Everybody has to start somewhere, what better place then to start at square one?
Marketing is...
Complicated.
From investopdia ( https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketing.asp ) marketing is:
"activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company."
And for someone who has not actually done marketing, this definition means a whole lot of nothing. There are countless definitions to what marketing really encompasses, but the best one I found was:
"Marketing is the process of getting potential clients or customers interested in your products and services. The keyword in this definition is "process"; marketing involves researching, promoting, selling, and distributing your products or services."
I feel this really hits the nail on the head for defining marketing. You can do so many different things, but at the end of the day everything you do in marketing is trying to get customers interested.
What are the different fields of Marketing?
Like I've mentioned and you have probably heard before, marketing is a very vast field. With
the definition listed above, it's all about getting people interested in the product or brand; so the question is "how do we do that"?
Well lets start out at the beginning. You or a company wants to make a new product for the market. The first thing to find out is, is there a demand for it? Do people even want what we are selling. And this leads to the first field Market Research.
Social Media Manager
Probably the job that sounds the most fun to high school and college kids... Someone has to maintain and put out content to stay relevant in this fast paced world. Managing Social media can have a variety of roles such as making sharable media, interacting with followers, damage control to dissatisfied customers and so much more!
It can be a fun job if social media is your thing, but the pay tends to be on the lower end of the scale. It takes time to develop a good portfolio to show employers your skills and in the that time the pay will be very minimal, even getting to the manager stage pay is typically $56,000 a year, which isn't bad but understand it will take time and a lot of grinding to get qualified.
*If this is something that interest you, invest in your social media accounts or make a new account promoting something (yes Meme accounts could work). having prior experience will make a great case for you in the future.
Market Research
Market Research is the process of collecting data from consumers and using that data to determine many factors. It can range from finding the demand (or how much a target audience wants the product), identifying the target audience (who should we be targeting) and other information to get a better picture for the company or brand to use when making decisions about the product.
The work of a Market Researcher is typically done through conducting surveys, focus groups, and product testing. It’s all about collecting data, figuring out what that data means, and then reporting the findings. Large companies may have their own research team, but often you work with an agency where a company will hire you to do the research.
There are many different jobs that can encompass "Market research" From Product Research, Media Analyst, Media Researcher, Traffic Manager, eCommerce Marketing Analyst, etc.
It might sound a bit boring on the surface, but if you find a niche you are good at it can be a really rewarding job that pays well.
SEO
SEO is a term being used more and more, and it stands for Search Engine Optimization. With the shift to business being done in the online world, new jobs have opened up to accommodate the changing business. SEO it's self are the tools that are used to make your website/product more visible to the online world. Search engines like Google have algorithms that decide what content will be listed and in what order in their search results. Being higher in search results means a higher likelihood of people coming to your website, because lets be honest... How many people actually go to the second page of Google search results to find something they are browsing for?
Bottom line- SEO is focused on the more technical side to promote their websites/products to the most people.
Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing is a vague term
as it surrounds a lot of different jobs and tasks. All things under the umbrella of Digital Marketing revolve around the online experience. Creating ads for websites, videos, social media. Designing websites and focusing on User Experience and User interface (UX and UI), SEO, Email marketing, etc.
There is a lot that can be called Digital Marketing, and it's a new exciting world that kids today know the skills or are better suited for when it comes time to finding a career.
Consumer Behavior
Along those same lines is the field of Consumer Behavior. This area has a bit more psychology and sociology mixed into it. Consumer Behavior is the field that studies how consumers make decisions about their wants and needs. It focuses on monitoring the consumer and the trends and changes through time.
While this field isn’t a job itself, it’s an important study that all marketers need to understand to better influence their decision making. If you wanted a job in this field, you would most likely take the research route that mainly deals with academia such as becoming a professor.
Advertising and Public Relations
The route most people think about when it comes to marketing. The creation of advertisements and dealing with the masses through public relations. Although Advertising, Marketing, and Communications (Public relations) are all intertwined with similar goals, these fields are big enough to be their own. The traditional marketing major will learn the other fields, while Public Relations and Advertisement tend to be their own fields of study.
Nevertheless, you can still do these things (and probably will) as a marketer. Advertisement is all the pieces that go out to consumers to convince them of something. These can range from spreading the word of a new product, to making an ad that is supposed to make the audience foster a good relationship with the company.
Public relations tends to cover the same goals but, on a lot more personal basis. Public relations can be releasing social media posts, events, talking to the press, or even getting the press to run a story about your business. The difference between Marketing, Advertisement, and Public relations tends to boil down into how you got the media out (Paid, earned, owned). It’s a bit much for a beginner but if you want to learn more a great we
You can think of these three fields as separate but similar (at least to everyone else)
Sales
Sales tends to get lumped into marketing, which can be a real pain on the job search “looking for marketers” but in actuality they want a salesperson. A salesperson usually interacts in what is called B2B (business to business) Which means the salesperson represents a business (Jim Halper from the office) and tries to sell their products to other companies (such as a school or place of work that needs paper). B2B is much larger than its counter part B2C (business to consumer), simply because everything that goes into making a product, all the ingredients and packaging, needs to be sourced from somewhere.
A note about sales is that it is not as scummy as people imagine. You’re not the used car salesmen trying to pull a fast one on people; because if you did that, people wont trust you and continue to buy from you. Instead, its on fostering relationships with other companies and working as the middle man to make both your company and the clients happy.
Brand Management
Brand management is the culmination of all the fields into a central role. At this point you are in control of the marketing of the product, while working with other fields. It can be creating a new product, or maintaining a new one, making sure it becomes or remains successful.
Conclusion
There is a lot of variety in the marketing field. These are just a few of the many roles you could do as a marketer, I haven’t even touched on some other ones such as digital marketing.
The biggest takeaway is that no marketing job is the same. Each job demands something different of you, and it is your job to figure out where you belong and what you are best at!
Good luck and stay tuned for more marketing posts!
-Cory Brodeur
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