The Most Important Skill In Marketing

The most important skill in marketing.

It isn’t what you might think.

It’s not an astoundingly creative mind, or a knack for hashtag creation and

buzzword formation.

It’s not the ability to sell ice in the arctic, or sand in the desert.

It’s not the ability to craft catchy headlines or copywriting that pulls a reader in and doesn’t let them go until the

very,

very,

very,

end.

It’s not even a superior intellect, thorough education and understanding of marketing principles, or the ability to crunch numbers and determine which campaigns delivered the highest returns.

Though all of these things are important, and a well-rounded marketer should indeed be fluent and proficient in all of them, they’re still not the single most important skill in marketing.

No, because the single most important skill in marketing is….

Empathy.

The ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes: your customer’s shoes.

In marketing, it rarely matters what we want, or what we think is fantastic, UNLESS, these align perfectly with what our target market wants, or thinks is fantastic.

The reason empathy is the most important skill in marketing is simple, if we can’t relate to our customers, how can we market to them?

It’s one thing for an auto dealer to want to be in the pre-owned car market, but what people really talk about, and search for, are “used cars”.

The same goes for a travel agency offering low priced airfare, when what people are really talking about, and searching for are “cheap flights”.

If we don’t know who our customers are, what they like and don’t like, what they do, how they speak, who they speak to, where they hangout, online and offline, and how they spend their time, then how we can even pretend to know how to market to them?

We need to be empathetic to their needs so we can better understand how to serve them.

Marketing is about putting yourself in another person’s shoes, and then finding a way to provide them as much value as possible.

The single most important skill in marketing today is empathy.