When I graduated with a marketing degree, most of my family and friends thought I would be telemarketing. A few others thought I would be creating TV ads.
To them, there was nothing else in marketing. (I clearly didn’t know many marketing professionals in those days). In fairness, I didn’t 100% understand what I would be doing day-to-day either at that point.
In reality, there are many functions under the marketing umbrella and it continues to change rapidly. All areas of business have multiple functions, but for some reason, it’s tough for many non-marketers to wrap their head around the fact that “the marketing person” can’t just do everything “in marketing”. Many people truly don't understand what all goes into it.
Most marketers have to be a unicorn.
Marketers wear many hats and have big, customer-facing responsibilities. And contrary to what some may believe, the marketers get stressed out. Big time. And we care. A lot.
Let’s take a social media manager as an example. To run social media well for an organization, one needs to regularly study various social platforms. They need to know what can be done on the channel, what their specific audience wants from that channel, and what the business has that would be valuable to the customer in that channel. They also:
Need to think about the customer journey to determine where their audience is when they consume the content the business is serving and where that individual should go next (ie. know what they’re trying to fucking accomplish).
They need to know about paid and organic social strategies and when to use each (See "knowing what they're trying to fucking accomplish" above).
They probably need to be a decent copywriter.
At a minimum, they need to direct the creative team. If they don’t have creative resources to help, they need to be creative.
They need to learn some decent video and photo editing skills
They need to determine what success looks like for each effort according to what they're trying to fucking accomplish above and set up posts to be tracked so they can measure success.
Then they need to have analytical skills to review data and pull insights back into their ongoing plan.
Oh, and they need to be incredibly organized and create a detailed communications plan. They then need to execute that beautiful plan.
In other words, this individual has to be creative, analytical, smart and extremely organized all at the same time.
You can wash, rinse, and repeat most of the items above for other areas of marketing - email manager, MMS / SMS manager, website manager, content manager, event manager, etc. Then you have areas in marketing like overall brand strategy, research, pricing, promotion, customer loyalty, creative design for many and various mediums, user experience, user interface (web and mobile), copywriting, selecting, setting up, integrating and maintaining all of the marketing systems and technologies, web development, integrated analytics and insights, maybe merchandising, and so on.
The fucking point is that, while it's not brain surgery or rocket science, marketing is still complex.
And, like any good team, it requires many individuals with distinct, valuable skills to make the business successful. So odds are, the one “marketing person” can’t - or better yet shouldn’t - do it all. And yes, there is a good chance that you might really need another marketing person.
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