Who do you think is a person of a company who passes the information about its products or services to people? Is it a marketer? Let’s find out.
What is a Marketer?
Or, Who is a Marketer? A marketer is a person who is responsible for passing information about a company’s products to people, influencing them, and linking them with the company. He is a professional who promotes or markets a company’s products and services.
Marketers do different tasks including searching for customers, understanding their needs, designing relevant marketing strategies, and increasing companies’ sales, and profits. Their skill sets, qualities, and abilities to understand market conditions and develop strategies have a great impact on a company’s sales and profits.
More simply, a marketer is one who promotes and aims to sell products for personal benefits or on behalf of an organization. For example, if you promote your products to someone you are a marketer, and if someone does the same to you they are marketers and you are their potential customer.
A good marketer has the ability to make a difference – he/she boosts the sales of products and in turn increases the revenue of the company. He is given certain authority to implement and change marketing strategies according to changes in customers, companies, and competition situations.
What is the Purpose of a Marketer?
The main purpose of a marketer includes:
- Finding the right market segment.
- Retain old and acquire new customers.
- Build effective marketing strategies.
- Increase customer satisfaction and retention.
- Increases sales and profit.
- Build brand value and market share.
- Maintain a good public image.
Roles and Responsibilities of a Marketer
What does a marketer do? Marketers perform a range of duties in order to ensure companies’ sales, profits, and sustainable futures. Some are:
Related: Roles and Responsibilities of a Manager
Market Search
The main task a marketer does is to search for markets. He is responsible for searching for new markets, understanding market trends, and gathering market information.
He needs to keep a close eye on happenings in the markets and search for one (s) segment that has the potential to bring profit to his company and which a company can serve well.
Understand Markets (Customers)
The next responsibility of marketers is to understand customers – what their situation is, what they need, their preferences, wants, ability to pay, status needs, and so forth. Here, they have to understand the markets and select the profitable segment (s). This is the key for marketers to develop better marketing strategies.
Develop Marketing Strategy
Once marketers understand the customer’s preference they have to develop the desired marketing strategies. The strategy is required to include customers’ concerns and the organization’s ability to provide the necessary funds to implement.
Produce Products
Although marketers have no direct involvement in the production process they do have information on what to produce and what customers are seeking to consume. They provide necessary information to the production department about the product’s design, features, and other attributes that they received from consulting customers.
Related: What is Actual Product?
Promotion
The promotion activity of marketers includes delivering the message to different customers about the company’s products – product benefits, usage, benefits, features, etc.
For the promotion, they can use promotional means like advertising, direct marketing, and others to inform customers about the company’s offerings. The promotional activity is required to be influential and attractive to customers.
Serve Customers
It is the task of marketers to close deals with customers. Here, they actually make a sale and deliver the products.
Customer Satisfaction
By only closing deals and serving customers marketers do not get success unless they make customers satisfied. The purpose of marketers should be to serve customers the way they want with their desired products.
Since marketers develop products by understanding the customer’s preferences they are likely to serve well customers and achieve customer satisfaction. For this, they have to perform beyond the customer’s expectations.
Ensure Repeat Business
One of the essential roles and responsibilities marketers have to do is to ensure that customers buy repetitively from them (organization). This can be achieved when they make customers highly satisfied as well as delighted by exceeding their expectations while serving them.
Also Read: The 6 Philosophies of Marketers
Public Relations
Marketers have to maintain good relations with the public and other parties who have an impact on the company’s performance. They are required to regularly interact with the public, adopt socially responsible marketing strategies, and maintain a good image of the company.
New Market Search
Marketers’ duties do not stop at achieving customer satisfaction or maintaining public relations. They have a continuous task till they are present in the organization. Once they are successful at satisfying one target market their next duty is to go on a search for new market segments.
Skills of a Good Marketer
The skill sets of a marketer define how capable he is of satisfying customers and setting an example in the organization. Good marketers certainly increase the company’s profit and brand value whereas bad ones negatively affect the company’s performance.
Below are some of the skills mentioned a marketer should own.
Curiosity
Marketers should have a curious nature to look at and understand the markets. They should be curious to understand everything happening in the markets.
Related: Skills of a Manager
This lets them understand what is going on in the market, how competition is moving, how & where customers’ preferences are going, etc. which supports marketers in developing better marketing strategies and achieving a competitive advantage.
Communication
Communication skill is a must a good marketer has. Marketing is all about delivering the right message to the right customers. When attempting to form a connection with clients, communication is essential. A compelling message has the power to significantly improve a company’s marketing image to customers.
Creativity
Marketers should have the creative quality to look at the markets the same way everyone is looking but understand in different ways. Creative skills help a marketer to develop unique strategies and serve uniquely to competitors. It helps companies to achieve a unique and competitive position in the market.
Psychological
Psychological meaning is that marketers should have good knowledge about understanding customers’ situations, needs, wants, and preferences without even interfering with them. In addition, they should be able to put themselves in customers’ conditions and understand them.
Analytical
Marketers should be able to analyze different marketing situations and customers’ behaviors. Marketers should have quality in understanding diverse situations and embrace the positive messages from them.
In this dynamic environment, everything is changing so quickly – marketers have to keep a close eye on it. In addition, they should be able to read and get the right message from the different statements of the organization like income statements, balance sheets, P/L accounts, and old annual reports.
Flexibility
In this dynamic environment, a successful marketer is one who is capable enough to adjust to the ever-changing customer behavior, market expectations, and competition. For this, marketers have to continuously gather relevant data from the market and be always ready to be up to date with change.
Digital Skills
There was a time when every marketing activity was conducted offline. But in this 21st century, it is essential for marketers to have deep knowledge of how the digital world works.
Related: Types of Marketing
They should be able to interact with customers on digital platforms and successfully launch marketing campaigns on different social media to reach the target markets.
Long Term Focus
Good marketers do not focus only on one-time sales and profit they consider their personal and organization’s long-term term interests. They are actively involved in building long-term relationships with customers and serving products that care about the customer’s and society’s welfare.
Marketer Vs. Marketeer
Since the words marketer and marketeer are heard the same they often make us confused. They are somewhat different – the main difference between them is that a marketer is responsible for anything and everything with regard to marketing and aims to serve diverse customers at a time as well. Whereas a marketeer is a professional who is usually involved in serving one-on-one customers and building strong emotions toward the brand of the company.
Read Next: What is the Marketing Mix?