Working in an agency and as a freelancer, for the better half of my 20s, I learned a lot of valuable lessons and worked with hundreds of people in various positions. It became a common occurrence to dread working with certain size companies that were big enough to have a marketing director but not big enough to have a marketing team. Working with companies that fit this criterion usually resulted in working with a marketing director who was a little in over their head. When a marketing director is leading a team or agency in marketing efforts or even a redesign they can make it break the project by not having a few required skills.
Below is a list of what I feel are essential skills every digital marketing director should have.
Being a Jack of all trades master of none
There are SEVERAL specialized director roles for large companies where someone maybe managing an entire search team or an entire PPC team, but for most companies with 1-50 employees, a Marketing Director handles everything from SEM to PPC and sometimes even sales. Being knowledgable in a LOT of different areas is essential for this, specializing in only one thing that makes it hard to effective in a small or single person marketing team.
My Experience: The best projects I have been on involved marketing directors that could listen to us talk about CSS, SEO, and PPC effortlessly and understand what we meant.
Having design chops
Having some design chops goes a long way, I mean the history of marketing is more or less rooted in good design and good copy. When it comes to digital marketing even more so. Knowing how to jump into Photoshop, Illustrator and Sketch is a great skill to have but at a very minimum having a baseline knowledge of what good design looks like and what kind of design is trending is incredibly valuable.
My Experience: About 3 years ago I designed a website for a company who did ABM, Hubspot and Marketo consulting. After presenting my home page design the client said she hated it, she did not know why there were gradients and shadows and said there was way too much white space. We went back and forth on the design and at the end of the project she came back and said “I really want to go back to our first design, I’m seeing the same types of elements you used on Google and some other sites ”
If this person just browsed some design blogs or sites once a month she would have known why we did what we did, instead we wasted months throwing out a very modern design in order to create a dated one
Data analysis & Benchmarking Skills
This one seems like an obvious but I come across this far too often. The first thing any digital marketing director should do when starting their job is setting KPI’s for the quarter/year and getting a benchmark and trend projection. Having a deep understanding of how to analyze traffic, conversions and attribution is essential to proving you are being effective.
My Experience: Pretty often I work with people in a director-level position that focus on easy numbers to process that do not do much for helping a business. A great example of this was a SaaS company I worked with who focused entirely on newsletter content and open rate, the issue here was that 90% of the newsletter list were already customers, so most of the marketing efforts were spent on remarketing towards existing customers without a clear upsell. Each marketing meeting involved talking about the newsletter open rate along with website impressions instead of clearly defined goals.
Communicating properly
Before joining an agency I worked a lot of freelance jobs and communication was always difficult, I assumed everything would change once I stopped doing projects for restaurants and spas and moved to working with fortune 500 companies. I got a slap of reality very quickly and realized effective communication is difficult and you can be in a director-level position and still be terrible at it.
My Experience: “Can we just get on a phone call?” I typically get this kind of response a few times a week, of course, phone calls are easier and sometimes a phone call is absolutely necessary but this is usually a crutch for people with bad communication skills. Poor email structuring and etiquette and not re-reading previous emails and a general disregard for people’s time are always the culprits when it comes to bad communication.
Checking your ego
Really at the end of the day, you can be a successful digital marketing director without knowing anything about code, or without knowing how to crop images in photoshop. But if you cannot check your ego in this kind of position you will absolutely fail. The strongest skill a marketing director can have is being open to new ideas and approaches. At the end of the day numbers do not lie, and just like a scientist marketing directors need to be unbiased and experiment and let the numbers lead them in their decisions.
My Experience: About 30% of the projects I have been involved in over the last 10 years involved a decision-maker with a big ego, these people were dead set in what they wanted and if you told them it would not work or produce bad results they would double down. Numbers never lie, in marketing its up to you to set KPI’s, experiment and reflect on the data to see what works and what doesn’t, there is no room for ego in that process.
Self-awareness and knowing what you are bad at
I am a terrible writer and willing to take writing and grammar advice from just about anyone willing to give it to me. Working with people who acknowledge their weaknesses and leverage team members who can fill those gaps are great to work with. This comes back to checking your ego and acknowledging other people’s skillsets.
My Experience: For some reason, design is always the area marketing people want to do themselves no matter how much experience they have. I have seen people put together wireframes using Microsoft Word and adamantly standby their work.
Not looking to their competitors
This one for the life of me I cannot understand but I come across it so often that about 50% of the time I do discovery and ask clients who their competitors are I get awkward silence followed by a “hmmmmm good question…”. Sometimes your in an industry where all the competition sucks and your the leader but you can still learn something from your competition. There are very few original ideas in design and marketing but a lot of people have a tendency not to copy what’s working well and instead, they do something completely different.
My Experience: The most recent example of this was a SaaS company I worked with who had a terrible website. Websites cost time and money so this is not so uncommon, what was uncommon was their bloated and completely unconventional menu structure, their primary call to action was under an “About” tab and they had 50+ menu items. I did a quick audit and showed them that the 5 leading companies in their industry all had a simplified menu structure that was pretty similar, but their marketing director refused to budge and wanted to stand out from the competition.
