Updated June 12, 2023
What are Marketing Career Paths?
Marketing is a word most uttered by people in the world of business. Still, their perception often only goes beyond designing a product, launching it, selling it, and getting consumer feedback. Not surprisingly, the terms people most frequently associated with the marketing career path roles are sales, branding, product promotion, market research, advertising, and public relations. And job openings related to such functions are published in newspapers, job sites, and social media.
Conventional marketing business careers jobs are expected to grow by 9% by 2024, which includes marketing, advertising, and promotion functions at the managerial level, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016-17 Occupational Outlook Handbook. However, there are various other marketing career paths that many people may have yet to hear about but offers an immense possibility for growth and advancement.
Marketing Career Paths
1. Marketing Career Path Communications
- Marketing communications is a multi-disciplinary activity that combines the core marketing functions in an organization connected with public relations, advertising, and brand promotion activities.
- Marketing Communications (Marcom) professionals require a range of skills considering the interdisciplinary nature of the job. The Marcom professional needs a marketing plan project, be involved in or coordinate the creation of logos, and promotional content on websites, and social media, organize trade shows, and corporate and consumer events, manage the marketing budget, evolve the style and presentation of emails and email campaigns, create press releases and hold press meets.
- The job of Marcom professionals is to reduce the time required for generating a sales lead to final product sales. Shortening the sales cycle means assisting the sales and channel partner in identifying, engaging, and delivering a customer. The effectiveness of Marcom depends on how effectively the communication process of the firm aligns with the goals of the firm. Understanding the customer’s buying process is critical for shortening the sales cycle.
- A buyer begins with problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, post-purchase evaluation, and feedback.
- The marketing career path is 100% result-oriented. It includes product market research, launching the product, sales, customer feedback, public relations, and crisis management.
- Marcom professionals can expect to earn much more than the median annual salary range of $61,290- 1,21,000 earned by other marketing professionals considering the multi-tasking involved in the job apart from usual traveling, interaction with clients or customers, and preparing marketing budgets.
2. Digital Marketing
- In simple terms, digital marketing career development involves promoting products and services on a digital or electronic platform. It includes websites, social media, emailing, blogging, television, radio channels, mobile applications, and hoardings.
- The industry can no longer ignore digital mediums as technology is an inseparable part of their lives. The digital space is becoming crowded, but content, cross-platform marketing career paths, mobile, data, and personalization will continue to dominate the trends for 2016. Content is more than words and images. Experts said that with the rapid growth in video streaming, content marketers need to readjust content definitions.
- The digital marketing professional has a challenging role in traditional media as much as his counterpart. Trends keep changing quicker in the electronic space, so one needs to be on the toes to keep up with the competition. Analysts said that early adopters of the digital medium are more likely to see better results than late starters.
- Mobile internet traffic is increasing so fast. Google has said this year that mobile overtook desktop traffic in 10 countries. Google released an algorithm update and is willing to accept two versions of the site but showing more affinity to mobile.
- Content in websites and blogs remains the King. Blogging and content will remain indispensable for brand positioning. In short, words will not be the only touch points for the brands.
- Hot jobs in digital marketing: Some of the most common job titles in digital marketing career development are – digital marketing manager, marketing manager, digital marketing specialist, marketing coordinator, SEO specialist, web developer, account executive, social media marketing manager, recruiter, digital marketing analyst, marketing specialist, content marketing manager, user experience manager, account manager, marketing director, content strategist, SEO manager, executive director, paid search specialist, social media specialist.
- The average annual salary ranges from $51000 for social media marketing to $102,000 for SEO-related jobs.
- Among the jobs listed above, the most in-demand job titles are digital marketing manager and marketing manager. Among the skills in this area that companies look for are – Social Media Marketing, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), Content Marketing, Google Analytics,and Digital Marketing.
- Data Analytics has evolved as a subset of digital marketing efforts, with some reports predicting a 60% increase in marketing analytics spending. The prediction is that for some industries, the growth would be 73% and will increase to almost 100% for large-cap B2C companies.
- Data analytics is complex due to the critical interpretation of data. It can attribute back to the brand’s marketing career path efforts. Analysts said it is not enough to know how to explore and use data. In 2016, companies should focus on creating a refined, almost personalized digital journey experienced on any device or touchpoint.
3. Social Media Marketing
- The social media landscape is now emerging as an effective platform for the industry, especially Business to Consumer (B2C). Ayaz Nanji wrote on Marketingprofs.com that the auto industry had witnessed the most active engagement by social media users.
- Quoting from the TrackMaven report, he said that CPG, entertainment, food, hospitality, insurance, restaurant, retail, and telco/cable verticals were the other sectors seeing rapid growth in social media engagement of the audience.
- This data proves that social media has become a part of the digital marketing career path and has a unique identity. Understanding design, content creation, hashtagging, video and image postings, and popular and trending topics will go a long way in utilizing the marketing, software, and design team to achieve the identified objectives. A social media manager need not be technical but keen to understand the nuances of the social media landscape and its possibilities.
- Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, and Google have inherent strengths and weaknesses in brand building and promotion. The results in digital marketing can only come through paid promotion. Therefore, the social media manager must select each platform and budget.
- Social media marketer needs to know the nuances of using appropriate images and videos that are not copyrighted to gain an edge over competitors. A recent survey of US-based advertising and marketing executives revealed that the public relations and communications department should handle social media postings in organizations. The survey revealed that 51% of the respondents voted for the communications department, while 28% chose the marketing career path team. About 5% felt the CEO should handle it, while 9% selected customer service. However, the rapid changes in technology, complexity, and diversity of markets have all made it possible for marketing communication as a separate function to evolve within organizations.
4. SEO Marketing
- Search Engine Optimizatio (SEO) is a term associated with increasing website traffic. It involves programming skills using keywords, tags, titles, descriptions of a page, loading time, and placement of features on a page.
- The importance of SEO in digital marketing jobs in a company can be gauged by the average double-digit growth in salaries for this category since 2012, according to a report from Conductor. The report said that starting salaries for SEO professionals have increased by 17% since 2012, with marketing managers/SEO managers seeing the biggest hike of 26% in pay.
- Among SEO-related roles, directors of the marketing career path have the highest average salary of $104,235, while SEO coordinators/associates have the lowest pay of $52,613.
- Even among experts, there are many myths regarding SEO, as Google continuously evolves its algorithm to meet the needs of web visitors seeking information. It concerns the importance of keywords, meta tags, inbound links, and page rank, among others. Google’s algorithm has evolved to detect such trickery adopted by SEO experts. The message is simple- ensure good quality content with relevant information, original images, or stock images. So the success lies not in tricking Google but in putting that much effort into creating quality, original content.
5. Content Marketing Manager
- Content marketing was perhaps unheard of until the internet and mobile became popular. One could think of advertorials- a cross between advertisements and editorial that was paid for but looked more editorial than an advertisement.
- The content marketing career path is possible through websites, blogging, and articles in newspapers and magazines. It need not necessarily be about the product, brand, or company. Still, it can be about new technology, issues related to the industry, and new research advances in the area of operation- for example, health, nutrition, sports, food, or any other industry.
- The content marketer should not indulge in hard selling but gently engage the consumer or client in learning more about the product and its advantages. WordPress and Tumblr are ideal for blogging so is Google’s blogger platform. The company can also utilize the in-house talent to write blogs on other websites related to the industry.
- Email marketing and SMS promotion are a part of the content marketing career path. Apart from text and images, infographics and video can be used effectively by content managers to bring new business and help in brand building. The clever use of timing, headlines, and words will ensure that the effort never ends up as spam or have a lower click-through rate (CTR).
- The efforts of the Content Marketing Career Path team include a plan that obviously should have the details to make money for the company and convince the management to undertake that exercise by making the funds available. They have to lay the facts on the table, supported by real numbers and meticulous research. They have to put the buying process (or customer acquisition) process in perspective and share the vision of what would happen after the campaign.
- The content manager should be able to write and edit articles apart from producing projects to expand the digital footprints, awareness, subscribers, and leads. It is a creative job that requires collaborating with internal content experts and clients to leverage industry knowledge.
- Drawn from journalism/communication backgrounds with good analytical and management skills. They must manage the editorial calendar and be good at Google, Facebook, and Linkedin analytics.
Conclusion
As visible from the new job opportunities in the marketing career path, they have a few things in common- it is challenging, multi-disciplinary, unique, and innovative, and it involves the use of technology, communication techniques, and creating relevant, good quality content. Several new jobs or functions generate from data, analytics, social media growth, video streaming, blogging, mobile internet, and apps.
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