6 Must-Have Traits in a Marketing Strategist

By Joanna Swartwood, Square 2 Marketing

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?