5 Marketable Skills to Help You Land A Marketing Job

Marketing is big business. Every company invests in marketing to some degree, whether it’s traditional advertising, self-promotion, guerilla efforts, or simply maintaining a visible social media presence. While everyone needs marketers, it’s still a highly competitive field. More and more businesses have ditched advertising agencies of record and taken their marketing in-house. While that certainly creates opportunities, these businesses aren’t usually looking to hire a team or division. They want one person who can handle everything they need done. This means that if you’re trying to break into a marketing career, you not only have to understand all the fundamentals of marketing and advertising but stand out in a crowded field of applicants. Here are some key skills that will make it possible for you to do that and rise above the competition.

Understanding Digital Opportunities

It doesn’t matter if you’re marketing a Slinky or an iot connectivity platform. It’s the 2020s, and digital advertising needs to be one of, if not the primary tools you use to connect to your customers and target audiences. Some studies show that nearly two-thirds of buying decisions are made on mobile devices. You must thoroughly understand the consumer thought process, how this sales funnel works, and what channels are available for you to market to online shoppers.

Firstly, recognize that digital customers are buying this way because they want convenience and instant gratification. They want simple access to the information they need to make a purchasing decision. This also makes them shrewd; it doesn’t take much time to comparison shop, so they will check two to four different sites to compare prices and products. The automotive industry has seen a huge shift in this direction as their marketing moved online in the early 21st century. As much as dealerships want buyers on the lot so their trained salesforce can overcome objections and upsell, customers revolted and now prefer to browse their websites and compare before contacting a dealership.

So, how do you market in a way that will stand out in this environment? By applying the same concepts of reach and frequency that you would use in traditional advertising. But digital let’s you play with a much bigger box of crayons. Retargeting is especially helpful here. This is where a digital banner ad will use cookies to “follow” a customer and serve them ads for a product they have browsed on other websites and mobile apps. If you are interviewing for a marketing job, being able to knowledgably speak about terms like retargeting, and geofencing, your expertise will shine through.

Programmatic Buying

Programmatic buying is a crucial ingredient to understanding digital opportunities. It applies mostly to buying and placing ads on social media sites and search engines, and it is a very sought-after skill in the marketing world. Essentially a successful programmatic buyer can maximize these channels’ feature of precision audience targeting to generate leads, ROI, or clicks.

Social media advertising comes in two major forms: boosted posts and paid ads. Boosted posts, as the name would suggest, are organic posts that a business can support with ad dollars to gain a larger reach. These are an economical way to amplify your messaging, and good for short, timely bursts. The scheduling tools allow for a certain amount of demographic targeting, but paid ads allow for the greatest amount of demographic pinpointing.

Let’s look at Facebook as a case study. Its ad manager interface lets a buyer select their target audience based on specific demographic information including gender, age, income level, geographic location, and even interests. Ad placement is based on an auction system (which can be automated) that allows buyers to bid for inventory based on target impressions or views.

Obviously, a marketing candidate who can demonstrate an understanding of these systems can be invaluable to a company hoping to expand their digital and social footprints.

Public Relations

Moving away from the mechanics of media buying for a moment, let’s look at a skill set that any business needs, but few invest in: a PR professional. A small number of companies have a dedicated spokesperson on staff who handles media relations and news releases. Often, these responsibilities fall upon the owner, CEO, or chief marketing officer. This makes sense, as many of the key communication skills that come with these duties overlap with these positions. A marketer who has trained in or studied public relations can stand out from an applicant pool. In some ways, having a single person to handle marketing and PR simplifies the coordination of messaging.

Cross-Training

Stepping over to more technical skill sets, it’s important to acknowledge that employers want marketers to wear as many hats as possible. There was a time not long ago where a business might have an in-house marketing department that included a copy-writer, graphic designer, webmaster, social lead, and even an audio and video producer. As technology has converged, though, many of these companies now seek a single candidate to fill all these roles.

The good news is that production software has come so far that it is much more practical for a single person to master these tasks. Programs like the Adobe Creative Suite integrate video, graphic, and web design programs with training and tutorials available on demand. Subscription-based programs of this kind also make it easy for employers to budget a monthly fee rather than an upfront cost for expensive professional software. While a budding marketer is studying, they can even subscribe to discounted educational versions of these programs to build proficiency.

Dependability

Finally, it bears mentioning that employers value dependability and integrity as highly as any other skill. A person with good recommendations that reflect an excellent track record of showing up on time, working hard, and solving problems will always set themselves apart in the interview process. Most employers will hold a candidate with these qualities in higher regard than the marketer with the most impressive marketer who doesn’t exude these attributes.

Learn the fundamentals of digital advertising and programmatic buying, study and practice public relations, cross-train and stay dependable, and you will find yourself in the running for many great careers in marketing!