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Career Paths

ADVERTISING

Advertising is a field in marketing communication that employs a sponsored message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Key positions in advertising include that of a planner, account manager, copywriter, art director, production manager, and media buyer.

  • Copywriters write advertising copy with the aim to increase brand awareness and ultimately persuade a person or group to take a particular action
  • Art directors, the other part of the creative team, help translate copywriters’ ideas into dramatic visuals called “layouts.” Agency artists develop print layouts, packaging designs, television layouts (called “storyboards”), corporate logotypes, trademarks, and symbols.
  • Production managers are responsible for physically creating ads, in-house or by contracting through outside production houses.
  • Account managers serve as liaisons between clients and agencies. They coordinate the planning, creation, production, and implementation of advertising campaigns for the different accounts they handle working closely with marketing managers to achieve business objectives.
  • Media buyers determine the best mix of different channels such as television, outdoor, radio, print, web etc. and negotiate price and advertising placement to procure media inventory.

BRAND AND PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Brand and product managers plan, direct, and control business and marketing efforts for their products. They are involved with research and development, packaging, manufacturing, sales and distribution, advertising, promotion, market research, and business analysis and forecasting. A company’s brand management team consists of people in several positions.

  • Brand Managers guide the development of marketing strategies for a specific category or set of brands and oversee a team of ABMs.
  • Associate Brand Managers are individuals with 4-5 years of industry experience responsible for planning, analysis and driving of marketing strategy for a brand.
  • Assistant Brand Managers are individuals with 1-3 years of industry experience responsible for planning, analysis and driving of marketing strategy for a brand.
  • Product Managers oversee several brands within a product line or product group.
  • Product Category Managers direct multiple product lines in the product category.
  • Shopper Marketers understand how one’s target consumers behave as shoppers, in different channels and formats, and leverage this intelligence to the benefit of all stakeholders
  • Project managers oversee the planning and execution of different projects.
  • Consumer Insights/Market Analysts research the market and provide important strategic information analysis to project managers.
  • Project Directors oversee project managers are responsible for the overall effectiveness of project completion.
  • Research Directors oversee the planning, gathering, and analysis of all organizational research.

SALES

Sales and sales management opportunities exist in a wide range of profit and non-profit organizations and in product and service organizations, including financial, insurance, consulting, telecom, automotive, media and government organizations. Key jobs include customer business development, account management, service support.

  • Account managers/CBDs sell products and services to retailers and works with them to determine optimal product mix
  • National account managers oversee a team of customer business development managers and account managers.
  • Service support personnel support sales reps during and after the sale of a product.
  • Sales management includes a sequence of positions ranging from district sales manager to vice president of sales.

RETAIL

Retailing involves the process of selling consumer goods or services to customers through multiple channels of distribution to earn profits. Retailers satisfy demand identified through a supply chain. Key jobs include store manager, regional manager, buyer, department manager, and sales reps

  • Store managers direct the management and operation of an individual store and are in-charge of profit and loss.
  • Regional managers manage groups of stores across several cities and report performance to headquarters.
  • Buyers work with CBDs and Account Managers to determine what SKUs and merchandise a store carries
  • Department managers act as store manager of a department, such as clothing or accessories, but on the product level.
  • Sales reps sell merchandise to retail customers.

MARKETING RESEARCH

Marketing researchers systematically gather, record, and analyze qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services. Their role involves identifying and assessing how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior. They specify the information required to address these issues, design the method for collecting information, manage and implement the data collection process, analyze the results, and communicate the findings and their implications to senior management.

NEW-PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

New product development consists of a series of processes that include the conceptualization, design, development, and marketing of newly created or newly rebranded goods or services. Product lifecycle management is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from inception, through engineering design and manufacturing, until service and disposal of the manufactured products.

DIGITAL MARKETING AND E-COMMERCE

E-commerce marketing is the process of driving sales by raising awareness about an online store’s brand and product offerings. Digital marketing for e-commerce applies traditional marketing principles to a multichannel, data-driven environment. E-commerce marketing can be broadly categorized into two general actions: driving website traffic and optimizing the user experience for conversion. Both are critical components to growing an online business. E-commerce marketing channels include:

  • Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC): Effective PPC campaigns drive users with intent to purchase, making it more efficient than many traditional advertising platforms. Businesses bid on impressions for paid listings at the top of search engine results, paying on a per-click basis. Impressions are determined by user search query, with strategy revolving around which keyword bids yield the highest ROI.
  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Sometimes used a synonym for PPC, referring to paid advertising campaigns. SEM is often used to describe efforts on Google’s AdWords platform and paid platforms on other search engines, such as Bing. This multifaceted term is also used by many marketers to describe all paid and organic efforts.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Unlike the paid media opportunities described above, SEO traffic comes from unpaid “organic” results on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Successful SEO requires adherence to best practices on a product page level in tandem with content creation, inbound links, social media engagement, and many other factors that search engine algorithms take into consideration.
  • Display Advertising: Banners, sidebars and other predominantly-visual advertisements that appear on other websites. Display ads are facilitated by ad networks such as Google Display Network.
  • Affiliate Marketing: Referrals from other websites with industry or product-focused content such as reviews, comparisons, and testimonials. Successful affiliates have a loyal following or receive traffic from some of the above channels. They typically receive a set commission of referred sales, often determined on a case-by-case basis.
  • Email Marketing: Newsletters, abandoned cart notifications and remarketing all use email to target past and potential customers.

Some key e-commerce marketing terms include:

  • Google AdWords: Google’s advertising platform pioneered the PPC model and capitalizes on the company’s majority share of the search market.
  • Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The cumulative results from users executing a search engine query, comprising organic and paid listings. Having results on the first page of SERPs is critical to acquiring new customers.
  • Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): The process of improving every aspect of a website so that more visitors purchase. Faster load times, fewer clicks to purchase and more enticing product descriptions/images make it easier for the user’s to evaluate your product and follow through to purchase. The most common metric for evaluating CRO efforts is conversion rate.
  • Conversion Funnel: The steps taken by a prospect to become a customer, beginning with awareness and ending with a purchase. Higher-priced items generally have a longer sales cycle, while low-cost items can convert in a much shorter period of time.

DEMAND GENERATION

Demand generation captures the umbrella of marketing programs that get customers excited about your company’s product and services. Demand generation programs can help brands reach new markets, promote new product features, build consumer buzz, generate PR, and re-engage existing customers. It is more than just a branding concept or early funnel marketing tactic. Demand generation programs are touch points throughout the conversion optimization and sales cycles. The goal of demand generation is to build and nurture key prospect and customer relationships for the long term. To do this effectively, marketers follow through with actions such as customer response and relationship engagement on Twitter, blog post promotion through Facebook, webinar hosting, email marketing campaign execution, among many others.

MARKETING ANALYTICS

Marketing analytics comprises the processes and technologies that enable marketers to evaluate the success of their marketing initiatives by measuring performance (e.g., blogging versus social media versus channel communications) using important business metrics, such as ROI, marketing attribution and overall marketing effectiveness. Marketing analytics gathers data from across all marketing channels and consolidates it into a common marketing view. From this common view, analytical results can be extracted to provide invaluable assistance in driving marketing efforts forward. Marketers often make decisions based on data from individual channels (website metrics, for example), not taking into account the entire marketing picture. Marketing analytics, by contrast, considers all marketing efforts across all channels over a span of time – which is essential for sound decision making and effective, efficient program execution. To get the most benefit from marketing analytics, an analytic assortment that is balanced is required – that is, one that combines techniques for:

  • Reporting on the past: By using marketing analytics to report on the past, companies can answer such questions as: Which campaign elements generated the most revenue last quarter? How did email campaign A perform against direct mail campaign B? How many leads were generated from blog post C versus social media campaign D?
  • Analyzing the present: Marketing analytics enables brands to determine how marketing initiatives are performing right now by answering questions such as: How are customers engaging with the brand? Which channels do the most profitable customers prefer? Who is talking about the company on social media sites, and what are they saying?
  • Predicting and/or influencing the future: Marketing analytics can also deliver data-driven predictions that can be used to influence the future by answering questions such as: How can short-term wins be turned into loyalty and ongoing engagement. How will adding 10 more sales people in an underperforming region impact revenue?

BEHAVIOURAL INSIGHTS

Behavioural economics has become an important discipline for brand owners eager to understand why their consumers sometimes make irrational decisions that run counter to economic model predictions. Marketers have long been aware that irrationality helps shape consumer behavior. Behavioral economics can make that irrationality more predictable. Understanding exactly how small changes to the details of an offer can influence the way people react to it is crucial to unlocking significant value—often at very low cost. Key behavioral economics concepts that can help marketers improve the relationship between companies and their customers:

  • Social proof: Customers look to other people for information on what to buy or what service to use.
  • Loss aversion: Consumers are more willing to take risks in order to avoid losing things than to pursue gaining things.
  • Endowment effect: Consumers value items they own which they have an emotional attachment to, more than a similar item owned by someone else.
  • Default: Defaults are pre-set options or courses of action consumers receive, such as automatic enrollment in a 401(k) by an employer.
  • Choice overload: When consumers are presented with too many options, they can become overwhelmed, leading to unrealistic expectations, decision-making paralysis and unhappiness.
  • Framing: How marketers frame choices, set the context and present information can influence consumers’ decisions.
  • Decoy effect: Consumers’ preference for one option over another can change when a third, similar but less desirable option is presented.
  • Anchoring: Consumers will rely heavily on the first piece of information offered, and use it as a reference and benchmark for other decisions from that point on, whether it makes sense or not.

BRAND STRATEGY & CONSULTING

Brand Consulting involves developing a brand plan or brand blueprint that will drive the brand strategy, both internally and externally. It is a holistic approach that address all key elements of the brand from the copy used in recruitment advertising to customer facing departments and their ability to represent the brand to point of sale and retention strategies and more. Brand consultants work with marketing managers to determine the best resources to use to get the whole organization on track, by carrying out audits of the business, industry, processes, systems, stakeholders to determine the best way forward. Solutions may require advertising but will also look to improve R&D, sales, production, supply chains, operations, customer relationships and retention strategies.

INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals or types of individuals rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

Influencer content may be framed as testimonial advertising where they play the role of a potential buyer themselves, or they may be third parties. These third parties exist either in the supply chain, such as retailers, manufacturers, etc. or may be so-called value-added influencers, such as journalists, academics, industry analysts, professional advisers, and so on.

SOCIAL LISTENING

Social Listening is the process of tracking conversations around specific phrases, words or brands, and then leveraging them to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences. Social media isn’t just a broadcast platform. A successful strategy is built around reaching the right people at the best time with the most insightful content. Social media listening is more than watching mentions and replying when prompted. It requires brands to go beyond their notifications and find people who aren’t tagging them in their updates and discussions. Monitoring collects every social mention and action, while listening requires analysis and reflection. With the latter, Social Listening Analysts watch for patterns, track sentiment and draw conclusions based on where and when conversations happen. Monitoring involves compiling a list of social media engagement instances, while listening identifies and analyzes the most meaningful parts.