What Can You Do With a Marketing Degree?

Due to the business aspect of marketing along with the need for marketers to be numerate, the banking, finance, insurance, underwriting and accountancy sectors as well as management consulting, general management, business and administration roles are popular with marketing graduates.

Less typical marketing roles could include: roles in education, teaching others about marketing; in fundraising, using your skills of persuasion and market knowledge; and in sales and PR – all well-suited for creative-thinking marketing graduates. You could also transfer your skills to roles in the promotions department of sectors such as pharmaceutical and health care, energy and utilities, and culture, music and performing arts.

If you pride yourself on your creative flair, you might consider marketing roles in the fashion sector, graphic design (creating layouts, logos and promotional material), event planning, publishing, website design and the music, electronics and sporting industries.

Further sectors marketing graduates can explore include the environment, agriculture and conservation sectors – using your skills to raise awareness about issues; hospitality, leisure and tourism sectors – improving promotional campaigns; and working for the government, national defense and not-for-profit organizations in a huge range of roles.

Using your knowledge of consumer behavior, you could be an accomplished “mystery shopper”, while your powers of persuasion and ability to identify gems within a saturated market may put you in good stead as a real estate agent. You could use your people skills in recruitment and retail, couple this with your research skills to become a survey researcher and add management skills to become a director of marketing effectiveness.

Other roles open to marketing graduates include working in magazine and newspaper publishing, as a purchasing agent or buyer and as a casino manager. You can also work in risk management, in transportation, as a writer or editor for online or print publications, and perhaps even play and preview video games for a digitally focused company.

What stands out about the field of marketing is that it is very progressive. The marketing landscape evolves at a rapid pace, which in turn impacts on the type of marketing careers and specializations available. So, if you didn’t like the look of any of the roles mentioned above, perhaps your dream job hasn’t even been invented yet! As such, the best way to learn about newly emerging marketing roles is by reading as much as you can about the field, regularly checking job listings and being aware of the evolution of consumer, media and technology landscapes.

Key factors in future marketing roles are the growing trends towards using big data and mobile marketing. To reflect the rapidly changing marketing sector, below are some potential future marketing careers you may be interested in:

Creative Technologist: Expert in all things technology (including coding and server architectures), the creative technologist comes up with creative, technology-related solutions to problems. User experience and innovation are at the forefront.

Content Archivist: Brands are increasingly producing a vast amount of content through many channels. A content archivist keeps track of and organizes this content.

Community Management Executive: This will become a dedicated, formal practice which combines social media marketing, brand marketing, customer service, technology and analytics.

Mobile Marketing Manager: Also a practice in its own right, mobile marketing explores space and time in terms of the consumer: where they are at any one moment in time. This will help marketers deliver contextually-relevant mobile campaigns and socially connected experiences for enhanced engagement of the brand.

Transcultural Anthropologist: The future of targeted marketing, the transcultural anthropologist looks at pockets of global culture, identifying hybrid and very specific markets relevant to the company.