How to Develop Marketing Skills?

Quora Question: How do I develop skills in marketing? (Answer requested by Rupal Agarwal)

Marketing Skills to Succeed

Our Answer: Hi Rupal,

Thanks for sending in your question to me.

Good Marketing Skills are about being exceptional in the:

1. Grasp of Market Space: keen understanding of your target market (competitive movement, consumer buying behavior, emerging trends, SWOT analysis, etc.),
2. Creativity: Devising innovative ways to ‘create’ needs/wants for your product & services. You need to think out of the box ways to promote. It applies to a mix of tools like advertising, events, marketing collateral (flyers, pamphlets, brochures, corporate gifts, etc.), promotional campaigns, to mention some.
3. Communication: Conveying your information crisply and impactfully on the right platform, without data loss. It ‘must’ engage your customer to generate targeted response.

Now, coming to your question on how to get there:

1. Know & Understand Marketing Basics: Marketing requires a very good understanding of human psychology, since by far the customers continue to be humans only! What clicks with them, when & how they react & why, what touches them emotionally & how far can they go for it, what triggers impulse buying, what influences a thought out buying decision, and so on. For this: a) do read books like Marketing Management by Pilip Kotler, Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout.Read autobiographies like Iacocca, Maverick by Ricardo Semler. These books are quite old, but they will give you ‘the’ ‘workable’ fundamentals of Marketing. They give you the ‘right’ start. b) join online courses on coursera or edu.org. Go for reputed universities, since they give you case studies, projects, quizzes, community forums, etc. which give you an all round skill development along with the assessment of how you are doing.
2. Learn Digital Marketing: Digital Marketing is almost a necessary evil now for most industries operating in B2C space, particularly. Learn about it through online courses, talks, videos, web content. You might want to join Google digital marketing course, since thats the search engine you will fight for your space at. It will really help to learn some graphic designing too.
3. See ads (print, electronic, internet) of varied companies: Observe how they are putting across their messages. See how the same MNC markets differently in different geographies & cultures. Analyze what you like in those ads, what you dislike, what would you want to change and how.
4. Do Case Studies: Pick up some successful marketing campaigns. Keep your mix inclined more to the recent times and some oldies. Read how they were conceived & shaped. All the grind and strategies behind them. It will help you gain the real picture.
5. Make your ad copies: Practice makes you perfect in case of any skill. Make ad copies, promotional campaigns for some companies for your own learning. More like an assignment. Take all sizes of companies - big, medium, small, micro. Keep into consideration the possible financial outlay and design your multiplatform marketing campaigns accordingly.

Following above can help you acquire the needed skills technically. But application will depend much on your instincts & creativity. And therefore, practical experience only is the winning formula. Marketing is all around in various formats. It starts with a child and goes on to elderly. Keep observing tirelessly. It goes down to even noticing a child on how he/she is able to make his/her parents yield to the demand. Scrutinize what led to the parents’ submission. Thats the kinds of emotional cords you have to catch hold of. Keep running your brain, keep practicing. Stay diligent. Marketing should become your second nature. You will know you are going all right when spontaneously you start coming up with ideas, you start building strategies for selling anything you lay your hand on, you begin a mental consulting about a promotional campaign. A stage comes when its pure skill of Marketing you enjoy, just like sketching, painting, dancing. It goes beyond brands, just like you paint any subject and dance on any song. I think you get the idea. These are enough to have you started. All the very best! (https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-develop-skills-in-marketing/answer/Rakhi-Sinha-16) [Forum Handling]