marketing job titles |
One of the best ways to evaluate your marketing job titles is to set them up as a series of one-word descriptions. Then, you can quickly run through the list and see which ones are the most useful and which ones aren’t.
Here are some examples:
- “Marketing Manager” – Why? What does that mean?
- The “VP of Marketing” – Why? What does that mean?
- “Director of Marketing Communications” – Why? What does that mean?
Outbound vs. inbound marketing
There is a myriad of marketing job titles out there, each with its own meaning and value proposition. I will attempt to boil this down to three:
- Marketing Manager
- Marketing Director
- Marketing Executive
- Marketing associate vs marketing executive
The main domain in which you will work is the sales team. So, marketing jobs would include Sales Manager, Sales Analyst, Sales Account Manager, Sales Account Executive, etc.
Marketing skills and job titles
All jobs are not created equal, and some jobs are more equal than others. Some of them require unique skills and experience, some of them require you to be a “jack of all trades” or a “master of none.”
Their popularity is founded on the fact that they offer something extra. They are different from the usual marketing roles (e.g., product, sales) in that they have special characteristics and responsibilities that help to differentiate them from other roles:
- A marketing job title may refer to a specific position within an organization or industry, particularly one in which there is no direct competition.
- It may also refer to the job itself; marketing people may be called "marketing" people even though they don't actually sell anything (although not all successful marketers are successful at selling things).
For example: "Marketing Manager" is a common job title for senior managers who manage large marketing functions for large companies like Google or Microsoft, because it makes sense to call someone who does market research and analysis "head of marketing", but it's less common for salespeople who do sales over the phone; since you can't easily understand what is being sold over the phone, calling someone in sales the “sales manager” would actually be misleading; rather than saying “Sell me this expensive bottle of wine so I can start my new career as a sommelier” you need to say “Sell me this bottle of wine so I can buy my dream car!”
This is just one example. There are many other jobs where different titles would make sense as well:
- CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) - There's nothing wrong with calling someone who runs their own business or company a CMO (or even just "CEO"). It could mean that person has lots of control over what happens in the markets or businesses they work in. But if you're going to run your own business or company then it makes sense to call your manager by their proper title.
- VP Marketing - If you're running your own business or company then it makes sense that you should have some sort of formal title such as VP Marketing/VP Customer Success/VP Sales/VP Marketing /etc...
- CTO(Chief Technology Officer) - Again, if you're running your own business then it makes sense for your CTO to be named by their proper title rather than simply "Chief Technology Officer".
General marketing
You’ve probably heard of a few job titles that are used to describe marketing people. They include product marketer, user experience manager, business analyst, lead generation, and sales.
Most of them are now outdated or at least in danger of becoming obsolete. They have become “technical” and are often replaced by more modern job titles (CRO, SVP, EVP) that have nothing to do with marketing.
However, there are still some useful job title combinations out there. Here are some examples:
- Marketing Manager - You must be the right person for your company's marketing strategy.
- Marketing Manager - You must be the key person in your company's marketing strategy and take care of the day-to-day aspects of it (eg sales and accounts).
I think this is pretty clear from the list above: If you can have a title like "marketing manager," you probably know what you're doing when it comes to marketing for your startup or small business; If not, it's time to update what the Marketing Manager does.
Brand marketing
The term “brand marketing” was coined by the marketing/advertising firm, L.L. Bean. They coined it in reference to a brand of shoes whose sole was made from the tanned skin of a Maine moose, then they re-branded it as “L.L. Bean Responsible Care” (the company is owned by the same parent company, LL Bean).
In some ways this seems like a silly thing to even talk about here but, as with most things in life, there are things that are important and others that are not so important. As someone who started in what I refer to as the “brand marketing” role, I can say that it is not easy and requires lots of legwork and time to establish a brand identity that works well across all channels.
The first thing we need to do is get our name out there for people to know we exist outside of our home state and in spite of our small size (in which case we need to use print media etc.). This will require some extensive research and planning (although again, you should be able to do this on your own with the help of an SEO expert).
You don’t have to spend a lot of money on this kind of marketing; again you should be able to do this without much help from anyone else. The important thing is that you have something that works well and is recognized as strong enough (by your target audience) so that people will want to trust you should they meet you face-to-face or otherwise learn about your company via different channels.
Once we have established ourselves with the public at large through print media or print ads on mass-market websites or any other channel where people can see it, we need something that also establishes us as trustworthy online: social media sites where people can easily find us (and where other brands are not very popular).
We certainly don’t want just any social media site – we need one with real authority and popularity among the people who run it; one which has credibility amongst its users; and a site that is not just focused on general targeting but also has community-oriented features such as discussion boards where users can discuss topics of interest (this makes them more valuable than pure generic targeting), polls asking users what they think about certain subjects, etc., thereby making them more valuable than generic advertising messages because they are seen by many more people than only those who regularly use their service or products.
Content marketing
I’m sure you’ve heard the term content marketing. This is more than a simple rebranding of traditional marketing but, as a term, it covers a broad set of activities that are essentially marketing. They include advertising, Marketing Specialist job description.
Advertising is the most obvious use of the content, but there are many other forms of marketing and communication that rely on content to drive action:
- CPA (Cost per Action) sales.
- Email list building and nurturing.
- Social media posts & interactions.
These forms of Content marketing specialists are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each has its own benefits and costs:
- CCA (Cost per Acquisition) sales appeal to consumers who have not made an investment in your product or service yet. They are great for social media ads, which can generate significant ROI because they attract attention and impressions quickly. However, the potential for CCA is limited because users often forget about them after just one or two viewings (i.e., they don’t stick around long enough to generate ROI).
- CTA (Cost per Action) sales offer consumers an opportunity to make an investment in your product or service while they wait for their next purchase. These ads can generate significant ROI because they draw interest from both your existing users and people who view them for the first time (remember those “free samples” people gave you?). CTAs should be used aggressively with a variety of different products so you can build up a portfolio of different types of CTA campaigns that vary by user type and offer various different rewards based on the type of sale being made.
- Video content — taking short videos versus still images — is one form of content that has.
exploded in popularity over the last few years, along with mobile video ads:
The best way to get started with video is by creating a simple script using screen captures or video clips from popular sites like YouTube or Vimeo. Then turn this script into a 30-second video ad that will run on mobile devices' home screens as well as desktop browsers' Start menu bar apps (think Windows 8 Start menu). It's very easy! Just add your script/clip to YouTube and Vimeo's respective upload pages where it can stand alone as a full-screen ad or shareable link while giving you full control over how much audio to use. Then use Apple's AirPlay feature on iOS devices to send recorded video directly from your computer.
Digital marketing
As you can see, the list of job titles is pretty short. The exceptions are “Marketing” and “Digital Marketing” (if you are marketing, but not digital) and also “Marketing Internship” and “Marketing Internship in Advertising or Public Relations” (if you are in business but not advertising, or public relations). In other words, most internships that lead to full-time positions have more than one title.
The reason for this is twofold:
- This helps to keep things simple and clear to all departments (interns usually start in Marketing, who then must decide which title best describes their role).
- This makes it easier for everyone to be able to identify with the job title without having to deal with all the technicalities of it.
Email marketing
The Marketing Job Titles page is here:
It is a pretty exhaustive list of job titles, which you might find useful if you are looking for a marketing job. As well as what it says, if you scroll down to “Who’d like to be a…” there are also some interesting statistics about who’s doing what!
They say that “Experience matters” – so it should come as no surprise that the most popular job titles on the site (by far) are “Marketing Director” (3,680 searches) and “Marketing Director, Marketing Communications” (3,620).
The second most popular title of all is “Director of Customer Service and Operations” (2,900). The third most popular title is “Director of Sales Operations with Marketing Experience” (2,890), which was introduced about 2 years ago. There have been some other changes in recent months too: there has been a move away from the use of long text titles to shorter ones – perhaps to make them easier to read on mobile devices.
The other thing I noticed when doing this study was that I found quite a lot of overlap between marketing job titles and HR jobs: marketing director vs communications director; marketing manager vs sales manager; etc. So definitely worth taking a look at this when looking for your next role, HR positions titles.
Marketing communications
So you’ve done your research and found the right boss. Now what?
Well, you have to write your marketing communications. What is a marketing communications job? What is the definition of a marketing communications job? The definition of a marketing communications job is very straightforward: it involves writing in order to communicate something.
A good definition of a marketing communication job would be something like this: “writing a press release or other written communication which communicates an idea, idea that you want to communicate or was written by an expert”. Or, in other words, “writing to be seen or heard by someone other than the intended audience”.
Now, there are all kinds of gradations here. A press release is not necessarily any different from a casual tweet or blog post — but it should be handled with more care so as not to mislead the reader about what was intended for them. Blog posts are definitely different from advertising email lists (which should more closely resemble traditional PR emails). But when does one start and when does one stop?
And what exactly does “communication” mean here? I think we can all agree that writing things down into words and putting them out into the world is communication. And that includes posting things on social media and sharing things through email or text messages (just as long as they use language appropriate for the target audience). But where does this leave us in terms of actual work?
So, if we are writing to be seen or heard by someone other than our target audience, then we are working towards communicating with them — but how do marketers go about communicating with their target audience? That might sound obvious at first blush, but it turns out that there isn’t just one way to do it. There are many ways to communicate with your target audience…each has its own advantages and disadvantages and each can serve different purposes depending on where you are trying to send messages and who you would like your message delivered to:
Marketing research
I know you are all thinking “Marketing is a job title?” and you’re right. But, marketing is much more than that.
In my experience, marketing is the job of telling other people what to do. Marketing can be defined as the art of persuasion — but, it can also be seen as a job title. If we take that definition to its logical conclusion, then all the people in marketing have the same titles:
- Marketing Director
- Marketing Manager
- Marketing Analyst
The only difference between these and the Marketing Manager is the level of responsibility they have (you could argue that a Marketing Director and a Marketing Analyst are both responsible for marketing).
The reason for this is simple: Marketing has always been about selling something to someone else. But increasingly it is about selling something to oneself as well (which leads to another reason why we need different titles: there isn’t any one right answer on how to be a good marketer).
Partner marketing
One of the most basic marketing job titles is “marketing manager”. This is a very broad title and there are many sub-titles which may apply (e.g., “PR Manager”, “Marketing Director”, etc.) but for our purposes, we will use the term “marketing manager” to refer to the person who is responsible for all aspects of marketing.
This is an extremely important role in a startup and it needs to be filled with someone who can think strategically about the overall business and who has built a reputation for being successful at promoting products or services in new markets.
Product marketing
This is the first of two posts on marketing job titles.
The question I am going to ask is a simple one, but it’s one that tends to get asked a lot of people and gets very little discussion:
What are some marketing job titles? There are a lot of marketing jobs out there, but what are some marketing job titles?
I think the problem here is that people have been trained to associate certain kinds of jobs with certain kinds of job titles. When you go into advertising (or PR or whatever it is), you either know that they have certain kinds of jobs or you don’t. And if you do know what those kinds of jobs are, then you can be very precise in talking about your own fields. But that’s not really true for other industries — at least not yet. If you think about it, most modern industries have been created by someone who came up with an idea for a product and got hired as the first person to market that product. In our industry, we couldn’t possibly come up with an idea unless we were already well-known for being an industry leader in something else. So we just need to figure out how best to communicate our field’s value over time and how best to get people — especially potential employees — to understand why that value exists and why they should care about it.
Fortunately, there are a few useful ways forward here:
- There are tons and tons of words for various types of sales positions including “marketing director”, “business development director”, “advertising director”, etc (and I am sure there are some more interesting ones out there). But these aren’t really all-purpose terms; they don’t really capture anything beyond the literal meaning of their technical meaning. So why not use more general terms like “marketing manager? Or even better: “marketing person? Or even better still: “marketing coordinator? All these words have mutual connotations and can be used interchangeably in describing different roles (as long as they mean different things).
- A better way forward here is probably something like: “Product Marketing Manager – Builds pipelines and relationships between users and teams across the entire product lifecycle.
Collaborates with designers & developers for design direction & roadmap updates; monitors metrics & reports; plans & executes initiatives/projects; educates stakeholders.
Social media marketing
You can find job titles like “Head of Social Media”, “Social Media Director” and so on, but what if what you really want is a marketing role?
If you look at a list of typical marketing jobs, you will find that many of them are highly technical in nature. You might even see the words “social media” or “social media manager” in there. But those are not the actual titles that are used for these jobs. What people call them is different from what they actually do. So, I thought it would be interesting to compile a list of jobs for which we don’t have widely accepted definitions, but instead approach it as we would any other profession:
- Marketing: Marketing director (or vice president), marketer (or marketing manager), branding manager, brand manager…
- Business development: Business developer (or business analyst)…
- Sales: Sales representative…
These titles could definitely be considered marketing roles depending on their context and the problem being solved. For example, if you want to sell something to someone who already owns something similar already, go with a sales rep or sales director — but if you want to sell something new to someone who doesn’t have any experience with this type of product yet or has no experience with anything at all about this type of product yet, go for business development instead, Social media job titles.
A few words of caution here: these are not all bad things; they are simply not universally recognized as marketing roles in most cases. Some companies may use their own terminology that is unrelated to traditional marketing terms. In some cases, people may work on both sides — but it is usually true that people usually do one thing and one thing only; there tends to be little overlap between roles and responsibilities within businesses and between roles and responsibilities within businesses generally. So keep that in mind while reading this list (not necessarily while doing your resume).
Full list of common marketing roles
So, what are some marketing job titles?
A lot of the most common jobs in marketing are related to the one thing every company needs to do: market their product. In fact, there are so many great marketing jobs out there, it’s difficult to choose which ones to keep. There are simply too many and they vary from one company to the next.
So I’m going to go through this list of some of the most common (and hyped up) marketing roles (and then provide a couple of examples that fall into each category).
The first part is a list of just the more common ones. For those who want a more complete picture, I’ll also include a short description of each role and include links for other resources for those who want additional information about any particular marketing job title.
This will be updated periodically as new roles come out or new positions open up.
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