Become an Indispensable Marketing Professional — Yes, in Marketing

Being a successful marketer is often a challenging process and may require you to work much harder than you’d like to do on tasks that may seem beneath you.

That’s because many companies look at their marketing seem as somewhat dispensable and usually an accessory area inside the company.

However, if you follow the steps below and focus on enhancing your skills, you will make yourself an indispensable marketing professional.

You can also transform your marketing career by better understanding your success and making it simpler to show how well you are helping out your many customers.

In this article, you will see:

Marketing Effectiveness Is Not Easy to Measure

Marketing is such a unique process because its effectiveness is often very hard to qualify and explain to businesses.

Most companies are run by people who care about maximizing their sales and cutting back on expenses. And a marketing team is not an inexpensive addiction — and a money-minded professional looking at costs and sales may have a hard time understanding why their marketing team matters.

First of all, sales are not always an accurate measurement of a marketer’s success and effectiveness.

Yes, they indicate that a business’s name is getting more widely spread and that more people are buying from them.

However, many factors can trigger these types of changes, such as a change in the market, the closing of other companies around you, and the time of the season in which you’re operating.

And decreasing sales is rarely the fault of lousy marketing — but you’re going to be the first crew who is blamed for sales dips.

That’s because your effectiveness is hard to diagnose, and frustrated executives who don’t understand brand reach visibility and other complex terms will come down hard on a marketing team that may be overachieving and spreading the name of a business very well.

As an individual marketer in an expansive team, it can be challenging to discuss your own effectiveness.

For example, if you are a content writer and produce hundreds of articles every year and make $50-60K per year doing it, it is crucial to show your content’s effectiveness.

If you do not, there’s a good chance that you might get replaced by somebody who can do the same job for a lower price.

Unfortunately, too few marketing professionals know how to gauge this factor, let alone explain it.

As a result, they may end up not feeling comfortable explaining why they are on a team. Even worse, they may struggle to showcase the benefits that they do provide, leaving a company with a potentially poor opinion of this individual and their importance for a team’s success.

Therefore, it is crucial to understand why measuring your accomplishments is important and how you can achieve this goal as a marketer.

Just as importantly, you must fully understand the various steps to take to push your abilities even further and make yourself an indispensable part of a marketing team — and your team critical for a business’ operation.

Why Measuring Your Accomplishments Is So Important

Marketing professionals need to know how to quantify and explain their success to justify their very existence on a team in the first place.

Simply put, most companies look at marketing professionals as if they are extra helpers and not critical parts of a team.

Put it this way — if a company is a football team, most will look at you like the ball helper or water crew. You are essential to their operation, it is true, but another group of professionals can replace you if you aren’t successful and bringing in big leads.

Most businesses don’t realize that their marketing team is not like the water boys forever on the sidelines — instead, you’re more like the offensive line.

When you’re doing your job correctly as a marketer, you are hardly ever noticed, much like the best offensive line units in the NFL. However, when you let your team down, nothing will run smoothly, and your team will suffer.

If you can prove your worth to the company and show that you are a strong and durable offensive line, you can make yourself indispensable to the team.

Because no matter how good your company’s “quarterback” may be at their position, they’re going to get sacked over and over again without a good marketing team pushing forward and creating play-making opportunities for their team.

Thankfully, it isn’t as hard to prove your worth for your customers as you may think because there are a handful of various elements that you can use to quantify your success.

It is then important for you to fully understand the elements that you can use to quantify your success and present them to your business partners.

Even better, you can use your success as a marketing professional to push forward to new realms of success, such as advancing at your current position.

How to Track Your Success as a Marketing Professional

The best way to prove your value to your team is to prove your team’s importance to a business.

In other words, if you can showcase that a business’s investment in your crew is helping them to succeed, you are more likely to improve your overall success too.

Even better, using the methods below also help you to showcase your success as a marketing professional to everyone involved:

Cost Per Lead

Showcase how much your marketing team is spending on each lead to give your customers an idea of the value that you bring to them.

Conversion Rate

Highlight how many of your leads get converted into real sales, emphasizing the efficiency of your cost-to-usage ratio.

Social Media Presence

Take a look at your followers on your social media sites and use their numbers and engagement with the site to show how you’re reaching people.

Lifetime Value

Detail how many purchases a customer makes with a business and highlight various marketing elements that they claim helped them stay loyal.

Keyword Clicks

Use Google Search Console and other programs to track how often your keywords get clicked, where they lead to on your site, and whether these convert to sales.

Time-Usage Efficiency

Show your employer or your customers how many hours you work and how efficiently you use your time, such as using two-thirds of your paid hours on paid content.

Search Engine Rankings

Track your Google rankings from when you started to the current time, using any increases as proof of effectiveness.

Testimonials

Talk to customers who have worked with you in the past and use their testimonials to prove your effectiveness.

Customer Loyalty

See how many of your buyers are returning ones. This is the best way to prove that your strategies are generating loyal customers.

Showcase Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Set up KPIs with your customers and team before you begin and use these elements to indicate how successfully a business is marketed.

These factors are just a few ways to prove your effectiveness to your team. By demonstrating that your team is worth the cost to a company, you help to ingratiate it into their permanent marketing scheme.

Ways to Improve Your Effectiveness

As a marketing professional, you should continually look for new ways to advance your effectiveness.

Just a few methods that may work for you and your team include how you can:

• Use data-gathering programs to collect information about leads. 
• Focus on using your time efficiently.
• Present new product information to customers directly to improve their engagement.
• Showcase online training and webinars to engage with your customers.
• Don’t neglect educational content — customers love this type of reading.
• Make content personal, as customers love a good story.

As you can see, success in the marketing field requires a level of commitment and time energy that can be challenging.

However, taking the proper steps down this path can transform your marketing and help you track your success and present it to your company in a simplified and streamlined fashion.

And if you want to keep growing in your career, you need to know how to be a resilient marketer. Learn more about this in our webinar on the theme!