This list of the top 25 skills that can make you more marketable in 2016 and beyond was published on the Official LinkedIn blog.
The data was gathered by analyzing all of the hiring and recruiting activity that occurred on LinkedIn in 2015 to find the 25 hottest skills required. Since LinkedIn has access to the hiring data of millions of companies and professionals across the globe, it stands to reason that we should pay attention to their insights.
Most are technical skills, but number 2, 3 & 4 are vital for marketing and & PR jobs.
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
This skills is consistently ranked in the top four across every country LinkedIn analyzed. There is a lot that you need to learn to be able to do this effectively. And there are several ways you can gather data.
Surveying: Survey data can be used in many ways. I am sure you know that the media loves statistics. A good report can garner earned media attention and coverage. It does depend on how you present the findings though. One agency had a stellar study on health care but when they first released it they got zero media interest. After a rewrite of the report and better graphics to tell the story, it was picked up by major media and resulted in more than 1,000 qualified leads. You can use online tools to poll broader audiences or use outside vendors to help you gather data in hard-to-reach audiences. In some cases we’ve used freelance researchers to do the grunt work.
Listening: Social media has provided us with the ultimate research tool. We can now tap directly into conversations taking place right now on any subject or brand. We can find out what problems people are having, how they feel about your brand ad your competitors, what their needs and aspirations are and who the influencers are in that space. There are now a slew of tools to help you do this.
Data Mining: Every company already has tons of data about their product, their sales, their customers and the industry. The skill that’s needed is how to find that data and what to do with it. Having data without insights is totally useless. One tool you should know how to use is Google Analytics. There will be valuable data in CRM systems and other data sources too.
Analysis and Application: This is about seeing the bigger picture. You need to develop the ability to look at several pieces of data and see how they relate and what insight that can offer. It’s a logic skill – if A and B then …. and come up with a sound scenario that makes sense and gives direction.
Campaign Management
There are currently 9,510 marketing campaign manager jobs posted in the US on LinkedIn. These are some of the skills they require:
- Define campaign objectives, target audiences, strategies, and identify the optimum marketing mix of deliverables, events and media.
- Manage content strategy and content development as part of global editorial calendar.
- Create innovative and engaging marketing assets including infographics, slideshares, social posts, landing pages, podcasts, animated gifs, product collateral, email offers, and other tools as needed.
- Oversee project management of campaign and program execution including timelines, ROI/results, changes/improvements.
- Lead the development and publication of out-side-in market stories and conversations that lead a path back to product messaging for products sold into the target markets.
- Help determine appropriate marketing assets including product collateral, email offers, and other tools as needed such as infographics, whitepapers, videos, social media content
- Ongoing project management of the execution of campaigns and programs including timelines, ROI/results, changes/improvements, managing vendors
- Communicate campaign plans and results to internal and external audiences and secure executive, regional and cross-functional support
- Utilize marketing automation best practices to track, monitor and report on results of programs.
That’s quite a list.
SEO/SEM Marketing
This too requires a lot of skills. SEO and SEM for a start are two different animals. SEO is about organic search results and SEM is about paid search. Each has a different set of skills. To be effective at SEO you have to stay abreast of the constant changes in the search engine algorithms. That in itself is almost a full-time job today. At the very least you need to find some resources that will do that job for you, so that you can read two or three sources and stay current. Moz.com and Search Engine land would be my first two choices.
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