Have you ever considered pursuing a career in marketing? Or are you looking for some reasons to finally take the plunge? This article is your one stop shop for all that and more!
First things first. Marketing is a vast concept. Everybody has a different perspective on what marketing is. For some, it is about social media. For others, it is about data and insights. But more or less, it is about conversation and persuasion.
Simple acts like promoting the uniqueness of a PlayStation to your parents so they buy it for you, is marketing. Painting a picture of luxurious cooking so your brother makes that one dish you’ve been craving for is marketing.
The truth is that you cannot escape marketing. No matter where you are in your life – you are being marketed something or the other. And in other cases, you are the marketer yourself. Be it your job or anything else, you have to market a product or service for it to sustain. And sometimes, that product or service might just be yourself!
A brand exists in the economy as a result of good marketing practices.Throughout this article, we have a friend named Neha Arora with us, who is the Head of Marketing and Insights – Free Courses Portfolio at upGrad. We had an engaging conversation with Neha to understand an expert’s perspective on the subject.
Let’s start with the basics: What is Marketing?
Google says, “Marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.”
In the words of Neha, “Marketing is all about ‘conversations’. It talks about the expression of ideas and telling people about your product/service. Marketing exists where a product/service exists.”
Who is a Marketer?
A Marketer is someone who builds a convincing story, creates value for the product, and connects with their consumer. Google puts it as simply as, “a person or company that advertises or promotes something.”
5 Reasons Why You Should Pursue A Career In Marketing
According to Neha, there are many reasons why a person should pursue a career in marketing. Some of them include knowing your customer and the scope of marketing with respect to its specialisations. Let’s look at them one by one:
- Marketing helps you know your consumer: You will always have a consumer, be it any job front/function. Marketing helps you build a relationship with your customer, communicate with them, and know them better. It helps you understand the psychology and the thinking process of the person in front of you. Today, it is one of the skills that pay for life and teaches young minds to perform better at work and explore more.
Most of us want to interact with different people to build and grow our network. Marketing is one career field which helps us network with different brand collaborators and artists. Not only does it help you understand your consumer, it also helps you understand the audience at large, who may or may not be potential consumers..
For example, if someone is not interested in a product/service, marketing may help identify the reasons behind their dislike or other parameters to build a better strategy for an organisation/venture. The ability to know or understand a person is one of the most valuable skills in a person today.
Studying human psychology is the same as knowing your consumer when it comes to marketing. This is, in a way, understanding how the mind works and what appeals to a person. Interesting, isn’t it? - It is a dynamic career : Marketing is constantly evolving . There are many ways to connect with people and innovate along the way. Marketing is a great opportunity, as Neha says, for young people to experiment. It is an exciting platform for creative minds and is, certainly, not traditional anymore.
As is also mentioned in the book Quantum Marketing, we are now living in the Fifth Paradigm of Marketing, where people are moving faster than ever. Marketing is irreversible and everything is now anew. Being part of such a revolution is rewarding and helps you grow. As a marketing professional, you understand new trends, behaviours, researches, and of course, the new fields within marketing where people can do well.
It is the best way to grow and learn different concepts about the human mind, how people respond, and of course, marketing techniques. - Access to new products/services: There are tons of new products/services that never existed before. Which is why, it makes it all the more interesting and engaging to be a part of the marketing spectrum in this age.
From PlayStations to Vacuum Cleaners, everything is evolving. Marketing a product requires a creative thought process, which comes from knowing technology and the newly arising products and services. This is the most creative, thought-provoking and exciting department to work in, if you’re interested in the evolution of new products and services, and new technology! To play with new things and to study them better, marketing gives you all the chances in the world! - Specialisations in Marketing: Marketing offers a wide range of specialisations today. Again, there are numerous opportunities for young minds to explore and build their careers in this field. Varied forms of practices and methodologies now help the youth form an exciting trajectory for their career path and make an informed decision. With all the specialisations available in this field, there is a lot of freedom to experiment and perform new functions.
We will talk further in this article, about the different specialisations and field areas of Marketing. From social media marketing to event marketing, everything is changing and everything is exciting. There is so much to explore! - User-generated content through Marketing: In this age, there is a lot of user-generated content. We are not in the earlier times anymore where communication used to only be one way or like a monologue. Communication now includes dialogue and people are coming forward and expressing themselves daily. With this new change, marketing brings in a lot of scope for young minds to explore and know themselves better, along with knowing their audience better. This also opens new avenues for marketing a product or service, which can be equally exciting and challenging.
A Brief Introduction to the Diverse Fields of Marketing
Since marketing is so vast, there are numerous fields you can take up and become a Marketer. Here is a look at some of them:
- Social Media Marketing: Social media today is huge. It can drive revolutions and is a means to conduct virtual protests, among many other things. Many people take to social media whenever there’s a crisis and wish for their voices to be heard. Social Media Marketing is vital to a brand’s reputation because it reaches out mainly to the younger generation which is an important audience demographic..
There’s usually a huge social media team when it comes to big companies. A social media marketer posts content informed by the company’s brand guide. They’re engaging with a brand’s audience in real time, preparing analysis of engagement data, planning future campaigns and approaches based on that analysis, and collaborating with other marketers to determine how a social strategy can support a brand’s other work.
But it is not just big companies that employ social media marketers. Many small businesses are increasingly depending on social media platforms to market their products/services. Sometimes they use it as an exclusive way of marketing, too!
A good thing to do for a Social Media Marketer would be to build an online presence for themselves and learn the techniques behind what seems an art today.
- Email Marketing: Emails have a huge reach. Some companies only rely on email marketing for the generation of revenue, if they have ways to generate online purchases. Email Marketing consists of writing the copy for emails, designing it, knowing how to widen its reach, and tracking its performance.
One great way to learn Email Marketing would be to subscribe to email newsletters of big brands (if you can keep up with their regular offer and discount emails). Evaluating their subject line, preview text, the time they send out the email, content, and other marketing metrics that can really help you gauge a plan for your email newsletter.
Already interested? How about starting your personal email newsletter?
Platforms like Mailchimp are on their way to becoming the new blogging channels. You can start a regular correspondence with subscribers for free, learning the ropes on each platform as you go. This way, you can gain experience on Email Marketing before you apply for a job.
- Copywriting: Yes, it’s just like it sounds. Writing copy. This might sound like a simple and easy task to do, but copywriting makes and shapes all the content, and what matters the most for a brand is content. Social media creatives, email newsletters, blog posts, website updates, team pages, purchase windows – everything consists of or is a platform where the copy is the number one thing that is needed.
One great way to learn efficient copywriting is to master the art of storytelling. Great storytellers have a way with words and know how to put their ideas to paper (or well, digital screens!)
Copywriting in itself is a promising job prospect and there are many companies who are always on the lookout for such talent. You must have a portfolio of all your written work, to be eligible for copywriting jobs like writing video scripts, blog posts, social media copies, website updates, etc.
- Brand Marketing: Brand Management is mostly, if not all, about creativity. It is the art of establishingbrand identity and letting the product or service speak for itself. “You can think of brand management as the complete manifestation of the company in the marketplace. It has one voice, tone, look, and feel”, says Henry Bruce, former VP of Marketing at Contently.”
Just like every other aspect of marketing, the idea of brand marketing stems fromtelling the story of your brand.
As a bright job prospect, a Brand Manager compiles the good and bad aspects of a product/service, puts together the identity of the brand, and helps the it develop a voice of its own. - Product Marketing: Product marketing is a strategic marketing function that bridges the gap between product management and marketing communications. The primary role of a product marketing manager is to define the target markets and value propositions. Other critical responsibilities include positioning and sales enablement. A Product Marketing Manager is considered to have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to managing a product/service.
What does product marketing do? The 2020 State of Product Marketing report by ‘Product Marketing Alliance’, revealed that only 5% of product marketers are 100% sure that the role of product marketing is fully understood. So, let’s try and clear this up. Done right, in a nutshell, product marketing:
- Represents the voice of the customer – before, during and after launch,
- Clearly articulates a product’s value in a way that resonates with the market, and
- Drives product adoption and advocacy.
“It’s responsible for the customer journey and what message is presented at each part of the journey.” – Aaron Brennan, Director of Product Marketing at airSlate
- Event Marketing: Everybody loves entertainment and events. The job of an Event Marketing Manager is indeed an interesting one. Event marketing is the experiential marketing of a brand, service, or product through memorable experiences or promotional events. It typically involves direct interaction with a brand’s representatives.
Event Marketing should not be confused with Event Management, which is a process of organizing, promoting and conducting events. - Search Engine Optimisation/Search Engine Marketing: Digital Marketing quite widely depends on SEO. The biggest search engine we know of today is Google. According to Mailchimp’s blog, “SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better”.
There are many courses available on Udemy which explain Search Engine Optimisation in a very simple and easy to understand manner. This is one of the courses that we recommend for learning SEO.
There are many other diverse areas where you can pursue Marketing as a career, such as Public Relations/Communications, Ads Marketing, Performance Marketing, Growth Marketing, etc.
Neha’s Tips to start out as a Marketer
- “Research, research, research!”: Whether it’s about knowing your customer, your brand ambassador, or somebody else in power, researching well before starting out on the rest of the activities is important.
- The power of Networking: For anybody who is starting out, networking is the key to growth. It is one of the most sought-after skills in the 21st century. According to Forbes, networking is important for the following reasons:
- It is an avenue to exchange ideas
- It makes you noticeable
- It’s an avenue for newer opportunities
- Helps in reassessing your qualifications
- Improves your creative intellect
- Is an extra resource library
- Support from high profiles individuals
- Growth in status
- Growth in self-confidence
- Develop long-lasting relationships
- Importance of internships: Neha also highlights the importance of internships and calls them your ‘guru’ for commencing a Marketing career.
So, now that you know all there is, will you choose Marketing as your career field? Let us know in the comments below!
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