If you’re looking to start or advance your career in marketing, you should be happy to know that the growth of the marketing industry has led to a plethora of roles based on peculiar skillsets. This has provided numerous categories and even opportunities.
With the constant changes the industry goes through, the marketing teams of companies end up affected by it. This could lead to major uncertainty on your part as to where to focus. To help with your decision, here are 6 marketing positions to consider. You will need to be open-minded when choosing an area of expertise since a lot of them overlap with others while drawing on qualities and skills that are quite similar.
1. Social Media Marketing
Whenever a brand on social media posts a joke that is off-color, it’s quite common for people to blame the “inexperienced intern”. However, no serious organization will leave their social media handling in the hands of an inexperienced intern. To be honest, the bigger the company, the bigger the social media team. This means that senior-level marketers will be in charge of their social strategy.
Social media marketers post content that is informed by the style guide of a brand, but you should note that they are not just writing copy all the time. They’re also engaging with brand audiences in real-time, readying analysis of engagement, planning future campaigns based on the analysis, as well as working with other marketers in order to determine how brands can support their products with social strategies.
If you have an interest in working within this field, the first thing to do is build a strong professional online presence. One of the ways your professional footprint can be enhanced in this field is to get an online masters in communication. You could also attempt to work on a project-by-project basis for small businesses or brands in order to create a portfolio of multimedia and social copy elements.
2. Brand Management
Brand managers oversee each aspect of communication and bring the persona of a brand to life. Brand persona can be defined as a collection of customer and messaging experiences while carrying a company’s narrative across all platforms.
In a large organization, brand managers will likely work on individual brands or product lines within an organization. Brand management is also a creative job as well as a project management job. This role requires organizational expertise in incentivizing and motivating your co-workers in various departments. No marketer should be doing jobs all on their own. They ought to collaborate with marketing operations, digital marketing, copywriters, designers, etc.
It is almost impossible to break into brand management without having any marketing experience. However, if you’re a marketer looking for a way to move up, you can volunteer to complete corporate strategy projects. When interviewing for the position of brand manager, you will want to have the opportunity to pinpoint different scenarios in which you solved a problem or crisis at a company, revamped the messaging of a brand to appease a particular audience, or created a project alongside different team members.
3. Email Marketing
Due to social media algorithms, just a small number of audiences of an account will actually see content on social media. That’s why companies have to find more creative and innovative methods to reach most of their audience. Emails remain a precious communication avenue in the marketing industry due to newsletters and the fact that its subscribers follow the brand’s messages. This audience is more curious, and email marketers capable of leveraging this opportunity will be able to exploit this avenue.
Email marketing involves editorial strategy and data analysis. Most of the time, you’ll be curating blog posts meant to be included in newsletters; making use of email service providers to build campaigns; accessing open rates, subscriber numbers, and click-through rates; and running experiments meant to boost performance.
If email marketing is something you’re interested in, independent email publications are a great way to study. However, you can still subscribe to newsletters. Also, you can gain experience by creating your own newsletter. Platforms such as MailChimp and Substack should give you inspiration regarding this. You can begin a consistent and free correspondence with subscribers. In this way, you can learn the ropes as you go. This ensures that you already own a commanding portfolio whenever you decide to apply for an email marketing job.
4. Product Marketing
A product marketer will usually act as a liaison between a marketing team and employees in sales, engineering, customer service, product management, account management, etc. Product marketers usually spend some time trying to learn about the target audience, ascertaining their wants and needs, and translating customer experience information to the department meant to create and promote a company’s offerings.
This number of responsibilities and tasks means that product marketers need to be highly comfortable with multitasking and collaborating with all kinds of people. This particular role requires great rapport with various teams – even more so than every other role on this list.
Product marketing will increase the effectiveness of the sales team of a company when converting members of the audience into customers. Some of the responsibilities of this role include creating and keeping tabs on sales playbooks, presentations, and sales collateral, running sales training, conducting competitive intelligence, and executing product launches.
In case you have an interest in product marketing, you should study the success stories of companies such as Apple and Nike that have backed a single product. Read more on the way products are made and promoted. Communicate with product marketers in your company or look for people to talk to via your network. Ensure that your writing skills are kept sharp. In addition to this, if you cannot get preliminary experience in creating product marketing work, you can decide to create your personal materials on spec.
5. Content Marketing and Copywriting
Times are changing, and brands have started to create content just like publishers and media companies. The designers and writers hired to create this content are known as content marketers.
If you’re a skilled writer and marketer, you will still likely require a branded storytelling education before your career in content marketing can truly begin. Marketers will be able to sharpen their skills with the help of books about storytelling and the mechanics involved.
It can be intuitive to tell a story, but when your role involves selling a product or something else, it’s quite easy to forget the fact that the story comes first. That’s why it’s important to study a powerful narrative and its elements. When watching TV or even listening to a podcast, you can take a moment to analyze the endpoint of the story. After doing this for a while, you will be able to apply this technique to your own work.
If you’re interested in content marketing, all you’ll need to do is write extensively. You will have to show hiring managers your passion and commitment when it comes to writing. This means that you’ll have to be versatile enough to write on different platforms like blog entries, video scripts, social media copy, flyers, brochures, investigative articles, etc.
A marketing degree will put you in good stead in case you’re applying for a content marketing role. However, your employability will exponentially increase if you have a creative writing or literature degree. After all, it is important to be able to distinguish a good story while in this role.
6. PR/Communications
Just like a lot of other roles that are on this list, a marketer with a focus on corporate communications or public relations will work very closely with event marketers, content marketers, and social media marketers. Public relations representatives are usually tasked with the promotion of content for companies that have been created by marketers and the company/brand as a whole. They’re also usually expected to assume a role that has an extensive professional network so as to effectively conduct their jobs.
As a communications professional, you will most likely have to draft lots of press releases. You will also have to build relationships with industry workers who might find that the updates of your company are actually newsworthy.
While working in public relations, you will likely be communicating with your phone or during corporate events with stakeholders, guest speakers, communications professionals, and journalists. You will need to develop the ability to downplay some aspects of the history of your company and also get people excited about some other aspects.
If you have writing ability, you might decide to ghostwrite op-eds for the executives of your company and attempt to put them in publications of repute. To get a role in public relations, create a portfolio of your work by engaging in a small-scale promotional work (e.g., a local campaign or a friend’s side business). In addition to this, ensure that you provide the depth and breadth of your abilities. Make a promotional copy, make use of your network in inspiring ways to gain popularity and conduct tests on your speechwriting skills.
