When a tree falls: The one skill every marketer needs

A fallen tree in a field. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve mentored students and spoken at many industry luncheons and as a result I am asked more than occasionally what the skills are for a successful marketer. Not a run-of-the-mill, forms-filling automaton, but a ‘real’ marketer, one that is insightful, creative, innovative, and focused on results.

The good news is that it’s really simple, but the bad news is, it can’t be taught. What separates outstanding marketing professionals from the merely satisfactory is the ability to actively listen.

And right now, reading this, you’re wearing the same expression I get when I say it to others face-to-face.

“Yeah, yeah, I get that,” they’ll say. “But what else?”

“Nothing, that’s it,” I’ll reply.

“But they need to be able to write, right? Or design? Or understand statistics? Or ‘know’ social media?”

Silence.

“Okay, so you’re all about results, right? So they need a finance background?”

Well, maybe, but that will define what kind of marketer they’ll be. What field, what industry, what specialty. But listening is what will make the difference whether they are good at the process of marketing or good at intuitively understanding audiences and the messages required to reach them. And that’s what really matters.

Especially in an age where marketing is about relationships above all else, good marketing increasingly resembles any decent relationship. And we all know (directly or indirectly!) that relationship counselors will remind us that all relationship issues eventually boil down to listening to what the other is saying.

In business, communication used to mean managing what we say as companies. What, how and when we express our brand, our values, and our products’ benefits. But if anything at all has changed in the past couple of decades, it is that communication has a great deal more to do with listening than talking.

It starts before the first pen is put to paper planning a first product, and doesn’t stop even after the product is launched to an eager marketplace. It’s a cycle of listening and iteration. Listening so closely that you can hear what isn’t even being said so you can build a product and create a story that users didn’t expect but that absolutely captivates them. And that’s when they’ll start talking... and their friends and peers will be listening.

So if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it… what does it matter anyway?