Marketing is an area of study which is ever evolving. It is a quite recent area of study which touches upon many other fields such as psychology or design.

At university, you will cover the fundamentals and the marketing practice from a theoretical perspective. However, it is good to expand on that knowledge by developing other skills which are essential to marketers.

The degree has a low number of scheduled hours which gives you the freedom to organise your time to do other activities which can build on your CV and work experience.

In this blog, I will cover some of these skills and how I have developed them while at university.

Content Creation

Marketers are involved in many aspects of communication. Usually, organisations reach consumer through different channels which require different media. As a marketer it is good to familiarise yourself with different forms of content creation and how that content is then presented to consumers.

I started by managing the Facebook page for a company. This allowed me to create posts and track their performance: What times worked best? What type of content? What audience was I reaching?

At university there are many opportunities to manage the social media of a group. For starters, societies. All societies have a social media officer who oversees communicating all classes, partnerships and events.

Data Analysis

Marketing involves a high level of data collection from all your marketing efforts, campaigns, partners, and projects. This is used to monitor the campaign or strategy to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

The degree (BSc Marketing Management) offers a marketing research module in second year which covers the marketing research process. However, it is a skill that you may want to further develop.

Google offers a wide range of courses, including data analytics. At an even more practical level it is good to learn how to use Excel (not currently taught in the degree I’m taking) to analyse data as most companies use this program.

Website Development/Design

For one of my internships, one of my tasks was to update the website and make minor changes. This website had been done in WordPress and it was an intuitive platform to use. As WordPress is widely used, most of my questions were just one google search away.

Now, I am working on developing a website to include in a marketing portfolio should I need one in the future.

If you want to have the freedom to be more creative when designing and want to understand how the interface works, you should learn programming languages such as JavaScript, CSS and HTML. I personally have not learned them but if it something you are interested in there are many online courses to get started.

This is just a glimpse of what you can learn on your own. There are many skills that you can develop as a marketer depending on the career path you wish to undertake.

If you need help while doing your degree do not hesitate to contact the careers team or your lecturers. They have always been really helpful to me and have given me the support I needed.

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The opinions expressed by our bloggers and those providing comments are personal, and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lancaster University. Responsibility for the accuracy of any of the information contained within blog posts belongs to the blogger.