While marketing is exciting, fast-paced, social and glamorous, it has a dark side too. As seasoned (perhaps slightly cynical) marketing professionals we feel we need to shine the light and help graduates make an informed decision about their future career. Here are the top 6 badies of the marketing profession.
People hate marketing: While people like to be informed of products they find useful, receiving realistic information and having information available whenever they need it, people hate the hassling, lying, idiot making, time wasting type of marketing. The trend definitely goes towards the former value-adding type of marketing, but what you will be doing all depends on the brand you work for. The good news is, marketing is universal and you are able to work in different industries.
Work-work unbalance: Most likely you will make a corporate versus agency decision at some stage. Agencies are fast paced and despite all the fun with fellow creatives, the long hours happen more often than not. Overtime in agencies is such a well-known phenomenon that jokes about having no work-life balance are quite acceptable and even used for a good laugh in amusingly sadistic videos, like this one by Union Advertising Canada.
Herding cats: When working in marketing you will be required to work towards a coordinated campaign with a team of strong personalities. If you are used to herding cats or coordinating your younger siblings for that matter, chances are you do well in a team of marketing professionals.
Bubbles and sparkle: Because content is king, communication skills are key. If you find it easy to debate, make people laugh and manage to entertain a crowd around a dinner table, chances are you are a people’s person, and could be easily tweaked into someone who can sell a product and deliver a constant flow of engaging content. So bubbles and sparkle are a good start to a career in marketing.
Lower back: Most marketing tasks are performed in front of a screen, especially the digital marketing type that has become so incredibly popular. Your laptop, hopefully equipped with all sorts of fancy applications will become your best friend. Your daily goal is to keep robots happy and even socialising happens online. While being glued to a chair, chances are you can move the chair to cool places. Due to the nature of the job, digital marketing professionals working for forward thinking companies are often able to work remotely, at least some of the time. Working flexi place, might become more and more interesting as you get older and your priorities shift from winning awards to seeing your kids grow up.
A statistics fetish: There are three major directions you can take. There is a salesy, an analytical and creative side to marketing. Besides being creative and coming up with good ideas, being fluent in interpreting analytics and using the data for actionable next steps is now a basic requirement of marketers. Understanding research tools to get data to help you make better choices is a valuable skill. You could start by familiarising yourself with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools.
Ok, so nothing can put you off. You are still reading this, you are reading The Social Examiner before going to bed and Search Engine Land while you should be working. You cancel girl’s evenings (Rugby with the boys) to attend networking events like Online Tuesday? You have your own blog and even do websites for friends on Sundays?
Cool, here is the good news. The job market needs you. According to AdAge, 80% of companies are increasing digital marketing budgets and hiring of top talent remains one of the challenges. According to the study, the top hiring barriers is finding skilled talent (65% of respondents). Jey!
As one of the top recruitment agencies in South Africa specialising in marketing and communications jobs we are in a privileged position to help you with your first career move. Get in touch and our marketing & communications consulting team will gladly assist.
