Marketing

[Stumpy81]

How tech savvy do you need to be to be successful at marketing? Are there flexible and part time roles available?

It's a huge field and much more specialised than people realise, but the short answer is almost all of it needs you to be quite tech-savvy.

If you are "the marketing person" or one of a small team, you'll generally need at least a working knowledge of website editing, email marketing software like mailchimp, google analytics. These are things you'd use 2-3 times a week. Design stuff - you might do it all on Canva or InDesign in house, or you might be working with external graphic designers but either way you still need to know your jpegs from your vector graphics and how to prepare a document for a commercial printers. Many companies will need you to do photo/video editing too.

Larger marketing teams might allow you to specialise a bit more so you don't have to be such a jack of all trades, but I've worked in marketing for years and pretty much the only aspect where I don't need to be particularly tech-y is copywriting. Everything else is digital.

I have worked in marketing and comms for years and indeed usually organisations expect you to do everything from designing posters/leaflets (using Canva, PhotoShop, inDesign), maintaining websites, social media, MailChimp as well as videos. My organisation also expect me to do internal comms and campaigning (it's a charity) on top!

This is one of the many reasons I want to leave the field. I have mainly worked for charities and you have to basically do the job of several people, the money is not always great and marketing budgets are always tiny. That said apparently doing marketing for other sectors like tech for example can be well paid.

You could try working in communications and PR instead if you are not a techie. You would need good copywriting skills and good communications skills but it would be mainly writing press releases, liaising with the media, PR crisis management and organising some events such as press launches rather than doing technical stuff.

What qualifications or experience do you have @Stumpy81 ? I work in a closely related field.

Oh yes the communications and PR sounds a lot more like where my personality and skills would lie. I have experience with managing a wedding venue and I do all the social media updating and making flyers with adobe spark and campaigns with Mailchimp but it’s all self taught. Can you recommend any courses where I can develop my skills? In terms of creating and hosting events. I am confident with this but no academic credentials.

Managing a wedding venue isn’t the same as comms and PR. What about going into event planing?

I’ve worked in the PR industry for +25y and don’t recruit based on courses (the uni degrees and courses in the field teach a lot of theory but not a lot of the practical stuff you need, most of the learning is on the job). Entry level is competitive and when you get a foot in the door with a decent agency with interesting clients, or for a good, interesting in-house role, junior positions aren’t well paid.

I’m not sure what your motivation is (money, flexibility, interesting role all come a few years in as you earn your stripes in comms/PR) but PR isn’t the glamorous, easy job you might think!

My motivation for a career change is, basically we have been at our farm for 13 years and created a business from it, into a wedding venue. So I haven’t just managed one, I’ve created one and also ran it. However unfortunately our landlord is old and our tenancy looks uncertain for the future, once his son takes over. I have a degree in sociology and also a PGCE and I taught sociology before the business took off. So I am looking for something to do if we cannot continue the business. I feel I have been out of teaching too long, especially with a theory based subject which changed with the times, to go back to it. I have enjoyed learning the marketing side of the business albeit it is very rudimentary. So basically I was looking for information on what the job was and entailed. I’m also considering Human Resources. I’m open to any suggestions. I’m not too keen on events management though.

OK, most businesses will need some kind of marketing (as you’ll know from your own event business) but a career in just that is something else and yea you would need to have a good grasp of tech to make the most of the channels needed to reach audiences.

Would you be open to something like being a virtual EA or similar? A friend has started a very successful business in this area and now has a number of people working for her (she’s kind of like an EA pimp! 😁). Your organisational and interpersonal skills would set you up really well for that I’d imagine.

Sounds like you'd be better in event marketing rather than generalised marketing which is quite strategic and yes, you'd need some technical skills too.

Sorry but what does EA stand for 🙈

Executive Assistant

Executive Assistant - needs plenty of organisation skills so if you can run weddings you should be golden!