If you scour marketing job sites, you'll always find a wide array of positions available. Some of these will require that you have a certain amount of experience and educational background, but there is also plenty of entry level marketing work that you can find, especially but not always with smaller firms. Some of the best entry level marketing jobs are those that are a combination of sales and marketing positions, but if you find after a while that you don't like sales you'll have a good amount of marketing experience and expertise under your belt and you can find a job that's purely marketing.
According to the 'Marketing Dictionary', "The classic components of marketing are the Four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion — the selection and development of the product, determination of price, selection and design of distribution channels (place), and all aspects of generating or enhancing demand for the product, including advertising (promotion)." Although people typically believe that marketing is just another word for advertising or sales, that's not true at all, even though the three different activities do, by all means, have some crossover with each other. Marketing comprises everything that a company does in order to acquire clients or buyers and maintain an ongoing positive relationship with them. Much of the "fun part" of marketing involves the little things that most people don't realize are so powerful in a serious, business way: the writing of thank-you notes, playing golf with a prospect or a client who may be offering your company some tremendous repeat business, returning telephone calls promptly, and taking a client out to lunch are all aspects, and highly important aspects, of marketing. In the end, marketing work is all about matching a company's products and services to the people who have a real need or serious desire for them. This begins with what is known as "targeting" and it's the way that any company gives itself the best chance to be profitable.
So, as a marketing professional, you first must select the product (or service) that you are going to get across to your clients and prospects. Marketing may involve selecting from a pool of already-made-available company products to target market to a particular prospect and client segment of consumers; or it may take part in coming up with a new product or service in order to enable the company to sell to a wider potential customer base. Clearly these activities require advanced creative and communications abilities. If you're in a cheese company's marketing department, you might help the company decide upon a better match of Mozzarella cheese with more clients. Perhaps your company has only been selling its Mozzarella to the Italian community, but you analyze your research data and conclude that the Irish community would also love the company's Mozzarella cheese. On the other hand, you might also attend some company meetings and decide that the company needs to come up with another proprietary blended cheese, because it's getting beaten by the competition in that niche even though your data shows a large local prospect base for such specialty cheese.
Next, you would help to figure out how much you're going to sell these cheeses for. This would entail more research such as online or by going to different stores in person and seeing for how much your competitors sell their cheese. You would also conduct research to find out how successful your competitors are with their selling at these prices, who buys the bulk of their cheese, national average pricing, and surveying to determine how much consumers are generally willing to spend on such and such a cheese. You also have to work with production department, management, and sales to ensure that you will make a profit on your cheese sales while selling them at the best possible price. Depending upon your position and also upon the company for which you work, there may be some variation in your duties but the basic requirements of the job will remain the same.
Once you have helped to select products and their pricing, you'll be in charge of helping to figure out where your company is going to sell them. The Mozzarella cheese that you want to sell to the Irish will need to be placed in some new stores or sold to some new Irish pubs, etc. The new specialty cheese may have to be sold to gourmet cheese shops or to supermarkets that have a gourmet cheese section, and so on.
And finally, the aspect of marketing that people are most familiar with: you'll help create the media and the message to make people aware that you offer these cheeses and get them interested in possibly buying them from you. It will be the sales force's job to close deals, and they will use your collateral materials to help them accomplish this. But you will coordinate and perhaps come up with the message and the advertising to be used to peak people's interest and awareness in the first place.
There are marketing professionals making six-figure incomes while doing what they find to be exciting and creative work. If you are a creative, communicative person who wants to provide a great life for his family, maybe marketing work is right for you.
