The best marketing leaders know the value of a high-performing team. To drive results, your marketing team should excel in analytics, strategic thinking, positioning, brand plans, and marketing execution. But how can you accurately measure your marketing team’s strengths and identify potential gaps?
At Beloved Brands, we’ve developed a Marketing Skills Assessment to help you evaluate your team across the five essential areas that define top marketing performance. This tool provides a clear breakdown of 20 critical skills every marketer should have and offers an actionable way to measure individual and team performance.
How good is your marketing team?
Our Marketing Skills Assessment covers five key areas that successful marketers must master:
- Brand Analytics
- Strategic Thinking
- Brand Positioning
- Brand Plans
- Marketing Execution
To illustrate, click on the marketing skills for marketing teams image above to zoom in.
For each of these areas, we’ve identified four key skills to evaluate, creating a comprehensive assessment with a total of 20 core marketing skills. With this tool, you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly where your marketing team excels and where they may need additional training or support.
To illustrate, click on the marketing skills for marketing teams image above to zoom in.
How to Use the Marketing Skills Assessment
For each skill, score your team members on a scale from 1 to 5:
5: Exceptional performance in that element
4: Very strong performance
3: Solid performance, meeting expectations
2: Below your expectations
1: Unable to perform this skill
Once you’ve evaluated your team, use the total score to gauge your overall team performance. If your team isn’t scoring at least 80% or higher, it’s a sign that additional training or restructuring may be needed to boost both individual and overall brand performance.
Our best Marketing Learning posts
To build your marketing skills, click on the story below
Making your marketing team smarter
At Beloved Brands, we teach how the best marketers use brand analytics, strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, and marketing execution.
To illustrate, click on the marketing skills for marketing teams image above to zoom in.
We focus on essential Marketing Skills so your brand managers will be stronger at brand analytics, strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, and marketing execution. I bring my experience as a past VP of Marketing, with experience at every level of marketing while at Johnson & Johnson, Coke, and General Mills. I teach how the best marketers are expected to show up. As a result, your team will thrive in today’s marketing world, produce better work, and drive stronger results for their brand.
Brand Analytics
When marketers don’t go deep enough on brand analytics they miss the underlying issues facing the brand.
Our Marketing Training teaches how the best marketers use analytical skills to create a deep-dive business review with conclusions about what’s going on with the marketplace, consumers, channels, competitors, and brand. Marketers must use analysis to discover their brand’s unique underlying situation to set up strategic thinking. The analytics identifies the growth accelerators that will make your investments move faster, inhibitors that will hold them back, opportunities to take advantage of, and threats to avoid.
The brand analytics skills we build through our marketing training.
- To start, your marketers will understand all brand data sources and knowledge—market share, funnels, consumption, qualitative, VOC, and financials.
- Next, they will dig deep into data and draw out comparisons and insights to build an analytical story that sets up the business problem to solve.
- Most importantly, they will learn how to lead a best-in-class 360-degree deep-dive business review for the brand that identifies the key issues that set up the strategies.
- Finally, we show how to write analytical performance reports that outline the strategic implications of in-market consumption and sales performance.
To illustrate, click on the marketing skills for marketing teams image above to zoom in.
2. Strategic Thinking
When your marketers jump straight to tactics, they miss the underlying issues that are hurting the brand.
Our Marketing Training teaches how the best marketers use strategic thinking to understand your brand’s unique circumstances. Our Strategic ThinkBox helps them ask challenging questions about 1) the brand’s core strength, 2) the consumer bond the brand has built, 3) the competitive dynamic, and 4) the business situation. The best marketers focus their limited resources on building capabilities to deliver a market impact that leads to an identifiable performance result.
The strategic thinking skills we build through our marketing training.
- First, your marketers will take a holistic view that determines your brand’s core strength, consumer bond, competitive dynamic, and business situation.
- Next, they will slow down to think strategically, coming up with the most challenging, interruptive questions before reaching for solutions.
- Most importantly, we show how to structure smart strategic decisions that line up with a vision of a better future for their brand. They will learn how to invest in building strategic programs, identify focused accelerators that make the investment work harder, and deliver a market impact that leads to a desired performance result.
- Finally, they will articulate the strategy throughout the organization to ensure everyone working on the brand can understand and deliver against it.
To illustrate, click on the marketing skills for marketing teams image above to zoom in.
3. Brand Positioning
Too many times, brands try to be everything to anyone they end up being nothing to everyone.
Our Marketing Training teaches how the best marketers use conceptual thinking to create the ideal consumer profile adding moments of accelerated needs, underlying consumer insights, and enemies that torment them. They build the brand positioning statement balanced with functional and emotional benefits. Then, they use an organizing brand idea to steer everyone who works on the brand.
The brand positioning skills we build through our marketing training.
- To start, your marketers will define an ideal target market (consumers, users, shoppers) framed with accelerated needs, consumer insights, and enemies.
- Then, they will learn to use our functional and emotional cheatsheets, with 100 keywords to build the brand positioning around, to help them turn product features into the ideal functional and emotional consumer benefits.
- Most importantly, we will show how to find a winning brand positioning space that is own-able for the brand and motivating to your target, summarized with a brand positioning statement.
- Finally, they will develop a brand idea that can steer how the brand shows up to every touchpoint and organize everyone who works on the brand to deliver.
To illustrate, click on the marketing skills for marketing teams image above to zoom in.
4. Brand Planning
When your marketers try to do too many things in their brand plan, none have enough resources to make an impact.
Our Beloved Brands Marketing Training teaches how the best marketers use planning skills to write a strategic plan that defines how to invest their limited resources to build capabilities that drive growth. They establish a vision, purpose, values, and goals that define a better future. And they find key issues with detailed strategies and execution plans to guide everyone who works on the team.
The brand plan skills we build through our marketing training.
- First, your marketers will translate smart, strategic thinking into key issues and strategic statements that form the foundation of the brand plan.
- Next, they will make decisions on all elements of a smart brand plan, including the vision, purpose, values, goals, issues, strategies, and tactics.
- Importantly, your marketers will learn how to be stronger in writing and presenting the brand plan to senior management and across the organization.
- Finally, they will develop smart execution plans—communication, sales/retail, and innovation—that deliver against the brand strategies.
To illustrate, click on the marketing skills for marketing teams image above to zoom in.
5. Marketing Execution
When the marketing execution is not organized and aligned to the strategy, everyone who executes ends up operating in silos.
Our Marketing Training teaches how the best marketers use instinctual thinking to help make decisions on any execution that goes to the market. The best marketing execution focuses on the target, fits with the brand, delivers the main message, and stays on strategy. They write smart, emotional, creative briefs that inspire experts to deliver their best work. They make smart decisions when it comes to creative advertising, media investment, new product innovation, and in-store marketing. And, they work well with agency partners, product development, and the sales team.
The marketing execution skills we build through our marketing training.
- First, your marketers will lead any marketing execution project using our Marketing PlayBox and checklists to make smarter and more creative decisions on advertising, innovation, and in-store.
- Importantly, they will write strategic, consumer-focused, and thorough creative briefs to steer and inspire great work from experts, plus guide your decisions.
- Your marketers will learn to partner with experts to inspire greatness from the teams of experts to deliver great work.
- Finally, they will make smart and creative decisions backed by an OmniChannel mindset to deliver the strategy and tighten the bond with your consumers.
At Beloved Brands, we specialize in helping marketing teams grow stronger. Our training programs focus on building your team’s essential skills to excel in brand analytics, strategic thinking, positioning, planning, and execution. If your team has gaps in any of these areas, we can help you close them, enabling your marketing efforts to deliver stronger results and achieve your business goals.
