Heather Hopkins

About Heather Hopkins

What are the essential skills for modern marketers? [infographic]

Looking to future proof your CV? Want to make sure your marketing team has the right mix of talent?

Our recent Skills of the Modern Marketer report defines the skills that senior marketers are seeking for their team. Both the broad knowledge areas and the deep vertical skills needed to be successful in marketing. 

As Neil Perkin’s blog post on the report mentioned last week, we also found a surprising focus on soft skills – in particular, adaptability, inquisitiveness and willingness to collaborate.

We created this infographic to summarise the findings of the report, based on interviews and a survey with senior level marketers. 

Digital transformation: it’s the customer, stupid

We hosted a Digital Transformation roundtable on rethinking your customer here at Econsultancy’s London offices yesterday and I wanted to share some of the themes that were discussed, and in particular the focus on the customer. 

Our roundtables are free to attend for Enterprise subscribers. The format is simple. We invite 20 people to come in and chat about an issue under Chatham House Rules (the conversation cannot be attributed).

Attendees set the agenda at the start of the session by naming the topics they’d like to discuss. Yesterdays topics included:

15 essential skills for modern marketers

What are the skills needed by marketers to be succesful in the future?

In our research for the Skills of the Modern Marketer report, we asked senior level marketers that question and have come up with 15 essential skills – organised into three ‘top five skills lists’ for marketing.

Why three lists? When we asked respondents about the skills essential to marketing there was a surprising focus placed on the soft skills.

So in addition to the usual broad knowledge areas and vertical skills areas, marketers need the right soft skills to be able to work across the organisation. The best ideas will founder without buy-in across the organisation and support from multiple teams.

Marketers also need to be able to adapt quickly in response to the rapid pace of change all around us.

So that leaves us with three top five lists, one each for soft skills, broad skills and technical skills.   

Privacy: How much personal data are we willing to share?

The play Privacy has just opened at London’s Donmar Warehouse and it is a must-see for those involved in data, analytics and personalisation.

This excellent play explores the issues of privacy and surveillance in the post-Snowden era. The play starts with the writer seeing his therapist, exploring his unwillingness to share.

The writer then commits to share online after being pressed by his Director and from this premise we explore the issues of privacy and security and secrecy.

Personalisation: where to start and what’s to come

Last week I moderated the roundtables at our Digital Cream London event on personalisation and I wanted to share some of the themes and takeaways from these sessions. 

Personalisation is certainly on the radar. It was named this year’s top digital priority by B2C marketers in our Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing published in January.

But this is a nut we have not yet cracked. Whilst it’s an exciting opportunity, it is also a long-term priority.

Marketers expect personalisation to be the third most exciting opportunity in five years time (after customer experience and multichannel campaign management).