What Traits Make a Good Marketing Consultant or Manager?

September 19 2016 - Marketing is an area of business that is a very popular career choice these days, especially since the advent of social media, which has revolutionized how companies approach marketing to targeted audiences. If you are interested in becoming a marketing consultant or marketing manager, getting the knowledge and qualifications to start your career is also easier than ever thanks to the internet - because you can now take a marketing degree online with a good university like Arizona State, so you can fit your studies around your life and avoid too much student debt.

Of course, knowing the methods and approaches involved and being able to pass exams are not the only things that go towards making you a successful marketing manager or consultant. There are some personal skills that make some people have a real aptitude for this kind of work. You may think that in marketing it is important to have great communication skills and be a good 'people person', however this is more important for marketers themselves than for managers and consultants that work on developing marketing strategies rather than executing them. They still don't hurt (as in any job), but to work on the more technical side of marketing the following are more important:

Innovative Thinking

One of the things that can make you stand out once you've done your marketing degree online is your ability to come up with new ways of engaging more people. People are exposed to so many marketing messages each day on their phones, in their environment and on their social media accounts that only the ones that really catch their attention work, and you will go far if you are someone who can find new ways to use existing technology and methods or who is an early adopter of all the latest things.

Good Math Skills

This may sound like an odd one, but so much of marketingstrategy is analyzing the effectiveness of different campaigns based on metrics, and working out the return on investment of different approaches. This doesn't mean you have to be a mental arithmetic genius, but understanding how to work with basic statistics and how to get meaning from the metrics your campaigns create will help you a lot.

Technical Skills

Unless you want to focus on 'old' marketing approaches or direct marketing, you are going to be working with the internet a lot, and that means you need to be comfortable with concepts like algorithms so you can understand why search engines and online advertising programs work the way they do, and use that understanding to formulate good uses for them. You don't need to be able to code or understand the inner workings of Google (which are in any case secret and constantly changing), but you will need to grasp things like SEO.

These are a few areas to focus on while you are preparing for your career in marketing and doing your online bachelor of science in marketing.

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