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In your lifetime, you’ve probably come across an ad (or many) that seems totally unrelatable. While it probably doesn’t faze you, there’s a marketer in the background wondering why you scrolled past.
And chances are, they’re lacking a critical marketing skill: emotional intelligence.
See, if you don’t know your audience — if you can’t put yourself in their shoes — there’s no way you can design campaigns that speak to them.
In this post, we dive a bit deeper into what emotional intelligence is, how it relates to marketing, and how to find candidates who possess it in spades.
You’ve probably heard the term emotional intelligence (EQ) before, but it’s a concept worth reviewing.
Psychology Today defines emotional intelligence as “the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others.” In other words, EQ refers to your capacity to understand your motivations and behavior — and anyone else’s.
Think of that person who intuitively knows how you feel, that most people feel comfortable talking to. That person has high emotional intelligence. And as you might guess, most folks like them have excellent social skills.
By knowing how another person is feeling and what they care about, they can better cater conversations to specific moods or interests. People with high EQ are also great problem solvers, taking in everyone’s opinions and distilling them into a plan that everyone can agree on.
Emotional intelligence is one of the most important marketing skills. You must be able to adopt the mindset of a consumer to develop content that they will find compelling — whether you have a strong opinion on the product you’re marketing or if you’re completely unfamiliar with it.
Marketers with emotional intelligence are able to identify the valuable parts of their feelings and meld them with what they discover about each customer persona.
For example, say you’re marketing a new smartphone. To you, data storage may be the most important thing in your decision. While others may feel the same way, storage may not be a deciding factor for everyone. Other buyers may be more interested in style, ease of use, or camera quality. Being able to switch between your point of view and others’ perspectives is key to marketing that phone to each segment of your target market.
So, how do you know if a new marketer has the EQ chops you need?
Get curious about a time that a candidate developed a campaign or a rebrand from scratch. How did they gain inspiration? Did they try the product or the new feature themselves? Did they interview customers? Are there certain nonverbal cues they make a point to look for in those interviews?
Besides assessing their ability to take themselves through the customer journey, you’re also looking for their ability to handle criticism or disagreement. Marketers work with a variety of stakeholders and need to be able to collect input and address objections without taking feedback personally. And when they know from their research that messaging reflects exactly what buyers want and need, they should have the courage to push back.
If you want to go even further with this exercise, ask what drew them to your brand. How would they tackle a rebrand or specific campaign? What do they see as areas of opportunity?
Marketers need social skills to run customer interviews effectively. A great way to test that is to have one or more of your team pretend to be on a consumer panel.
Pay attention to how they make the team members feel, what questions they ask, and how they summarize their findings. Interviewers should feel comfortable sharing honest feedback with the candidate. Questions should get to the root of the product’s value. And at the end, the candidate should be able to accurately summarize the information they gathered from the most neutral perspective possible.
Of course, there’s some wiggle room here. Everyone gets nervous in interview settings! But at least you’ll have a good sense of how the candidate thinks.
This method may be a bit more involved, but Meyers-Briggs and other personality tests can tell you whether someone shows signs of emotional intelligence.
Home in on the candidates who are deeply self-aware but curious about other people’s thoughts and feelings. They should also be skilled at identifying nonverbal cues and be diplomatic in team settings, especially when discussing creative direction or a contentious campaign.
Hire for Emotional Intelligence
All of these ways to assess emotional intelligence aren’t helpful if you can’t get marketing candidates in the door, and recruiting can take valuable time and effort away from your in-house HR team. So why not outsource?
At Planet Interactive, we make a point of sourcing emotionally intelligent, creative, hard-working professionals for every industry. Put your search on autopilot and contact us today.
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