There are seven habits I observe about the marketing professionals I admire.
After recently rereading Steve Covey’s work on 7 habits of highly effective people, I thought I’d look at his list from a marketer’s perspective. This isn’t an exhaustive list just my own personal reflections.
THEY WRITE: Marketers who are writing articles, blogs and books tend to take their ideas into the public domain. They share a point of view, a counter intuitive approach or some unconventional observation. In writing about topics of interest, they try to solve problems and shine a light on how they arrived at their point of view so you can understand how they got from A to B. Writing helps them solve marketing challenges.
THEY READ: Marketers, who don’t read, tend to be people who tend to get stuck in the same thought patterns. Marketers who do read want to understand and see the world from a different vantage point. They don’t just read marketing or business books – in fact they tend to read from a wide swath of material to educate and inform their approach to their work. They read because they tend to be naturally curious people.
THEY LISTEN: I recently attended a conference where there were many marketing professionals. I watched one very well-known person sit quietly through the presentations and you could see their brain thinking away. They were attentive to the conversation in front of them and not distracted by the email, texts and tweets that interrupt most of us all day long. They were present and ready to learn.
THEY ACT: Another way to say this is that they take action. They do something with the insights they have and they bring it to the market place. They don’t just write about it. [tweetthis]Great marketers act like verbs – in motion, not like nouns that are static.[/tweetthis] Their instincts are to do once an ideas or direction starts to form. Motion forward is built into the DNA of these individuals.
THEY TEST: Marketing professionals love to talk about A/B testing for everything. How can I set up real world experiments to see how two competing approaches do in a real life test? They want to find the better tactics to solve a strategic problem and they want to do it in the real world not on a whiteboard in a conference room.
THEY MOTIVATE: Motivating a team or staff isn’t easy. How can you both get out of the way and manage people to do their best work? Not an easy challenge. But the best marketing pros have a positive upbeat view of how to move things along although it might come out as a quiet strength or with a resounding roar. But they understand that to get great work done they have to motivate others toward solving problems and achieving results that seemed impossible just months before the task began. Great marketers also need to inspire but allow people to fail without fear of taking risks.
THEY APPRECIATE: They recognize that talking about their own accomplishments is unproductive and useless. Only someone else can comment on the work you do – but you must find ways to acknowledge the work of others. Appreciation can fuel and motivate a team. Marketers, like other business professionals, want those ‘high fives’ to help them know that their work is appreciated.
That’s my list of seven.
I’m sure you can think of many more. Please add them to the comments below.
