So you’d like to begin or deepen a career in marketing. Well, the good news is that the marketing industry is growing—and modern marketers can specialize in a wide variety of roles based on their unique skill sets.
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As the industry changes, so does the make-up of each company’s marketing team, and you might be uncertain which direction you want to go. To help you decide what type of role you’re best suited for, I’ve outlined nine common positions within marketing, what folks in those positions do, and what you can do if you want to start down that path. Ive worked in a few different kinds of marketing myself, including in social media and content marketing, and turned to other marketers, including some of my former colleagues at Contently, to learn more about their roles.
Keep an open mind as you decide which area of expertise you’d like to pursue, as many overlap with several others and draw on similar skills and qualities.
Marketing is often thought of as a single job or skillset, but in reality it encompasses a vast range of specialties and career options From market research to branding to digital campaigns, there are many diverse fields within the broader marketing profession Understanding these different disciplines can help you find your ideal role in this dynamic, fast-paced industry.
In this comprehensive guide I will outline the major marketing categories and key focus areas to consider as you look to join this vibrant field. Whether you are a student exploring degree options a young professional considering specializations, or an experienced marketer looking to broaden your skillset, learning about the varied career paths can unlock new possibilities.
Core Marketing Specialties
Here are some of the most common and in-demand spheres within the marketing field:
Market Research This role focuses on understanding consumers through surveys focus groups interviews and data analysis. Market researchers identify trends, sentiments, habits and needs to guide marketing strategies. They often have backgrounds in statistics.
Content Marketing: Content marketers create written, graphic, video and audio content to attract and engage consumers. They focus on storytelling and education rather than overt sales pitches. Skills in communications and media are essential for this role.
Social Media Marketing: As the name suggests, social media specialists get a company’s brand and content in front of audiences on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and more. This role requires creativity, digital savvy and communication skills.
SEO/SEM: Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) focus on improving visibility and search rankings to drive website traffic. Technical skills like keyword research, link-building and analytics are key for SEO/SEM.
Email/CRM: Professionals in this niche design, build and analyze email marketing campaigns and customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives. Expertise in data, analytics and campaign management software is vital.
Mobile Marketing: With consumers increasingly connected on mobile devices, mobile marketing focuses on ads, apps, messaging, personalization and other tactics tailored for smartphones and tablets. Analytical and technical competencies are essential here.
Marketing Roles By Function
Beyond specialties, there are also general marketing career paths based on functional areas within organizations and agencies:
Brand Management: Brand managers act as the voice of a brand to build strong emotional connections with consumers. Key skills include creative thinking, project management and communication.
Product Marketing: Product marketers highlight features and value propositions of company offerings through positioning, messaging and launches. A business sense and technical aptitude are useful in this role.
Marketing Analytics: Analytics evaluates data to identify opportunities and quantify performance. Marketing analysts should be proficient in statistics, segmentation and reporting.
Campaign Management: Campaign managers oversee the strategy, creation, execution and measurement of marketing campaigns across channels. Strong project management and organizational abilities are vital here.
Account Management: Account managers serve as the primary liaison between the marketing team and clients. Communication skills and business acumen are essential for account managers.
Marketing Operations: Marketing ops focuses on processes, technology and infrastructure to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Analytical skills and IT/systems knowledge are advantageous in this role.
Marketing Career Paths By Industry
Beyond specific functions, marketing roles also vary significantly across industries and settings:
Consumer Packaged Goods
Marketers in the packaged goods space focus on product management, trade marketing, brand management and shopper marketing for food, beverage, personal care and home care brands.
Retail
Retail marketing spans areas like omni-channel campaign management, loyalty programs, personalized promotions and in-store experience enhancement for retailers.
Financial Services
Professionals promote credit cards, loans, investment products and insurance through areas like digital marketing, customer acquisition and retention programs.
Technology
Tech marketing involves product launches, technical storytelling, conferences, digital campaigns, PR and influencer engagement for software and hardware companies.
Healthcare
Healthcare marketers need specialized expertise to promote pharmaceuticals, medical devices, hospitals and insurance legally and ethically to professionals and consumers.
Non-Profit
Non-profit marketers drum up support through areas like donor engagement and fundraising campaigns with sensitivity to the organization’s social mission.
Tourism & Hospitality
Travel and hospitality marketers promote destinations, hotels, airlines, cruises, resorts and related services through creative brand-building and experiential tactics.
Sports & Entertainment
Marketers use endorsements, events, activations and digital engagement to promote teams, leagues, movies, shows, music and celebrities.
As you can see, marketing covers an immense landscape of focus areas and career trajectories across virtually every industry. Keep an open mind, and you are bound to find an area that aligns with your interests and aspirations.
Navigating Your Marketing Career Journey
Hopefully this overview provides a helpful high-level introduction to the diversity within the marketing profession. Here are some tips as you explore roles and plan your career path:
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Gain broad experience first to determine what you enjoy before specializing.
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Be open to lateral moves into new niches to broaden your skillset.
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Consider certificates or coursework to build expertise for a specific role.
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Join marketing associations and communities to build your network.
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Stay on top of marketing innovations and trends shaping the industry.
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Develop both your hard skills and soft skills over time.
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Balance your passions, interests and strengths to find the right fit.
While the array of options may seem daunting at first, embracing the variety can unlock more possibilities over the course of your career. An agile mindset and willingness to learn will serve you well in the dynamic world of marketing.
Content Marketing and Copywriting
Brands are beginning to create content the way publishers or media companies would, and the writers and designers they hire to create all this content are called content marketers. Simple enough, right?
Jordan Teicher, a content marketer and the editor-in-chief at Contently, says the ability to tell a story is paramount to the job. “Most [consumers] hate the hard sell,” he explains. “Narrative entertains and challenges consumers in a creative way.” In recent years, marketers who write blog posts, internal documents, e-books, Powerpoint decks, op-eds, speeches, and more have begun to centralize their efforts around the concept of storytelling.
If you’re a marketer and skilled writer, you may still need an education in branded storytelling before your content marketing career takes off. And that’s perfectly normal. “Marketers can sharpen their skills by reading books about the mechanics of storytelling. Telling a story may seem intuitive, but when your job is ultimately to sell something, its easy to forget” that the story must come first, Teicher says. “So spend time studying the elements of a powerful narrative. Then, when youre watching TV or listening to your go-to podcast, step back and analyze what the story is trying to accomplish. After some practice, youll start to do the same with your own work.”
To get into content marketing, all you really have to do is write. A lot. You need to prove to hiring managers that you are passionate about the written word, which means you’ll need to flex your muscles writing social media copy, video scripts, blog entries, investigative articles, zines, brochures, flyers, or other materials. A marketing degree can look appropriate if you’re applying to a content marketing job, but believe it or not, you’ll be even more attractive as a candidate with a literature or creative writing degree. After all, you need to know a good story.
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Product marketers often act as an important liaison between the marketing team and colleagues in product management, engineering, sales, account management, customer service, and more. They spend a lot of time learning about their target audience, understanding what they want and need, and “translating” information about customer experience to those tasked with creating and promoting a company’s offerings.
This set of responsibilities means product marketers ought to have a high comfort level for multitasking and collaborating with different kinds of people. They’re the professionals on our list who most desperately need to develop a rapport with other teams.
As Bruce puts it, “product marketing increases the effectiveness of a company’s sales team to convert interested audience members into customers. Responsibilities include creating and maintaining sales playbooks and tools, sales collateral, and presentations; [running] sales trainings; executing all product launches; [and] conducting competitive/market intelligence and win/loss analysis.”
If you’re interested in product marketing, study the corporate success stories of brands that have rallied behind a single eye-catching product: the Apples, Nikes, and Glossiers of the world. Read about how products are created and promoted. Talk to product marketers at your own company or find folks to reach out to through your network. Make sure you’re keeping your writing skills sharp. And if you can’t find preliminary experience in developing product marketing work for brands, create your own materials on spec.
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Social Media Marketing
When a brand makes an off-color joke on a social media platform, it’s common for people watching to attribute this misstep to “the intern running the Twitter account.” But no responsible company would hand over the keys to a brand’s Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feeds to an inexperienced intern. In fact, the larger the brand, the larger its social media team likely is, with more senior-level marketers overseeing its social strategy.
I’ve worked in social media strategy for brands including Walmart, Amazon Prime Video, and Lionsgate Films, and I’ve learned from each experience that social media marketers are often expected to think of themselves as editorial professionals first, brand strategists second. Even if a tweet is on brand, it’s useless to everyone if it’s written in a boring (or worse, offensive!) way.
A social media marketer posts content informed by a brand’s style guide, but it’s important to note that they aren’t simply writing copy all day. 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. And they’ll often have ambitious KPIs (key performance indicators) to reach for.
If you’re interested in working as a social media marketer, the first thing you can do is develop a robust professional online presence for yourself. You can also try to work on a project basis for brands or small businesses and build a portfolio of social copy and multimedia elements. If that’s not an option, you can always develop a sample social media strategy for a brand you admire, sort of like a prospective TV writer putting together a spec script.
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Because of social media algorithms, only a small portion of an account’s audience will see their social media content. So companies look for additional ways to reach the majority of their target audience. Email is still a precious commodity in the marketing industry because a newsletter’s subscriber base opts in to a brand’s messaging. It’s a naturally more captive and curious audience, and email marketers who know how to leverage the opportunity to connect with users in their inboxes can do very well for themselves.
To work in email marketing is to toe the line between data analysis and editorial strategy. You’re often curating blog posts and links to include in newsletters or promotions for subscribers; using an email service provider to build and launch campaigns; keeping an eye on open rates, click through rates, and subscriber numbers; and running A/B tests and other experiments to try to boost performance.
If you’re interested in email marketing, independent email publications like TheSkimm are great examples to study, but you can also subscribe to newsletters from publications, like this one from The New York Times Cooking, and brands, like this one from General Electric.
You can also get some experience by starting your own personal newsletter. Platforms like Substack and Mailchimp have taken off with writers, almost as if the email newsletter is on its way to becoming the new blog. You can start a regular correspondence with subscribers for free, learning the ropes on each platform as you go. This way, when you apply to an email marketing job, you’ll already have a portfolio of work.
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A brand manager oversees every aspect of communication, both internal and external, and brings a company or product line’s brand persona to life. A brand persona is a collection of messaging and customer experiences, and it carries a company’s narrative (the sort of thing you saw on the “About” page 10 years ago) across all platforms. “You can think of brand management as the complete manifestation of the company in the marketplace,” says Henry Bruce, former VP of Marketing at Contently. “It has one voice, tone, look, and feel.” A brand manager is responsible for maintaining all those aspects of a brand persona at once.
In larger companies, a brand manager will probably work on an individual brand or product line within the organization—like this brand manager at Staples who works specifically on the company’s TRU RED line—but the same ideas apply.
Working in brand management is partly a creative job, but it’s also part project management. Adrienne Todd, communication manager at Celonis, a process mining company, says brand management requires organizational skills and expertise in motivating and incentivizing your coworkers in different departments. “Its a fact of marketing that no one marketer can (or should) do something entirely on their own,” she explains. “You have to coordinate with designers, copywriters, digital marketing, marketing operations, and more, and that coordination doesnt happen on its own, nor does it come naturally to people.”
Breaking into brand management is near impossible without any marketing experience, but if you’re already a marketer looking to move up, volunteer for corporate strategy projects at your office. When you’re interviewing for a brand manager position, you’ll want to be able to point to multiple scenarios in which you put out a fire for a company, reworked a brand’s messaging to appease a specific audience, or developed a project with multiple team members.
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What Is Marketing In 3 Minutes | Marketing For Beginners
What are the different career fields in marketing?
There are many different career fields within these specializations that center on certain responsibilities within marketing, like writing, editing, project management or research.
What are the different types of marketing?
There are 12 different fields within marketing you may consider pursuing. They are: 1. Content marketing Content marketing is a type of marketing strategy in which you attract and retain audiences and customers by sharing content like podcasts, articles and videos.
What are the different types of Marketing specializations?
Here are the common types of marketing specializations you can pursue: 1. Digital marketing Digital marketing involves using a wide variety of online outlets and channels to increase a company’s brand awareness, reach additional potential customers and convert more individuals to sales leads.
How do I choose a marketing field?
These are some helpful tips for choosing a marketing field: Interests and passion: Consider your interests and passions when choosing a marketing field. For example, if you’re passionate about video editing and cameras, choosing to focus on video marketing may be right for you.
