6 Must-Have Traits In A Marketing Strategist

Plus, How To Identify A Marketing Strategy Rock Star

Your marketing and sales team should always include a strategy lead (often called a strategist) who is accountable for building a program that drives revenue for your company.

A marketing strategist is vital if you’re serious about lead or revenue generation. Read on to learn six must-have traits in a digital marketing strategist, plus some tips on how to spot a true marketing strategy rock star.

1. Knowledgeable About Marketing Technologies

If you’re serious about driving revenue from marketing and sales, technology is central to your solution set. You need your strategy lead to operate comfortably with your tech stack, and you need someone who knows the tech space well enough to make informed recommendations for your business.

If the person leading your marketing team doesn’t understand the differences between HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot, how can they possibly know what solution is best for you?

2. Experienced At Making Strategic Decisions

The strategic lead on your account should have experience driving results for companies like yours. A lot of agencies hire young talent, and it’s great to have them contributing to your work. However, when it comes to making serious strategic decisions, you want someone who’s well-versed in business strategy and revenue generation and who is able to quickly assess your business situation to devise the right solution for where your business is in their growth cycle.

An experienced strategist understands the importance of having a foundation in place to support the strategy. The ability to pull all pieces of the strategy together into an action plan that can scale comes from years of experience. When a deep level of experience and trust exists between a client and a marketing strategist, magic can happen.

3. Works With Trusted Team Of A-Players

To truly succeed and bring their strategic vision to life, a marketing strategist needs a trusted team of A-players surrounding and supporting them. Look for a balanced team that includes people who specialize in areas like conversion-oriented copywriting, content strategy, content editing, UX design and Agile development.

Your marketing strategist should understand the strengths of each team member working on your account so that work is assigned efficiently. This person should also make decisions about which team members are key to include in conversations and meetings as you work on new campaigns and strategies.

4. Analytics Is Their Sweet Spot

Find a digital strategist that lights up when analytics enters the conversation. If a marketing strategist’s role is to recommend the right set of strategies and tactics to drive results, then they should thrive in the world of data analysis. You want a strategist who understands where to focus based on what the data is telling them and what the data means considering where the company is headed as well as its top initiatives.

5. Passionate To Help Clients Succeed

Your marketing strategy lead should be passionate about helping clients succeed. When interviewing agencies, ask to meet the strategist who will lead your team. Their enthusiasm for helping clients should be clear. If you feel a strategist falls flat in your initial conversations about how to get results for your business, mark it as a red flag and move on.

6. Takes A Customer-Centric, Revenue-First Approach

Your strategist needs to focus on big-picture objectives. Most importantly, they should know how to drive revenue from your marketing and sales efforts. A strategist must understand ROI, how to set and meet goals, and how to optimize programs for better performance.

If your strategy lead spends a lot of their time focusing on day-to-day tactics and emails, how can they have the time to focus on bigger-picture objectives like revenue generation?

How To Identify A Marketing Strategy Rock Star

When you meet a true marketing strategy rock star, you usually know, because you leave every conversation feeling inspired and creative. I’m lucky to get to work with many of them.

Take KC Cox, Square 2 Marketing’s newest marketing strategist, who we welcomed to the team full time on January 15. KC exemplifies what a marketing strategy rock star looks like, and she’s the kind of person you want making strategic decisions about revenue generation for your business.

KC’s approach to marketing and sales has always been customer-centric and focused on driving revenue. Her experience in the tech world has helped shape her into a stellar digital marketing strategist. She watched the first secure e-commerce transaction take place, and then she helped launch the e-commerce platform for SkyMall. At another company, she developed technology to incentivize employees using an e-commerce framework, and she ran e-commerce for two other manufacturers wanting to leverage the internet to grow sales.

She spent several years working in the hectic San Francisco tech world, launching and monetizing online tools for Zoomerang (a MarketTools company), Egreetings and Greeting Card Universe. She also worked with Clicktools (a SaaS tool integrated with Salesforce acquired by CallidusCloud), where she started the marketing department and implemented Marketo.

KC was employee #32 at Infusionsoft, where she helped launch their partner and third-party integrations programs. She left Infusionsoft to run the services division at the #1 Infusionsoft implementation company so she could help do what she loves, which is assist companies with their growth.

KC has tremendous passion to help clients succeed. Her past consulting work includes helping to align sales and marketing for New York-based Booker Software, as well as marketing automation implementation for Eyeview Digital, Cofactor and WebPT.

Her strengths include helping companies align different touch points of customer experience, providing in-depth analytics expertise, and developing marketing and sales strategies from a revenue growth perspective.

We are excited to have KC join our talented team!