approach to your work, these skills will help you deal with any problems on your way to success.


Author Bio:
Lesley Vos is a professional copywriter and guest contributor, currently blogging at Bid4Papers, which helps students and authors with writing solutions. Specializing in data research, web text writing, and content promotion, she is in love with words, non-fiction literature, and jazz.

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