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MARKETING

Marketing is a great career choice. Take it from me, your average marketer.

I have learned so much and have enjoyed every minute of it. Not only are there many different areas of marketing to get into, but the number of opportunities and career paths you can have is unmatched by other departments.

I highly recommend anyone thinking about starting a career in marketing to jump in and do. I promise you won't regret it.

But how can you land your first role in marketing? This post aims to give you some quick tips to help you begin your career in marketing.

Tip #1 - Decide What Kind of Marketing Role You Want

Like I said above, there are plenty of types of roles in marketing you can choose from. Each is very unique but all share similarities and skill sets as well. A good start is to decide what you're interested in. Here are 4 common types of marketing you'll see in many organizations:

Product Marketing

Product marketing is a good choice for those who are interested in the technical side of a product or solution and will spend a lot of time as a liaison between the whole marketing team and product management.

You'll be digging in and learning about the company's target audiences, researching the wants and needs of said audiences, and researching the industry as a whole. If you're passionate about how products are created and talked about, product marketing might be a good fit.

A career trajectory in product marketing could look like this: Marketing Coordinator --> Associate Product Marketing Manager --> Product Marketing Manager --> Senior Product Marketing Manager --> Director of Product Marketing --> VP of Product Marketing --> CMO

Email Marketing

Although email marketing has been around since the beginning of the internet and "e-mail" it's still a very important tactic in marketing. A job in email marketing means a lot of time spent in tools like Marketo or Hubspot and will spend their days building email campaigns, focusing on open rates, click-through rates, and subscriber numbers. And running A/B tests and other experiments to try to boost performance of emails.

Email Marketers often report into the head of Marketing Operations and help multiple teams across an organization send out invites, announcements, and content to mailable databases.

If you like to write, edit, and dig into analytics and best practices (that constantly change as the world changes) to use for optimizing campaigns, email marketing could be a good career for you.

A career trajectory in email marketing could look like this: Email Marketing Coordinator (or marketing operations coordinator) --> Email Marketing Manager --> Senior Email Marketing Manager --> Director of Email Marketing (or Director of Marketing Operations) --> VP of Marketing Operations --> CMO

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing, in my opinion, is a GREAT place to start a marketing career. Maybe I'm biased because that's where I started and it set me up for continued success (now I'm a Digital Marketing Manager). Keep in mind, Now,  running corporate social media accounts is much different than running personal accounts that you share with your friends and family.

A social media marketer posts daily on behalf of a company, oftentimes following the brand style guide. Although it may seem like this role is mainly just writing social posts, there's a lot more to it. If the company has high engagement and an active social community, you'll have to respond to comments and questions in real-time, work with creative teams to craft social media specific graphics and images, work in tandem with other teams across the company to support campaigns on the social channels, and analyze post and audience data for planning and strategizing to increase audience size, engagements, and brand awareness.

If you're interested in pursuing social media marketing as a career, it doesn't hurt to develop your own personal and industry-specific social presence. Not only do you learn the skills needed to run a business-focused social media account, but you also can become a thought-leader and learn the nuances of social media.

A career trajectory in email marketing could look like this:

Social Media Coordinator --> Social Media Specialist (more data-focused) --> Social Media Manager --> Senior Social Media Manager --> Head of Social Media

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing focuses on Internet and online-based digital technologies such as computers, mobile phones,  and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Think Google Ads, website marketing and SEO, and any other paid online initiative (sometimes companies will also have social media fall under digital marketing or demand generation).

If you're interested in paid advertising, Google Search and Display, and websites, digital marketing could be a good option for you. You'll need a combination of creativity and analysis and the are interested in managing budgets and learning the nuances of ad spend and ROI.

I currently am a digital marketing manager and am enjoying it a lot. It's not only a role where I can use my copywriting skills, but also project management and design chops are needed. Knowing how Google Ads work is an invaluable skill in marketing. It doesn't hurt to make it your career.