What are the factors you usually consider before you choose a career? You know some look for a high-paying job? Some may be looking for fame? Or simply all you need is a stable job with a stable salary in a stable workplace? All answers are valid. Whether you’ve been considering a marketing career already or still have no clue, let me tell you some of the factors that drove me and the marketers I know to pick a job in the marketing field.
Marketing is broader than what you ever thought
What is the image that comes across your head whenever you hear the word “marketer”? Is it a guy uttering creative ideas wherever he goes or a person desperately trying to convince the client with their creative idea. I know, I know, we all had that conception. However, the marketing field is really broad and is beyond advertising.
Marketing, according to the definition approved by the American Marketing Association, is “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Marketing covers many different areas, namely, public relations, advertising, branding, along with an entirely different world called digital marketing, that includes online marketing, mobile marketing, and social media marketing.
Marketing gives you a unique opportunity to choose to settle in any of these different marketing paths. More interestingly, in such a broad field, you are less likely to get yourself stuck in one path forever and there’s no limit to what you can do. Since the different areas of marketing are usually interrelated, you might find yourself doing a wide range of things, and shifting from one area to another should be somehow smooth. You would not feel like an alien who just jumped from its spacecraft. Rather than that, after years of experience, you would be privileged to have accumulated experience in different areas in the same field.
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Marketing is an opportunity-rich field
Marketing is not only a broad field, but it is also an always advancing industry, with new opportunities emerging every day in its different areas.
Marketing applicants are still in quite high demand. According to WUZZUF’s statistics, more than 23,000 marketing-related vacancies have been posted on WUZZUF in 2018, forming 10% of the total vacancies posted throughout the past 12 months.
However, marketing has a relatively low application rate, compared to other industries. Marketing has only 55 applications per vacancy on average, while some other industries like accounting and human resources, for instance, witness fierce competition with 180 and 155 applications per vacancy on average respectively.
In short, Marketing brings you an undeniably great opportunity to build a rewarding career, through a relatively less competitive industry, away from the long queues looking for jobs in fiercely competitive, yet not necessarily more rewarding industries.
[mks_icon icon=”icon-arrow-right” color=”#000000″ type=”sl”]Click here to explore marketing vacancies on WUZZUF
Marketing pays really well
Who said money isn’t important? However, the luckiest ones are probably the ones who do a job they like and get paid well for it. And, if you recognized your passion for marketing, don’t worry about money!
With the increasing importance of the marketing industry, companies need to offer good salaries to make sure they have the best marketers in town. Yet, Salaries vary, depending on many factors; e.g. company, country, level of experience, the exact role you play. According to PayScale, an entry-level marketing specialist in Egypt is paid around EGP 5100/ month on average, while a digital marketing specialist‘s average pay is EGP 3700/ month.
When it comes to the managerial level, a marketing manager’s annual pay ranges from EGP 70,160 to EGP 912,307. Refer to the graph below, you will find how some of the marketing jobs maintain good positions among different fields known for their rewarding jobs. These figures are only average amounts calculated by PayScale, and you may be offered more or less, depending on the factors mentioned earlier.
Marketing has bright career prospects for you
It’s true that you can hunt a high-paying job in the marketing field. However, profit is not the only thing marketing can offer you. Marketing can help you build a strong career towards leading positions as well.
A recent study conducted at Notre Dam Menzoda College of Business shows that 25% of CEOs have a marketing or sales background. When he presented this study at AMA Winter Conference, Assistant professor Frank Germann highlighted that a third of CEOs, who have a marketing background, work for the largest companies.
Furthermore, 42% of B2B companies prefer to employ a CEO with a marketing background, since marketers usually develop a deep understanding of the targeted segments and know quite well how to satisfy a customer, according to the above study. If you are a person who’s ambitious enough to think of yourself as a thoughtful CEO in the near future, marketing is your wise route to meet this end.
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Marketing paves your way to an impactful career
If you agree with Amr Helmy, Culture Marketing Manager at Red Bull, that money is only one part of the reward, but the impact you leave behind is way more important. You can consider a career in marketing for such impact. Advertisements, marketing campaigns, social media are all part of the popular culture we are all exposed to every day. As part of their work, marketers usually develop a deeper understanding of the addressed target segments, through consumer behavior studies. More interestingly, many successful marketing campaigns had a big influence on the culture of their societies beyond selling their products.
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Believe it or not, before the 1930s, Santa Claus wasn’t the cute old man with a snowy beard in a red outfit we know today. Before that date, Santa didn’t have a fixed look; he was sometimes drawn as a tall old man dressed in a green suit or elf-like figure. However, as Coca-Cola’s marketing team back in the 1930s was working on Christmas ads, they helped shape the modern image of Santa Claus. The Coca-cola team wanted to show a realistic and symbolic image of Santa Claus. Commissioned by Coca-cola, the American illustrator Haddon Sundblom depicted Santa Claus as a funny old man, based on the looks of a real-life retired salesman. Coca-cola used this image in its printed ads and marketing activities. Since then, the world knows only one Santa Claus.
While in Japan, people don’t necessarily get a tree to celebrate Christmas, but they would probably have KFC. It all started with a 40-year-old successful campaign when Christmas wasn’t yet popular or widely celebrated in Japan, and non-japanese residents used to eat at KFC because they couldn’t find a whole turkey or chicken anywhere else. One of KFC’s creative marketers at that time proposed a special Christmas offer: “chicken and wine for $10”. Today, many of the Japanese people cannot celebrate Christmas without this classic meal and they try to pass the tradition to their children, according to a report by ABC NEWS.
Unleash your Creativity through Marketing
If you think you’re Chandler of the family, don’t waste your creativity and wittiness being a “Transpondster”. It’s true that marketers are also responsible for achieving companies’ KPIs, but they do it the Chandler way.
It’s the marketer’s job to make customers and users love your brand and buy its products. That’s why creativity is integrative to marketing and advertising, as David Ogilvy, aka the father of modern advertising, stated in the commandments he passed to us “It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.” Marketers are expected to come up with creative ideas that would be appealing to the target audience, and more importantly, help them sell the products and/ or services of their brands.
However, you don’t have to be creative to work in marketing. Many marketing jobs require analytical organizational, rather than creative, skills, including a marketing manager, marketing communications coordinator, market research analyst, and others.
Muhammed Omar answers the question for you
Here, in WUZZUF, we were so lucky to have shared the same office with Muhammed Omar, also known as “E3langi”, the brilliant marketing guy, our sarcastic guru, among many other titles. Mohamed Omar, former Growth Marketing Manager at WUZZUF, shares with us his story highlighting the reasons that drove him to choose a marketing career since the very beginning.
It all started while he was still a university student. He majored in Pharmacy, and he also actively participated in student activities. He was mainly driven by a cause to help his peers develop their skills and get prepared for the job market. As he was doing this, Omar was doing a great deal of marketing already, and this is exactly when he discovered that he should not do anymore pharmacy, because marketing is his true passion.
“At first, I was intrigued by how broad the Marketing field is. It is not just about advertising, as it was commonly thought. It’s not only about convincing a user to buy your product or service, either. As a marketer, your job is to highlight the true value of your brand and establish a relationship of trust with your target audience. This was evenly challenging and interesting to me.” says, Omar.
He points out his proudest moments are when he can perceive the impact of his campaigns, as was the case with “A girl equals 100”, a campaign he initiated in 2016 that has achieved a great impact with organic reach. The audience didn’t only engage with reactions and comments, but they also shared stories after the campaign had inspired them.
When asked how his 10-year marketing career has changed him, Omar said that he had become a marketer in every aspect of his life. “Now I always bear the audience in mind, in whatever I do and write, and even when I do my job as a manager. I also became a data-driven person. Marketers can never understand their audience without enough data.”
The one piece of advice that Omar sends to aspiring marketers is “keep on learning”. Although marketing is an opportunity-rich field, there is still a huge knowledge gap, especially when it comes to Internet Marketing, which is not as easy as it may seem. “In marketing, professional experience is your best teacher. If you are interested in marketing, you will learn a lot through accumulated experience, along with the traditional means of learning. So never decline any learning experience or get yourself an internship, where you can learn by doing” he explains.
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Maybe you are not still sure if marketing is the right career for you. Shake off all the misconceptions you have in mind about marketing. You better try yourself or at least write your own must-have-in-a-job list and see if marketing is what you have been looking for. However, whether you are looking for a high-paying job, a rewarding career, impactful work, marketing has something for you.
What do you think about working in marketing? Have you ever tried it? Are you still confused and need some career coaching? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
