The 5 traits of great marketers
Spoiler: none of them are technical skills
Last weekend, I had the following exchange on Substack with CJ Gustafson of Mostly Metrics after his post about building teams caught my eye (a topic near + dear to my heart here at Loxo):
This conversation really got me thinking about the team I’ve been growing out here at Loxo + some observations I’ve made when reflecting on who I think are some of the best marketers + business practitioners around.
What follows is a distillation of what I believe are the 5 traits that these individuals possess - the traits that separate those who are good at what they do from those who are not just great, but truly exceptional.
Sponsor: Storylane
Most of our working hours are spent on items that are "urgent" but not always "important". As a result, very few hours are left for "non-urgent" but "important". This is a huge miss. Every quarter, our marketing team has a "hackathon week" dedicated to this problem. A week where we block off our calendars and select 1-3 items that are "non-urgent", but can make a MASSIVE impact on the business.
A few weeks ago we had our Q3 hack week and one of the most surprising (and exciting) things to me was that there were multiple team members going deep on building interactive demos + building out a few different use cases that span the entire customer lifecycle. This is the part that I geek out about most as a marketer + end user - how often are you able to have a solution that solves for multiple problems? Rarely are we empowered with a tool that can accomplish this with the specificity required, short of being a point solution.
A quick sneak peek of what we nerded out on that week:
1️⃣ Imagine a world where our entire onboarding team went away. Our Customer Success team was all on holiday for a month. Customer Support vanished.
Is it possible to build out a series where a brand-new customer could successfully onboard themselves following these step-by-step demos?
And more importantly, knowing each customer has their own set of unique variables, could the interactive demo be tailored to these variables so it's highly relevant?
2️⃣ For a prospect who's merely researching or just "curious" about what's out there, what is the most compelling pain of theirs that we can proactively show is not only solvable, but also how *easy* it can be solved
If we know the job-to-be-done they're struggling with, can we create a short interactive demo that highlights the biggest pain within that JTBD and how it can be solved within 3-5 clicks of the demo?
What would you build?
1. They're contrarian, but have high humility
Most marketers follow the pack or buck the system entirely. But great marketers challenge conventional wisdom while staying genuinely open to being wrong (in fact, many actively seek it to find that boundary).
This isn't about being difficult. It's about being thoughtful.
The key is understanding when to follow best practices and when to break them. Knowing there are "trending best practices", like the current “comment [WORD] to get the playbook!” engagement bait on LinkedIn, that works until everyone adopts them or algorithms change. Then there are "fundamental best practices", like putting your CTA in the top-right corner as that’s where users have been trained to go to take action on a website that we probably shouldn’t ignore.
The humility part is crucial. Most contrarians are seen as difficult because they have low humility – they challenge everything but never admit they're wrong. Some of the best marketers and thinkers, like Chris Walker or Kyle Poyar, will completely change their stance when presented with better data or logic.
What this looks like: Best practice says shorter forms convert better, but after testing, you may find that demo forms with 8 fields have 33% conversion rates (6-10x better than “best practice”). When the industry says BDRs are dead, we rethink the playbook being used instead of abandoning the channel.
2. Preventing problems > solving problems
Good marketers are excellent firefighters. Great marketers prevent the fires from starting in the first place.
This mirrors what separates reactive leaders from proactive ones. Being great at solving problems is reactive, being great at preventing problems is leadership.
Most marketing teams spend 90% of their time reacting - to campaign performance dips, to competitive threats, to sales complaints about lead quality, etc. The best marketers build systems and processes that anticipate + mitigate issues before they become urgent.
What this looks like: Instead of scrambling when Q4 pipeline is light, you built leading indicators in Q2 that flagged the issue early. Instead of reactive campaign optimizations, you have frameworks that catch problems before they tank performance.
3. Ecosystems, not channels
Most marketers fall into one of three camps: they either obsess over attribution data, they completely ignore it, or they operate somewhere in between those those two.
Meanwhile, great marketers do something more sophisticated – they think in ecosystems, accepting that their best work often isn’t measurable at the tactical (channel) level.
They understand that marketing isn't about individual channels performing in isolation. It's about interconnected systems where ads make BDR calls more effective. Where content makes prospects trust you more + have you top of mind when they enter the market. Where we’re looking through the lens of “will this touchpoint help or hurt the likelihood of the next touchpoint being successful?”
But they also know how to balance this, understanding that being too data-driven can kill innovation.
What this looks like: The Liquid Death x YETI casket campaign last year would never pass a traditional ROI analysis, BUT, it generated millions in earned media and brand equity. No clue what their budget was when going about this. But here’s the math I ran through my head:
Total budget to build casket, film commercial, etc. was less than final bid of $68,200, meaning they were ROI positive on this alone
Total earned media was likely in the ballpark of what would’ve cost at least $0.5-1.5 million in ad spend dollars to reach that same amount
Unattributable amount of additional revenue generated for Liquid Death and YETI for purchases of their other products by people who learned about them (or were reminded about them) through this PR stunt
I bet their organic + direct “channels” performed unbelievably those few weeks ;)
4. They know change is inevitable + embrace it
The best marketers constantly challenge their own assumptions because they understand that what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.
Platforms evolve.
Algorithms change.
Users behave differently.
Many are quick to say SEO isn't dead, but in reality it’s just the old SEO playbook that is. Email marketing still works, just not the way it did five years ago. People may not pick up cold calls like they used to, but there are things we can do to increase the likelihood that they do pick up ahead of that call.
All of this to say - channels don't die, the playbooks + tactics within them do, and those are what we need to constantly evolve.
Great marketers treat their strategies like hypotheses to be tested, validated, and retested again at a later date, not truths to be defended. They're always seeking feedback and genuinely want honest answers, even if those answers mean admitting their approach isn’t performing like it used to.
What this looks like: You're the first to spot when industry shifts are happening (i.e. AI Overviews changing search behavior) and the first to adapt your strategy accordingly. You regularly audit your own beliefs and strategies, not just your campaigns.
5. They make it simple
The ability to take complex marketing concepts and make them simple is a superpower. Most marketers do the opposite. They complicate simple things to appear sophisticated.
I used to be a complicator. I thought showing up to meetings with sophisticated dashboards and multi-slide explanations made me look smart. Instead, I just gave people the "digital glaze" – that look they get when you've lost them in unnecessary complexity.
The best marketers follow the "be brief, be brilliant, be gone" principle. They can explain anything from the overarching marketing strategy to attribution challenges to campaign performance in ways that anyone can quickly understand.
What this looks like: A conversation I had with Paul Stansik a few months back covers this perfectly when he shared this:
“I can usually tell who’s a simplifier vs. a complicator by how they answer [how the business is doing]. If I get a straight answer with a period at the end of it, there’s a pretty good chance that person’s a simplifier. And if I get an answer that is usually accompanied by hand-waving choreography that takes longer than 30 seconds and never really delivers on what I was really trying to get to? That’s maybe the mark of a complicator.”
The Common Thread
Notice what these traits have in common? They aren’t technical skills or experiences you can get from a textbook or a course. They’re traits. They’re operating principles. And I’m pretty sure that these expand well beyond how these great marketers go about their day-to-day in their jobs, but likely expand into their lives as a whole.
Which of these resonates the most with you?
What would you add?
Reply back and let me know :)
Book quote of the week
“Our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.”
- Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
Side note: anyone here on Goodreads? Joined two weeks ago after a friend pulled me on + always looking for good recs on what to read. Find me on there + send me a friend request :) @Sam Kuehnle
See you next Saturday,
Sam
P.S. if you liked today’s newsletter or have enjoyed some of the earlier ones, forward this along to a marketer you think would like it as well 🙂 This newsletter grows by word of mouth + I can see which weeks resonate more/less with you all based on how many people do (or don’t 😅) subscribe after reading.
I’ve been preaching the art of the eco-system for a while now and loved reading it here….