In a LinkedIn post from last year, Lou Adler, CEO and founder of The Adler Group, points out 12 ways to spot a high achiever. Here are the top three, edited a bit for length:
- They’ve been assigned difficult challenges ahead of their peers. The best people … are typically assigned tasks, clients and projects that are normally given to more senior people.
- They volunteer or ask to be assigned to projects over their heads. A person needs a lot of confidence to take on a task where they have little or no experience.
- They’re put on important multifunctional teams. Managers assign their strongest staff members to critical team projects … This is great evidence of strong team skills….
If you’re a marketer looking to make moves, or just want to stay on top of your game, you may be asking yourself: “How do I get the assignments and the recognition that will put me on top?”
We all want to do a little better tomorrow than we did today. We all want the chance to do great, challenging work, so we can grow; and we want our work to be acknowledged. I’ve seen changes over the last ten years in what constitutes excellence, and I’d like to share five key working habits that will help you create and manage marketing initiatives that are so obviously good, they make you a superstar. For today’s modern marketer, here are the –
5 Habits of Superstar Marketers
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Connect everything you do to ROI.
It wasn’t always this way. Ten years ago you could do a campaign that people loved for its creative. Today the campaign people love is the one delivering those great numbers.
Show a concrete connection to revenue to prove your value. Marketers are spenders. We have budgets, and we’re not afraid to use them, but that also means that we’re the first to be scrutinized when times are lean. Investment in marketing, whether in dollars or staff resources, is meant to generate or maintain company revenue. So make sure you can prove that your efforts are doing just that. Connect the dollars and time you spend to a bottom-line result. They key to this is ensuring complete trackability of all your marketing campaigns. Considering the availability of analytics tools and marketing automation software, tracking digital campaigns is relatively simple; however, you should also ensure that all sales and leads generated from offline initiatives are tagged in your marketing automation platform or your CRM.
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Produce killer, board-ready reports.
Nothing says more than a report that simply and succinctly details your success. In the world of marketing, it’s all about how you present yourself – and that certainly holds true for reporting. Market yourself, your skills, and your contribution to the company in the same way that you would tackle the presentation of your marketing collateral. Include hard data and facts in your reports, position yourself as a leader, and don’t just make sure your visual presentation is well-written and organized—make sure it’s aesthetically eye-catching as well.
This goes double if your boss is going to present your report to the board. Make your boss look good, and you’re golden (assuming you don’t work for someone who steals the credit).
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Understand what the boss wants.
Whether you report to a VP, the CEO, or directly to the board, understanding the upper management’s goals will go a long way in determining where you should focus your energy. No matter where you are on the chain of command, there’s always a bigger picture. Take the time to understand what that is so that you can position yourself appropriately, focus your efforts in the right place, and present reports and data that speak directly to the needs and aspirations of your superiors, as well as the company as a whole.
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Turn marketing into a science, not just an art.
Thanks to the evolution of data and technology, marketing doesn’t have to be a guessing game. It used to be about saturating the market to the fullest extent of your budget, and then praying that buyers would come knocking. Today, however, marketing isn’t just an art, it’s a science. Take a calculated approach to your work, and your results will inevitably improve. Not sure if the changes to your website suggested by your CEO will actually improve results? Do an A/B split test, examine the results, and make a confident decision. You need to track, measure, and test, test, test before you can discern fact from hypothesis, and once you do, you’ll be able to improve and tweak your marketing strategies.
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Pitch big ideas, and take charge of them.
Be fearless in researching and pitching large-scale ideas. Playing it safe is rarely a ticket to marketing stardom, so make it a part of your weekly routine to research emerging trends, attend best-practices webinars, and meet with agencies and vendors who are making waves in the marketing world. Bring this knowledge back to your team, and take charge of implementing ideas and practices that make sense 
for your organization.
What do you think? Are you a marketing superstar? Have you discovered other superstar tactics and techniques that you’d like to share?
Find out how marketing automation can help you reach superstar status:
