Marketing Career Guide

How to launch a successful Marketing career - get the right training & industry credentials

Find out what a Marketing career entails by browsing the below guide. Choose your focus area and the professional courses that suit your profile.

Is Marketing your true calling? If you're creative, persuasive and passionate about competition in the marketplace, you might be just the right candidate for a job in Marketing. You just need to see through the eyes of the customer and use your enthusiasm to convey information about the product that sells and meets customers' expectations. As a Marketing professional, you represent more than a product or a service, you grow ideas, you build bridges between audiences, you inspire people.

Jump to the Marketing branch that interests you most:

Modes of presenting your product or service and the way you approach your target group are what often defines the angle of the marketing campaign. The environments where you can reach new customers for your product are increasingly dominated by the online platforms. It is often the case that many Marketing typologies have become subgenres of digital or online marketing. However, the general guidelines for conducting direct marketing remain a reference point across all channels, both online and offline.

Browse the our list of Marketing courses - FindCourses has a huge range from Open, Online, Short and In-House.

This guide looks at traditional, direct marketing and digital marketing subareas. It then focuses on how social media and content marketing with high SEO value can strengthen your online Marketing and advertising campaigns. Insight into developing specialised marketing skills is featured across the guide, showing you what potential employers look for in a competitive candidate. Find inspiration in the topics below and share your Marketing experience with your peers, using the comment section below.

Direct Marketing

By definition, direct marketing entails the most straight-forward ways to reach out to potential customers. Through field sales, telemarketing, and snail-mail campaigns, direct marketing aims at providing the target audience with the essential and most compelling information about the marketed product that, ideally, converts into sales. The classic means of direct marketing are connected to print advertising, addressed messages with immediate impact on the potential buyer.

Key professional roles in designing direct marketing campaigns are: Market Analyst, Audience Research Specialist, Print Media Specialist, Print Designer and Print Production Specialist. Responsibilities connected to a direct marketing position include:

• Conducting audience research studies that helps you identify and better address your target group
• Consolidating data about how your product is currently perceived and how direct marketing can help it stand out in the market
• Designing marketing materials that can easily reach your target group and convey your message in an effective manner
• Decide on the optimal timing of your campaign, considering demographic data and success rate of previous campaigns
• Meeting customers' expectation and collecting feedback about improving the product you market, in order to boost the brand it represents

Skills that help you stand out if you consider a career in Direct Marketing - also transferrable to other Marketing environments and target groups:

• Strong analytical skills - working with demographic data and being able to extract the most relevant details about your target audience and present your outcomes
• Statistical knowledge and operating skills with statistical data on a dedicated software - allowing you to interpret data and present the goals and the outcomes of your direct marketing campaigns
• Communication and persuasion skills - that you can apply directly into the direct marketing message, either on the phone as a telemarketer, in your print designs and in the direct email campaigns
• Creative thinking - being original with your content and making a lasting impression on the customer, who will then use your product/service based on the arguments you put forth in your direct marketing campaign

Sales professionals play an essential role in reaching out to the customers, establishing contact with the audience and expressing the key marketing message in a direct and persuasive manner. A sales profession that connects directly with potential customers and plays a key role in developing a long-term relation with the buyer, establishing a contact that then converts into business for the maketer.

Find Sales training courses with providers from the UK!

Digital Marketing

Today the online environment provides the perfect channel for instant and optimised distribution of marketing content. However, the challenges of reaching out to the right audience, in a dense, changing and competitive environment persist. Innovation is at home in the fast developing online environment, and this is where you as a digital marketing professional can make your ideas grow, by being creative and keeping the pace with the online trends. Internet marketing can give your product the right exposure, build a brand and a general online presence that the audience can refer to, review and reach out to constantly.

Key roles in the digital marketing profession include: Digital Campaign Manager, Online Marketing Consultant, Ecommerce specialist, Mobile Marketing specialists, Web design & User Experience experts. Part of their tasks in meeting digital marketing goals can include:

• Newsletter and targeted email campaigns: design, content development and audience research.
• Online advertising: organising paid search engine campaigns, designing hosted adverts and banners.
• SEO and SEM strategy development: launching a content development strategy that is optimised for the search engines and ensures a competitive presence in the online.
• Web Content Development: generating high-quality, engaging web content that meets the expectations of your target audience.
• User experience (UX) optimisation - improving your online platform to give your user the best understanding of your product or service.
• Ecommerce: launching a friendly interface and having the right information architecture for users to buy, compare and review your products online.
• Adapting online platforms to mobile technologies and getting the best out of your advertising on mobile devices.

Integrating direct and digital marketing campaigns can be handled in house, by specialised marketing departments or through external agencies or consultants, that can carry out all-channel marketing for the entire brand. External consultants that specialise in marketing can help a company build an online presence and consolidate their brand with targeted recommendations and expert insight into the latest online trends.

Skills that you can be a valuable addition to your CV if you plan to specialise in digital marketing include:

• Copywriting skills - developing an engaging style of writing, that suits the marketing channel and speaks the language of your audience.
• Web design skills - an understanding of the most common CMS and how they are best tailored for Marketing purposes.
• Experience with online analytical tools such as Google Analytics, Web Trends etc.
• Data management knowledge and integration skills across platforms - optimising conversion rate for both direct and digital campaigns
• Basic economics knowledge and financial skills - being able to forecast the evolution of your product on the market, with and without online campaigning, to calculate revenue, conversion rate and budgets

Among the most used tools in digital marketing are already considered stand-alone marketing fields, which can become unique and exclusive channels for the marketer. There's currently a growing interest in search engine marketing and search engine optimisation, social media campaigning and effective online advertising, which have been proven successful across all industries. In our section below you can read more about how you can specialise in digital marketing and choose the most profitable channel for your product.

Find a course in Digital Marketing today! 

SEO and SEM

Driving your audience to your product by aiming up high - in the list of search results. Search Engine Marketing have been the fastest growing branches of marketing over the past decade, and the preferred tools of brands who look for the right exposure on the web, tailored to what audiences actually look for. High conversion from SEO boils down to making a product the direct answer to what people look for in Google or other engines.

How is it done? It's never a universal recipe, it's being on top of the latest online trends, mapping search terms and decrypting search algorhythms. Above all, it means understanding the audience, meeting customers expectations already in their 'search phase' and delivering the most reliable information, on an accessible platform.

Headhunted speacialists in SEO and SEM marketing are professionals with dedicated portfolio in search engine marketing, who know what to expect in terms of search engine algorhythm developments and online best practice. Among there, there are SEO experts, copywriters, graphic designers, information architecture and UX designers who:

• Analyse and redesign the content structure, so that it frames the product/service in the right way
• Design SE optimised platforms and user-responsive designs that are friendly with the audience and the search engine
• Advise on the type of content that can drive traffic to your site and convert into business
• Convey information reliability and product quality in a way that's readable by the audience and accessible by search bots
• Conduct keyword research around your product and translate the identified trends into a 'market demand' analysis, which then later builds the basis for your information architecture
• Boost page rank authority to link building and endorsments by high quality online sources
• Consolidate the brand and provide means of interaction, between business and customers

SEO skills that can deliver actual results in Marketing need constant refreshing - being on top of all trends, understanding the market from the point of view of the audience, adapting the unique selling points to the search engine. SEO expertise is developed through documentation work, online studies and usability tests conducted on a segment of the online audience, so that the ultimate SEO strategy is perfected at a larger scale.

• Read, process, react - find out what's current best practice in web content development, by following the latest updates released by Google, subscribe to specialised newsletters, set your alerts for the type of content you follow - typically your marketed product/service
• Organise a list of references and creditable sources that can help you compare successful campaigns, learn what works, what doesn't and how to respond to search algorhythm changes
• Get in touch with your existing target audience, find out their search patterns, habits, consider their use of language when they try to reach products/services in your area
• Optimise your online marketing platforms, making them accessible to the user - working together with user experience experts, web designers and developers, you can optimise the whole search experience: making people land on your site and keep them loyal to your platform, service and products
• Keep your content clear, engaging, focused on the product: avoid misleading information about it and follow the your potential customer's expectations, their wording, explore the semantic area connected to your product and adapt it to your target market

Social media marketing

Hone your social media marketing skills assisted by the experts in the field. Keep up with the changes in the online environment and the social media platforms and learn how to craft engaging social media campaigns. Depending on your industry profile and

Key job roles in social media marketing are: Campaign Manager, Online Community Manager, Market Analyst, social media strategist. Responsiblities connected to social media marketing include:

• Launching and maintaining social media channels to represent a brand, a campaign or a product
• Engaging with the audience by publishing relevant and informative content
• Collecting feedback, responding to queries and providing immediate customer service that can emphasise how trustworthy your brand is
• Establish a long term strategy, measurable goals and the evaluate the outcomes of your SM campaigns
• Integrate social media campaigns with the rest of your marketing campaigns, especially giving the right SEO boost
• Identifying your main social media community and using your strong ties to expand your network and get a broader one exposure - taking the word-of-mouth (WOM Marketing) approach via the social media channels

Being a social media marketing guru means using your channels regularly and strategically. Beyond the frequent posts, tweets, shoutouts, blog articles, you would ideally establish an online persona and speak about your brand in a way that's driven by the overarching business goals. Delivering marketing value through social media channels requires a keen eye for:

• What's trending - knowing how to make your content 'go viral' in your community and beyond
• Sharable content - attract new members in your community by generating high quality, snappy content that would branch out to more timelines and twitter feeds
• Innovation - going beyond the conventional, finding new topics that would stir the discussion around your product and make it more popular
• Influencing skills - being persuasive in a subtle, professional manner, and across various platforms; using various forms of content, image, text, video that are used consistently, yet not pressuring  your audience with repetitive content
• Originality - stand out from the crowd and integrate various channels into your mission as they evolve, and as your audience uses them; converting your interaction onto social media into real business value

Find Social Media Marketing courses - open courses, in house training, distance learning programmes

Advertising

As one of the most powerful marketing communication tools, advertising is used to persuade audiences in a direct or subtle way about buying the marketed products. Rules for good advertising are not universal, but there is consensus on certain types of approaches that could trigger immediate responses from the audience. Emotional triggers, familiar items, good story lines and snappy, engaging content that leave a lasting impression about a high quality product are some of the general campaigning guidelines for content producers. Originality is key in every advertising campaing, regardless of the medium or the platform of distribution.

Key job roles in advertising include: Content Editor, Copywriters, Print Production Specialist, Audio/Video Editor, Web Designer, who work together with professionals in the more general research functions of a marketing department You can choose your environment, preferred platforms and work materials, while selecting the optimal time to launch, calculating the outcome and revenue of your campaign and planning for the next one. Working in advertising entails:

• If you work in a specialised advertising or creative agency, you work with your clients' existing product to build the campaign: understanding who the target group is, what their expectation are, what the current reception of the product is on the market, how the competitors are better and finding what's unique about the product/service you market
• You present your sample content to the client: sample print layouts, video scripts, online banners, or AdWords campaign approach, and you get feedback from the client
• Present your advertising materials in front of a focus group and collect feedback from potential consumers/buyers, which can then be incorporated in a new and improved version of your ad
• Refine your ads and launch them, track the exposure and reaction to the product
• If you handle your advertising campaigns in house, you will most likely focus on the production part, based on your prior Marketing experience with the same product on existing channels - print, TV, web
• You shape the idea, the script or the design and move into the production part, where you can also be assisted by independent production agency who can collect and record the materials for your advertising campaign
• You record your campaign performance and calculate revenues during and after the campaign, and decide your next Marketing move

You can succeed in an Advertising career if you are ready to take the challenge of a competitive environment and meet the growing expectation of a diverse public, that is tech-savvy and exposed to multiple channels and advertising content. If you're planning your application for an advertising job, your key winning points are:

• Creative thinking - you are able to break the standards, innovate, collate ideas that make an impact on your audience and generate
• Originality - you are aware of what's trending, what audiences respond to and how your product has evolved, but you're able to craft new ideas without applying any pre-established templates
• Writing skills - writing content that's optimised to your channel and keeping your ideas focused, so that the message is internalised by your target audience just after mere exposure
• Visual editing skills - giving your content a shape, understanding graphics beyond the colour choice and shapes: seeing images and videos as carriers of ideas, working at the connotative level with your content to generate a unique, but clear understanding of your product on the market