Are you considering pursuing or developing your marketing career in 2019 and chasing down one of your dream digital marketing jobs?

If so you are in luck, as the future for digital marketing jobs looks bright according to a recent CMO survey.  More specifically, key takeaways from the survey suggest that companies are interested in hiring marketers, as ‘the number of marketing hires is expected to increase by 6.4% with the largest changes anticipated in business to consumer (B2C) product companies, which is estimated to increase by 9.7%.’

If you are looking for a job in marketing and you are not sure where to start, the image below shows the percentage of companies where marketing activities are taking a leading role. Moreover, it highlights the many different types of companies that hire and continue to hire a large percentage of marketing professionals. Furthermore, there are many different areas, from branding to digital marketing, advertising, social media, public relations, and marketing research, to name a few, where a marketing professional could be gainfully employed.  

For aspiring marketers, there are a number of skills that it would pay to feature in your application. According to the CMO survey, highlighted in the following image (Exhibit 3), a top skill that job-seeking marketing candidates should focus on in their jobs applications is creativity. Other skills include natural leadership abilities and martech platform experience,  ranked as most important after creativity. Further, the CMO survey highlighted, martech platform experience to be considered more important for B2B firms compared to B2C firms.

Would be marketers should further consider looking for digital marketing jobs in various areas where marketing budget and demand is expected to grow, such areas would include social media, mobile, video, and marketing analytics. According to the CMO survey, social media spend has continued to grow since August 2014 and it grew more in the past year than in any other survey year since this metric was first measured in 2009. The spend on mobile marketing is also increasing, accounting for 9.4% of the overall marketing budget, up from 3.7% in February 2017. The mobile marketing budget spend is anticipated to increase to 18% on average over the next three years. Specifically, companies that have B2C services are anticipated to place the highest portion of their marketing budget towards mobile spend, which is expected to be at 26.1%. The marketing budget percentage spent on marketing analytics is anticipated to stay flat, surprisingly perhaps, as it has done since it was first measured in 2012, but the overall amount is expected to increase from 6.7% to 21.3% over the next three years.

Finally, aspiring marketers are encouraged to continue to grow their digital skills. Specifically, investing in digital media training courses would be a great way to learn and develop new skills and gain a competitive edge when competing for digital marketing jobs. Many companies are looking for talented marketers who they can develop into creative leaders and who have a strong knowledge of marketing, digital and are not afraid to learn new things.

Guest Blogger, Lina Poka:  “Lina built a very successful marketing career in Toronto, Canada before moving to Edinburgh and holds a BBA & an MBA from the prestigious Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, Canada; and for the past six years Lina has run her own marketing consulting company.  Lina’s career has enabled her to manage teams of up to 50 people, build numerous websites and apps with millions of visitors & downloads, work on a project for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, broker deals with huge American & Canadian retailers and receive numerous international marketing awards.”