Overview
The term Marketing is used as an umbrella term for many aspects of a company's brand, advertising and web content strategies. Generally, marketing involves how a service or product is sold. These details can be ascertained by identifying customer needs, investigating how to meet them, and then evaluating the best way to generate profit. The constant advances in information technology and the demand for ever-more segmented markets have led to more sophisticated collection and analysis of data about existing and potential customers. Due to the industry's diversity, a marketing graduate career is highly sought-after amongst students and graduates alike.
Market factors and changes in the retail landscape have placed greater importance on the internet as a channel to consumers. Today, search engine optimisation (SEO) is at the forefront of marketing strategy for many organisations, creating further demand for marketing skills in this area. Prompting businesses to generate greater spend in the sector and promote significant growth, this opens further opportunities for graduates within marketing.
Average Marketing Graduate Salary
Marketing Graduate Career Path
Graduates need to understand that marketing encapsulates a broad range of specialist areas from creative ideas to numerical and business intelligence.
Graduates can choose to follow many areas of expertise in pursuing a marketing graduate career; they can take a creative or analytical route:
Creative
- Advertising
- Branding
- Communications
- Events Organisation
- PR
Analytical
- Database and Direct Marketing
- Marketing Analysis
- Market Research
- Web Marketing
With such an extensive range of options, the marketing industry offers a varied and interesting career for graduates. The competitive consumer marketplace will ensure a continued healthy demand for candidates.
Qualifications and Skills Needed
What proportion of candidates as a percent we place into Marketing graduate careers and the typical qualities graduate employers look for.
GRB Placements for Marketing by Degree
Typical Candidate Attributes
While recruiters welcome applications from graduates from all disciplines, successful graduates must fulfil the personal criteria of drive, sound communication skills, team work and business awareness. The underlying quality graduate marketing sector recruiters look for in a candidate is the ability to convey ideas. Marketing is essentially a creative business, and the ability to generate original thoughts and plans is highly sought after.
Over recent years, the growth in analytical marketing and market intelligence has resulted in heightened demand for numerate graduates. Such graduates tend to be problem-solvers who have the ability to disseminate large amounts of data or information and translate it into a strong business case. Numerate and analytical university projects and modules would be good to include on your CV or to highlight in your covering letter for a market intelligence job application.
Due to the popularity of marketing vacancies, graduates who have undertaken an internship programme or gained relevant work experience, prior to applying, hold an advantage. Therefore, it is worth considering offering your time to a marketing department or agency whilst at university to gain experience to put on your CV.
Do you have what it takes? Begin searching for graduate marketing jobs today.
Sources for Further Information
Chartered Institute of Marketing www.cim.co.uk
Marketing Science Institute www.msi.org
Institute of Direct & Digital Marketing www.theidm.com
Communications Advertising and Marketing Education Foundation www.camfoundation.com
The Market Research Society www.mrs.org.uk
The Marketing Society www.marketing-society.org.uk
British Market Research Association www.bmra.org.uk
The Direct Marketing Association www.dma.org.uk