Developing a comprehensive marketing strategy for a brand takes plenty of patience and effort. Regardless of whether the brand is a small business or a Fortune 500 company, understanding key components of your audience, the platforms they use and other core marketing tactics is essential for long-term success.

Many of the world’s best marketers have a variety of common characteristics and skill-sets that make them effective marketing gurus. Whether you’re just getting started in marketing or want to improve your long-standing skills, knowing what top marketers share in terms of characteristics is crucial.

Because of this, let’s take a look at the characteristics that top marketers tend to possess.

Goal Setting Ability

Successful marketing is all about goals. Without a concrete set of actions that your marketing campaigns are supposed to accomplish, most marketing efforts will be wasted energy. Pinging users with ads – but not understanding what you should be getting out of the process – often leads to an unpersuasive campaign.

As such, expert marketers have an innate understanding of goals – and more specifically, which specific goals are needed for each individual brand and campaign. Whether it’s clicks, shares, purchases or subscriptions, top marketers know that goals must be defined before any campaign begins.

Action-Oriented

It’s absolutely vital that marketers understand the concept of being action-oriented. Ultimately, marketing campaigns are constantly in flux: those who understand that dramatic changes may be necessary on a moment’s notice are likely to succeed more so than those who “set it and forget it”.

Many top marketers manage their campaigns on a daily basis, checking performance metrics and tweaking copy mid-campaign if necessary. There is also need for a certain level of experimentation in marketing, so action-oriented types tend to experiment, learn and ultimately prosper more than others.

Fluent in Marketing Tools

Expert marketers may possess a wealth of experience and knowledge, but even that is not enough in today’s world of digital marketing. Ultimately, marketing pros know that they must rely upona  series of comprehensive marketing solutions.

From social media analytics and email marketing solutions to utilities designed to optimize and automated the bidding process, experts can only do so much with their time. As such, embracing a suite of productivity tools that improves the marketing process is a common denominator among the most seasoned marketers.

Understands People

Marketers above all else must have an understanding of how people behave, think and otherwise come to conclusions. When targeting specific audiences with paid or organic marketing campaigns, designing them to resonate with the audiences requires understanding the audiences.

Top marketers know that pinging users with generic ad copy often leads to mediocre results. As such, market research, consumer psychology and a litany of other skill-sets are often combined to paint a better picture of what makes people tick. Without this understanding, a marketer can never hope to be among the best.

While many of the world’s best marketers come from wildly different backgrounds, the characteristics they share are simple enough to understand. Great marketers understand people, they know the value of modern-day marketing tools, they are action-oriented and they know how goals impact performance. With this information, you can begin improving your own marketing efforts.