Whether we realize it or not, we spend time each day engaging in activities that could be defined as marketing. This includes activities like deciding what holiday photo to post on Instagram, what clothes we wear to our work meeting, and how we sign off on each of our emails.
Every thought and action we put into curating our personal image and brand is a form of marketing. Regardless of what industry you work in or what role you serve, as workplaces become more digital and we spend more of our professional and personal lives online, the role of marketing has become more and more prevalent in each of our lives…whether we know it or not.
Whether we are working on branding a new department, segmenting candidates after a recruiting fair, or even developing a new sales strategy deck, the skills that are often taught in Marketing courses are usually relevant in many careers, even those that don’t seem to have much to do with marketing.
Having marketing skills can help you find success in your chosen profession and maximize your opportunities.
Often, professionals who are not trained in Marketing, learn skills like analytics, communication, advertising “on the job”. While this can be great experience and a good way to learn, there are also benefits to formal training in the form of a classroom course.
Consider these five reasons why you should take a course in marketing.
You Will Better Understand The Power Of Interpersonal Communication And Social Media
Attending a course on marketing, particular a course that focuses specifically on communication or social media marketing, will allow you to see the power, reach and impact of social media on our everyday lives.
Social media has become an incredibly important marketing tool for companies, with their customers, prospects, board members and even competitors seeing some form of marketing every time they scroll through their news feed.
Social media has changed the way we interact, the way we consume news, and the way we share information. It has become a new channel where customers can seek support from companies. It is a new way for users of products and services to express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
It has become our database of knowledge for understanding how to set up that new tool or cook that new recipe. As humans, we are using social media to communicate with people that we might have never met, without the Internet and tools like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Understanding how to harness this power is vital in most industries, even those that are not necessarily tech-related. For example, if you work in fashion, Instagram can be a great tool for seeing trends by looking at influencers, celebrities and clothing brands.
If you work in banking, you can use social media to keep up-to-date with certain financial markets and key players in the industry. Lawyers are able to research case study and seek opinions from other attorneys in different states or regions. Even manufacturers of goods can monitor social media to generate new ideas or improvements to their products.
With that in mind, it’s hard to identify any industry, or professional that wouldn’t benefit from additional training specific to social media.
You’ll Learn New Digital Skills
In addition to learning about the power of social media, completing a formal course in marketing gives you the opportunity to learn new digital skills that can help you in many different areas. Technological advancements in the digital age means that there are now tools online that can help us to understand how other people are using the internet.
Even those who took a Marketing class 10 or even 20 years ago could benefit from the continued learning that comes from understanding new advancements in the industry.
Tools like Google Analytics and the Google Search Console allow you to have an insight into different audiences and how different demographics respond to certain content.
Email tools like Mailchimp or digital advertising via Facebook Ads or Google AdWords are technologies that allow you to expand your reach to a broader, yet more targeted audiences.
A course in marketing will give you the skills you need to use these tools, gather data about how your audience responds to your messaging, interpret and read this data, and act accordingly. This will help to improve your critical thinking and analytical skills, while giving you a better understanding of navigating online spaces and the importance of different data when it comes to using the internet to serve your customer base.
You Will Gain More Insight Into Your Industry
Part of working in the marketing industry means staying up-to-date with what is going on around you in the world of messaging, technology, and human behavior.
Marketers need to continually evaluate and re-evaluate what strategies different brands are using and what is going on in the world that may be relevant to their target audience. Keeping your pulse on current events and understanding how they might impact your organizational growth, sales numbers, customer support calls, or employee satisfaction is an essential skill that every business professional can benefit from, whether you’re a new employee just getting started in your career or a seasoned CEO working in the boardroom.
Being aware of shifts in your industry allows you to be prepared for changes and to know what opportunities might be forthcoming and what risks might be worth taking. The more involved you are in your industry, the more likely you to find success and to leverage relationships. Completing a marketing course can help you gain critical analysis and evaluation skills, while helping you become a more effective ‘listener’.
A Course In Marketing Can Help You Better Understand Others
Whether your a business owner, a salesman, a teacher or a hairdresser, understanding what the person you are working with is thinking is essential for having a successful interaction. In the workplace, being able to read other people gives you a better grasp of difficult situations and helps in avoiding conflict. In a business setting, know what the customer wants is crucial to getting a sale and making a profit.
Marketing is all about showing a potential customer or client why they should do something and, in order to tap into this, you need to know the customer so well that whatever you are selling practically sells itself. Before selling anything to anyone, you need to already have clearly formulated the value that your product or service will provide to those you serve.
You need to be prepared to answer any questions or concerns. You need to have thought about every aspect of evaluating your product from the customer point of view.
Often times, a Marketing course gives you the strategies you need to evaluate the “why” behind why people might want to buy your product or use your service. Marketing courses often help us understand the psychology behind why people buy certain goods and choose certain services and why they avoid others.
A formal course can help you to make sense of how people of different ages, genders, cultures, backgrounds and budgets might respond to certain products. For this reason, it will help you in a social sense because you will have more of an insight into how different people work and this will show in the way you interact with others. It can help in giving you more empathy in your day-to-day life.
You Can Enhance Your Communication Skills
A Marketing course often helps students better understand people. After all, buying and selling is often an activity based on relationships and relationships are built from communication.
Learning how to better communicate with others, including your customers and your boss, can help you become a better listener and a better communicator, allowing you to prepare for a crisis or a tough or awkward situation.
Communication can also help you in your negotiation, a skill that every employee should posses. Whether you are leading a project, asking for a raise, or bucking for that next promotion, the ability to communicate value, negotiate, and compromise are skills that anyone can benefit from.
We all know that every job requires you to deal with difficult people at some point and knowing how to communicate in a way that makes the other person feel good can be the difference between a successful meeting and a failed deal.
There you have it! While there are definitely more than five great reasons to take a marketing course, I feel that these are skills that every professional can benefit from.
Have thoughts on Jade’s reasons? Have experience going back to school and taking a formal Marketing course? If so, be sure to share them in a comment.
–Sean
Branding By8
Thursday 16th of January 2020
Nice Post, great experience you have shared here.