Which Industry is Best for Marketing Jobs?

The opportunity to advance their career is very important for fashion retailers (72.2%), entertainment (72%), and retailers and wholesalers (71.3%). However, the best industries to help marketers progress are beauty (69%), gaming and gambling (67.9%), and telecommunications (65.6%). What is your highest level of education completed? What is your highest educational level? Another big industry in which to pursue a career in marketing is the education industry, which, according to the CMO survey, spends 12% of total revenue on marketing. The education industry includes all schools, colleges and universities, including the fast-growing online education market.

The expected growth of marketing jobs in this industry for the next 12 months is 5%. A marketing career that applies within this industry, particularly as the online education market continues to grow, is that of a social media strategist who is responsible for a company's social media marketing efforts and presence. Social media strategists have extensive knowledge of the various social media platforms and create personalized content that will successfully reach the target market. Start with Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology.

A brand manager oversees all aspects of communication, both internal and external, and brings to life the brand personality of a company or product line. A brand persona is a collection of customer messages and experiences, and carries the narrative of a company (the kind of thing you saw on the “About” page 10 years ago) across all platforms. A brand manager is responsible for maintaining all of those aspects of a brand person at once. Working in brand management is partly creative work, but it is also partly project management.

Adrienne Todd, communications manager at Celonis, a process mining company, says brand management requires organizational skills and experience to motivate and incentivize co-workers in different departments. Getting into brand management is almost impossible without marketing experience, but if you're already a marketer looking to move up, volunteer for corporate strategy projects in your office. When you're interviewing for a brand manager position, you'll want to be able to point out several scenarios where you put out a fire for a company, reworked a brand's message to appease a specific audience, or developed a project with several team members. Let's say, for example, that you work at Walmart and your team is tasked with launching a new blog for customers.

As an analyst, you can dig into the anonymous data collected by the brand's web team, find that the majority of people who read about Walmart products are women in their 30s and 50s, and notice that most users tend to read during the day. I could conclude that Walmart's new blog should be aimed, in part, at stay-at-home mothers, in which case it would present its findings to the team and get them excited about this new target demographic. The e-commerce marketing director is a job that assumes the role of a marketing director, manages an organization's overall marketing efforts, and applies it directly to online stores and marketing. This marketing strategy may require a new advertising campaign, the development of new products or the elaboration of a new vision for the brand.

A marketing degree may seem appropriate if you're applying for a content marketing job, but believe it or not, you'll be even more attractive as a candidate with a degree in literature or creative writing. The tactics used to target the market and the channels to which marketing messages are sent are very different depending on the industry in which marketers work. Social media marketing is another new marketing avenue that has paved the way for its own specialists and experts. Brand managers are also responsible for guiding the market research team by setting the agenda and criteria, and also selecting stimuli, such as product benefit statements, images, product samples, and video clips.

If you're a marketer and expert writer, you may still need an education in brand storytelling before your content marketing career takes off. Whether you see yourself directing marketing for a large company or overseeing a portfolio of clients you assist with marketing efforts, you'll find that jobs in marketing and advertising can be very financially rewarding. Marketing and promotion campaigns are essential for all companies, regardless of industry, as organizations seek to grow and maintain their market share. The responsibilities of a CRO marketer include auditing content to measure effectiveness and ROI, influencing content creation to ensure impact, measuring the way visitors and readers interact with your content, and using this data to optimize performance.

As long as there are companies that want to sell products and services, there will be a demand for marketing and advertising professionals. It's a naturally more captive and curious audience, and email marketers who know how to take advantage of the opportunity to connect with users in their inboxes can do very well on their own. The marketing industry is eager for professionals who love learning new skills, using data to inform their work, and collaborate with colleagues in other departments. The CMO survey reported that this industry spends 8.3% of total revenue on marketing and has projected marketing position growth of 19.2% over the next 12 months, making it the fastest-growing industry for marketing jobs.

Below are some of the top industries that spend the largest percentage of their revenue on marketing or that forecast the largest increases in marketing job growth in the next 12 months according to CMO survey: beauty (69%), gaming & gambling (67.9%), telecommunications (65.6%), education (12%), e-commerce (8%).

Kelli Roswick
Kelli Roswick

Amateur twitter geek. Proud music expert. Professional travel geek. Avid music practitioner. Proud beer expert. Typical bacon scholar.