One of the trickiest questions you can ask a marketer is how good they are. The question makes them say bizarre things like, Oh, well. I got 19% ROI on the last campaign I ran. or I manage about 9.4% engagement on my Facebook page. – answers which might make a little bit of sense to those of us associated to the industry, but mean nothing to those not in it.
Traditionally, marketers have been judged based on the campaigns they\’ve been associated with, or the creative ideas they ve come up with. In a world dominated by social media, it\’s not quite the same. The size and reach of campaigns largely depend on the brand associated with it, the marketing budget of the campaign and of course – the business goals. A good marketer will tell you that he hits 95% of the business goals assigned to him each and every single time right down to the last number.
But is that truly the right way for us distinguish a good marketer from a bad one? Most marketers would argue that if they were given $20,000 to play with, they wouldn’t have any trouble getting a brand\’s message out there to 500,000 people overnight. Some would argue that with an easy” product to market, something like say – an iPhone, they can come up with 500 ideas. In my mind of course, the iPhone is an incredibly hard product to market. But that’s a story for another day.
So – how good are you at marketing?
To answer this question, and to help marketers understand themselves – Circus Social created the Social Marketer\’s Quiz. Spread across 10 rounds, the quiz asks you close to 100 questions that test your knowledge across the various realms of digital marketing, varying from content, advertising, analytics, SEO, Twitter expertise – and so much more.
The Social Marketer’s Quiz
While the quiz may not give you a straight-up answer like \”You are X good at marketing\” – it definitely tells you what your strong and weak suits are, and after 10 rounds – it lets you gauge where you stand compared to marketers around the world. After all, quizzes that give you a definitive \”This is how good/what you are\” answer are best left to BuzzFeed.
So why should someone take a quiz like this? What is it measuring?
1. How Good Are You Truly, At Marketing?
It’s not as easy as just throwing an answer out there. If you’re marketing an amazing product, it\’s going to be a walk in the park. If you\’re marketing a horrible product, then it’s going to be much harder. Is a guy who can market a horrible product successfully call himself better at marketing than the guy coasting along with the amazing product?
What if the guy with the amazing product made $500,000 in sales from a $50,000 budget, but the guy with the horrible product made $100,000 in sales from a $50,000 budget? Sure, the guy with the amazing product managed more in sales with the same budget, but how do you factor how \”good\” the product is in this equation? There’s never a standard footing for both marketers.
2. What Are You Amazing At?
Would you rather just run Facebook ads all day to achieve a CTR of 3.409% or would you rather write content all day that gets shared 500 times? Would you rather write content? Cool. What if some marketer could get 1,500 shares instead of those 500 with the same content? He\’s not better at content is he, he\’s probably better at marketing it.
Again – too many equations here. Most would say that if someone got 1,500 shares versus 500 shares on an identical piece of content, the guy with 500 won. But – what if those 1,500 shares were not from the intended target audience, and the 500 were. Who\’s more valuable now? With this quiz – you\’re answering the same questions as other marketers, you\’re going through the same case studies as other marketers.
3. What Do You Suck At?
Do you suck at making conversions? Have you spent $500 last week on Facebook ads and managed to get 2,000 clicks out of which only 20 converted? Do you suck at conversions, or choosing the right target audience? Or maybe you suck at ad messaging. Heck, maybe you don\’t suck at all. Maybe the product you\’re selling is ridiculously overpriced and there are better alternatives out there. Which is it? You can’t compare yourself to another marketer can you. Yes you can, if you both took this standard quiz to see who ranked higher.
And of course, for you to figure out what you truly suck at. If you fail the Analytics round in the first try (like most people probably will) – then perhaps its time you stopped obsessing over the content you create and beef up your Analytics Knowledge instead.
It\’s important for marketers to do some self-evaluation every now and then, understand what they\’re good at and what they\’re not good at – and therefore, it becomes important to go through a self-evaluation tool like the Social Marketer’s Quiz.
