Traditionally marketing professionals were seen as those responsible for the four P’s promotion, pricing, product and placement. While this still remains true today, the role of the modern marketer has evolved to become a vital part of any organisation that embraces both traditional and digital methods of marketing.
Marketing is an exciting field to explore because it offers a wide variety of career paths in different industries. This includes working in areas such as brand management, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, digital advertising, copywriting plus many more. The marketing industry is vast and grows every year.
Contents
- 1 What are the Best Degrees for Marketing?
- 2 How to Get a Job in Marketing with a Maths Degree
- 3 How to Prepare Yourself for a Career in Marketing?
- 4 Where to Learn Marketing?
- 5 Getting Work Experience in Marketing as a Maths Graduate
- 6 Applying for Marketing Jobs
- 7 Freelance in Marketing With Your Skills
What are the Best Degrees for Marketing?
The field of marketing is one of the most popular in the business world. It is also one of the most competitive.
Whilst a degree can set you apart from other candidates when applying for jobs, they are not a guarantee of success in the job interview process.
Marketing professionals need to be many things such as creative, innovative, adaptable and hungry to learn and embrace new technologies. A degree is a fantastic way to kickstart your career but do not forget about the personal qualities employers look for.
The most obvious degree to support you entering the marketing industry is a degree in marketing. Someone who has graduated in marketing should have solid knowledge and appreciation for the basic concepts of marketing and understand a wide variety of marketing-related skills.
A degree in English can be advantageous for those looking to enter the world of copywriting, blogging, PR or social media marketing. We discuss this further in our article How to Get Into Marketing With an English Degree.
A degree in Maths can be useful for those looking to work in the technical side of marketing, such as analysing the performance of websites and e-commerce stores or analysing the effectiveness of campaigns. Marketing is a very data-driven industry and good numeracy and analytical skills are in-demand skills.
Relatively speaking, having a degree in any field can be seen as a positive when looking to enter marketing at an entry-level. Someone with a degree could be expected to have a high level of intelligence along with developed skills in academic writing, research and reporting, among other traits that are useful in the world of marketing.
How to Get a Job in Marketing with a Maths Degree
Marketing might not be the obvious choice for someone with an interest in mathematics, but by researching the different elements of the marketing industry, maths enthusiasts might be surprised by the roles available requiring data analysis skills.
For those looking to continue to work predominantly around the world of data, they should look for roles involving campaign management, CRM management and data analytics.
For those with a mathematics background that want to step into the more creative side of the marketing industry, such as social media or copywriting, it would be advisable that you go away to research and learn what it means to work as a professional in these areas, and any other marketing areas that pique your interest. Further in this article, we share great locations where you can learn marketing.
A lot of companies will look favourable on someone with a maths degree, you don’t get one of those without a serious amount of brains! But a degree alone won’t guarantee you a job in marketing, there are additional steps you should take to prepare yourself for finding jobs that interest you and applying for them.
You might like our articles: How To Get Into Marketing Without Any Experience & How to Become a Marketing Manager With No Marketing Experience.
A good place to start when looking for work in marketing is to know what kind of work you are looking for, what you have to offer and what employers are specifically looking for.
Those with purely a maths background will likely find gaps in their overall skill set when looking at marketing roles that require covering a wide spectrum of marketing duties. Before applying for these kinds of roles you should do as much learning as possible about marketing, certainly enough to sound confident and competent in a job interview.
How to Prepare Yourself for a Career in Marketing?
Marketing requires a lot of skills to be successful in the field. The first steps you should take is to identify your strengths and weaknesses and identify the areas you need to improve on.
Look for marketing jobs advertised online and read the criteria for what they are looking for in an ideal candidate. See how closely you match the criteria now and what you would feel confident demonstrating in a job interview. Create a plan to develop the other areas where you need to learn or experience more.
When you are browsing marketing jobs online you will no doubt realise the wide variety of jobs that exist in the field of marketing. Look through all different kinds of job descriptions and see which ones appeal to you most.
Marketing jobs best suited to maths graduates are ones that involve managing and analysing data. This could be tracking the performance of an e-commerce store, managing a company’s affiliate programmes or analysing the performance of marketing campaigns.
Where to Learn Marketing?
As a quick reference, the below resources are great places to build your marketing knowledge:
YouTube (!)
Hubspot has even put together a great article – 50 Free Online Marketing Classes to Take This Year.
Getting Work Experience in Marketing as a Maths Graduate
The best way to learn how to work in marketing is by getting hands-on experience. There are many ways that you can get this experience, such as internships and volunteering.
Volunteering is a great way to gain valuable skills and experience while also giving back to the community. You could offer to volunteer with a local marketing agency or any local community groups or charities that would be thankful for the help.
An internship is another great way for someone who wants work experience in marketing. Internships provide an opportunity for students or recent graduates to learn about different aspects of the field and get exposure in their desired industry.
Look to use these experiences as an opportunity to learn what it takes to run marketing campaigns and the individual skills that are required to complete individual tasks.
Getting work experience in marketing is a great way to strengthen your resume/CV and shows prospective employers that you are passionate and motivated to work within marketing. However, unpaid work is not a luxury everyone can partake in.
If you are already in employment, see if there are volunteering opportunities you could do in the evenings or weekends, or even enquire about any marketing opportunities at your current employer.
Work experience will be highly desirable and essential for marketing roles that require a level of experience. But for entry-level positions, the right candidate could see success by combining their degree with their own learning around marketing and demonstrating a genuine passion, enthusiasm and understanding of the marketing industry during the job application process.
Applying for Marketing Jobs
Once you have chosen the area of marketing that appeals most to you and have understood and learned the requirements of these job roles, you are now in a position to begin searching for jobs.
The first step in applying for a marketing job is to research the company. Once you have an idea of what they are looking for, you can tailor your resume and cover letter accordingly.
You should also make sure that your resume and cover letter are up-to-date and tailored specifically for the company that you are applying to work for.
As a maths graduate you might have some fantastic qualities, experience and education to refer to in your job application, but don’t forget that it is a marketing job you are applying for, so look to highlight and demonstrate how you can meet the criteria laid out in the job description.
Top Tip: As someone looking to break into the marketing world why not put together a digital portfolio of marketing content? This could be for fictional businesses or ones you have volunteered with. You could link to this portfolio on your resume or cover letter and it could include content tailored to what that job role is looking for.
Without developing any prior marketing experience, maths graduates may find it a tougher challenge in acquiring work in more content-driven marketing roles such as copywriting, social media and PR.
Freelance in Marketing With Your Skills
Going freelance with your maths skills in the world of marketing can be challenging as smaller businesses that would usually work with freelancers are likely to be more inclined towards hiring freelancers for the purposes of content creation.
However, by going freelance you will provide yourself with the opportunity to earn extra money, develop your skills, offer flexibility in your life, and earn experience that you could then use later in attaining full-time employment.
Getting started with freelance marketing is easier than ever thanks to platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork.
These two platforms offer you a way into acquiring customers however they are very popular platforms with a lot of competition on there. Before joining check what services other people are offering in marketing, how they promote themselves and what they charge for their services.
Certain services on these platforms can be very price-driven, so people looking to start on there should be realistic about their potential earnings, to begin with.
Freelance in Marketing Locally
Freelance marketing is a great way to make money in your local area. You can work for local businesses and people, which means you can stay close to home and work from the comfort of your own home.
It is important that you have the skills necessary for the type of marketing that you want to do. For example, if you want to be a copywriter you need to be confident and competent in producing text for a variety of purposes and a variety of industries. For more technical skills such as pay per click advertising or SEO, you need to have access to the right tools in order to achieve this.
To begin with, you might want to start with smaller clients in order to build your portfolio and confidence. You might consider starting with a lower pricing structure when starting out in order to build a portfolio, case studies and testimonials.
It is important that you know how to market yourself as a freelancer in order to win business and also how to identify potential clients and go about approaching them.
