Marketing can be one of the hardest industries to get a foot on the career ladder. Many potential employers will be looking for someone who has a proven track record of running successful campaigns. You can see why they’d want any future employee to have already had experience in the role. Still, the unfortunate irony is that new people to the industry can only get that experience if someone gives them the opportunity to work in the industry in the first place.
While it can be hard to convince someone to give you your first job in marketing, your CV could be a lot more persuasive if it shows you’ve trained and specialized in one of the more in-demand roles in the industry. There are probably lots of people who want to become photographers or copywriters, but there are always new roles being created in the industry. With that in mind, here’s a more detailed look at three of the most in-demand roles in the world of marketing.
Data scientist
Many people consider marketing to be an art form. Most roles require a certain amount of creativity when it comes to producing new and unique ideas to try and persuade any potential customers to spend money with your business. You might think that the only place these ideas can come from is your imagination. In fact, some of the most effective ideas come from analyzing all of the data that brands collect from their customers.
As more of us are using digital devices to purchase goods and services, like online shopping or even loyalty cards linked to online accounts, businesses are collecting more and more data from us. They can see which products are selling well and which are getting very little interest in comparison. They can even record when you view a product, put it into your basket but then never actually complete the purchase. This data can be hugely valuable to any company, but only if they have a data scientist to help analyze and produce insights into the data.
According to this article by Emerson College, the demand for people to fill positions like these has gone up by nearly 350% since 2013. When you consider what somebody can achieve if they are trained with the skillset to effectively analyze this data, it’s easy to see why they’re in such high demand. Not only can they pinpoint which parts of the business need marketing more to attract more customers, but they can also help any business have a better understanding of what their customers want, and can even help reduce waste by reducing the likelihood of a product not selling.
Social media producer
Back merely a few decades ago, marketing teams were tasked with producing advertisements for a small number of platforms. Mainly they were focused on getting their products to appear in magazines, billboards, and commercial breaks on the TV and on the radio. These days, there are so many more places for brands to focus their marketing efforts on. These include things like banner adverts on websites, commercials before videos on YouTube or in between songs on Spotify, and even on social media platforms. In fact, social media has become one of the most critical places for brands to advertise This is because more people are spending time viewing posts on social media than looking at traditional platforms, like magazines and TV.
With this in mind, more and more brands are looking to employ social media producers. The big difference between a social media producer and any other producer in the industry is the speed they need to work. If you’re producing a television advert, you’d probably be given months to develop your ideas, film the footage and then edit it into an effective advert. The benefit of social media means you can react almost instantly to the latest trends, so social media producers are regularly expected to produce graphics, videos, and other marketing materials in a matter of hours. For example, new memes become popular on social media every week. One of the most popular ways to get attention on these platforms is to be the brand that produces a humorous version of these memes before anybody else and then persuades your followers to share it with their followers. Even if a brand is a day behind when it comes to recognizing the latest viral topics on social media, they could miss out on creating a viral post that would be seen by tens of thousands of potential customers.
Customer services
While many of the roles of a marketing department have changed over the years, there is still one role that is just as important as it has always been. That role is a brand’s customer service representative. It is just as important to respond to any customer complaints and queries as it has been in previous decades. In fact, as many of us are now able to search for answers on Google instantly and even get products delivered by Amazon within 24 hours of ordering them, we expect brands to respond a lot quicker than we used to. Gone are the days where customers would patiently wait a few days for someone to write them a letter or give them a call back to respond to their query.
Instead, customer service employees now need to respond to queries on email, their website, and other social media platforms within hours of somebody contacting them instead of days. Not only that, but customers are expecting them to resolve the issue just as quickly. Failure to respond to complaints could lead to customers criticizing your brand on social media, meaning their friends and family will be unlikely to use your brand again as well as the original customer themselves. It’s equally as important to respond to inquiries about products just as quickly, as the customer may decide to contact a different brand if you take too long to respond.
