You are an innovative and strategic thinker—and when it comes to a marketing career, you’ve got your sights set on finding a role that can play to those strengths. While it’s fairly common to start out in a junior marketing specialist or marketing coordinator role, you want to have a better idea of what could potentially come after that as you advance further into a marketing career. In this field, advancement typically comes in one of two forms: elevating into leadership positions or specializing in niche areas.
Finding your ideal path forward in this field isn’t always easy, but it can certainly help to start early and begin learning more about some of the common marketing job titles and specialization areas that could be available to you. Once you have a better idea of what interests you, it becomes much easier to start charting a course for your future.
To help with this, we identified 12 marketing job titles that might intrigue you as you progress through your career. Keep reading to get a taste of the many paths you could pursue along your marketing career path.
12 Marketing job titles that could one day be yours
While this list is by no means comprehensive, the following marketing job titles could all put a Marketing Bachelor’s degree to good use. Let’s get started in identifying your potential “destinations” to strive for.
1. Market research analyst
Give people what they want. It may seem like a simple concept, but there’s a surprising depth and complexity that goes into figuring out what appeals to consumers. Market research analysts are responsible for compiling and making sense of the data needed to help determine what products or services people want and how much they’re willing to pay for them. They gather information through competitive research, surveys, focus groups and other tactics. They must then translate the data into actionable insights that help stakeholders make decisions. Explore more about Market research analyst in this article.
2. SEO specialist
Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about increasing the quantity and quality of a company’s organic web traffic through search engines, such as Google®, Bing®, YouTube® or Yahoo®. SEO specialists develop and implement strategies to improve the search rankings of an organization’s website.
Technical understanding and an awareness of how people think mix together to make SEO strategy stand out. These specialists research popular keywords related to their products or services and help infuse them into their web content in order to appear in the top of their potential customer’s search results. These specialists often work closely with web developers, user experience (UX) specialists, copywriters and other creative professionals to ensure technical specifications are met without compromising other site priorities—for example, the look and voice of a website.
3. Partner marketing manager
Peanut butter and jelly. Hot chocolate and marshmallows. At some point, these products stood alone until someone realized the potential of combining them. At the risk of underselling all that’s involved with this role, partner marketing managers are the team-up idea people. They work with outside organizations to create lucrative and mutually beneficial partnerships (sometimes called co-branding or co-marketing).
As an example, think of the successful pairing of Red Bull® with GoPro®. These two brands were working to establish themselves as part of an action-packed lifestyle. Working together to sponsor extreme sports events brings extra attention to both brands.
4. Public relations specialist
A public relations (PR) specialist’s role is similar to that of a communications manager. Their main objective is to secure and manage media coverage of their organization or its leaders in order to help create or maintain a positive reputation. Some ways of achieving this is through writing press releases, orchestrating press conferences, planning public events, and building relationships with publications and other influential individuals.
5. Brand manager
Think of your favorite fast-food chain. Despite hundreds of locations across the country, these places all have the same look and feel—whether it’s the uniforms the employees wear, the designs on the cups or colors used in their advertisements. A brand manager is the person responsible for building and maintaining that cohesive overall identity.
This includes building a brand framework to help ensure every piece of marketing material feels like it comes from one cohesive voice and overall look. Much of this role focuses on the creative elements used to build and position a brand and defining how they should be used. For example, brand style guides often have entire pages dedicated to the proper use and placement of logos or when to use certain typefaces or colors. That might seem strange to the uninitiated, but the big picture standards developed by brand managers help provide a source of truth to reference—which keeps creative work from veering “off brand.”
6. Product marketing manager
For every new product or service that is launched or updated, a product marketing manager is typically behind the scenes helping orchestrate all of the pieces that go into bringing it to market. Duties will vary greatly depending on the company or industry, but you’d typically be involved in decisions related to strategy, pricing, product positioning, target audience, messaging and branding.
7. Digital marketing specialist
Digital marketing is a broad term for a specific sector of the marketing field. Simply put, any online marketing tactic (email, websites, search engines, social media, etc.) falls under its umbrella. A professional with this job title likely has some knowledge in all of these areas, helping execute an organization’s online marketing strategy. Like internet usage itself, this subset of marketing has grown from a niche novelty to a massive piece of everyday life.
8. Communications manager
Communications managers are responsible for promoting a company’s products, services or overall mission to the public. Duties may include identifying press opportunities, publishing press releases, crafting newsletters, creating social media strategies or serving as a spokesperson on behalf of a company.
9. Content marketing specialist
Content marketing specialists are responsible for crafting and distributing helpful, relevant content for an identified audience. Content could be in the form of blog articles, newsletters, infographics, videos, quizzes, games and more. Content marketing tactics can drive traffic to a company’s website, build brand awareness and ultimately help drive sales.
10. Social media marketer
Social media marketers help manage and oversee an organization’s entire social media presence. They help devise and oversee the social strategy in order to attract new customers and engage with existing ones. This often includes crafting engaging posts, determining which platforms should be used for each message, responding to questions or comments from followers, promoting events or sales, creating and sharing promotions or coupons, and more.
11. Marketing automation specialist
Marketing automation refers to the technology or software that companies use to market to their audience on multiple channels, such as websites, email, chat, social media and more. While technology automates the outreach process, marketing automation specialists need to develop the strategy, monitor the software and analyze the results. Their objective is to help deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, with the ultimate goal of helping drive sales. Many marketing automation campaigns are tied directly to consumer or user behavior online—for example, sending a potential customer a 10-percent-off coupon a few days after they’ve added an item to their online shopping cart and subsequently abandoned it.
12. Copywriter
Do you have a way with words? Copywriting could be your calling! These creative professionals are responsible for telling the story of a brand, product or service by writing informative and engaging copy. While crafting punchy taglines like “I’m Lovin’ It®” or “Just Do It®” for multibillion dollar brands might be the focus of those at the upper echelons of copywriting, most have daily work that’s focused on the production of the huge variety of assets that may require copy. That can take the form of webpages, product packaging, brochures, fliers, emails, billboards and so much more—if it’s promoting something and it has words on it, there’s a good chance a copywriter was involved in its creation. This work requires a unique mix of creativity, consumer psychology and problem-solving ability as the space for their message is often limited.
Which marketing job titles catch your eye?
With such a wide variety of marketing job titles out there, there is a good chance you’ll be able to find an option that aligns with your skills and interests. That said, having an idea of where you’d like to take your marketing career is just a small piece of the plan—you’ll also need to have an education to help keep you on track. Also check out "what is a marketing technologist".
Visit the Rasmussen University Marketing degree page to learn more about how our flexible, fully online programs can help set the foundation for a career in this field.
Google and YouTube are registered trademarks of Google, LLC.
Bing is a registered trademark of Microsoft, Inc.
Yahoo is a registered trademark of Oath, Inc.
Red Bull is a registered trademark of Red Bull GmbH.
GoPro is a registered trademark of GoPro, Inc.
I’m Lovin’ It is a registered trademark of McDonalds Corporation.
Just Do It is a registered trademark of Nike, Inc.
