Marketing is a dynamic and rapidly growing field that provides opportunities for advancement. If you are ready to take the next step in your career, however, you may need to expand your skill set and add new degrees or credentials to your resume. You can accomplish both by seeking your Master of Business Administration.
While the MBA is often associated with finance, analytics, and accounting, it is a diverse degree program with opportunities for specialization. To uncover the MBA’s remarkable power within the marketing field, we explain which skills this program imparts and how these translate to careers in marketing. Along the way, we’ll answer a key question: “What jobs can I get with an MBA?”
Growing Your Career in Marketing With an MBA
Continuous learning is a must in the ever-evolving world of marketing. New trends and technologies call for constant skill development. If you want to truly improve your skill set, however, you may need to look beyond strictly marketing programs to explore broad-based opportunities such as the MBA. This could represent an amazing opportunity to expand your horizons, network with influential individuals, and, of course, add a highly respected credential to your resume.
The Need for Continuous Growth in Marketing
Marketing represents one of today’s fastest-changing fields, but this pace of change should not be intimidating. Rather, new concepts and technologies provide exciting ways to bring your creative visions to life. To make the most of these opportunities, however, you must keep up with every twist and turn, including changes in social media, branding, and even artificial intelligence.
A growth mindset can help, and this is best cultivated while seeking your MBA. While many marketing programs emphasize targeted training to get you caught up with the now, the MBA is a future-oriented (and, arguably, future-proof) degree that reveals how you can continue to expand your skill set after you’ve built a solid foundation. As you master MBA challenges, you will no longer shy away from change but rather embrace it.
The Value of an MBA for Marketing Professionals
The MBA is one of the most recognizable and respected graduate degrees, but it represents so much more than a simple piece of paper. This degree program offers numerous advantages from a marketing perspective. We’ve outlined several benefits below:
Increased Earning Potential
For many MBA candidates, the chief value of this degree lies in its ability to boost wages. Marketing professionals in particular earn considerably more when they secure graduate-level credentials and especially when equipped with a powerful degree such as the MBA.
The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) provides promising insight into the earning power of the MBA: For 2023, recruiters anticipated median starting base salaries of $125,000 per year. By comparison, those with their bachelor’s were expected to earn $75,000 in 2023.
Job Market Resilience
The marketing field has undergone major changes in the last several years, and as new technologies and trends emerge, it can be difficult to predict what’s next for marketing professionals. No one degree can provide full peace of mind, but there is no denying the resilience of the MBA over time.
Because this degree is so widely respected and promotes such a range of transferable skills, it can help you weather changes in the job market and pivot as needed. Even if marketing prospects remain promising, you can leverage your MBA to pursue new areas of passion as they emerge.
Career Advancement
A bachelor’s degree is typically sufficient for securing entry-level work in the marketing field — but what if you want to have more influence as a marketing professional? Your climb up the ladder could prove frustratingly slow if you lack a graduate degree. An MBA, however, can open doors, helping you move into a number of compelling leadership roles. Examples of jobs you can get with an MBA include:
- Marketing director
- Marketing manager
- Business development manager
- Brand manager
Flexibility/Adaptability
As marketing evolves, professionals at all levels must be prepared to embrace new opportunities. This might mean getting comfortable with emerging technologies or even pivoting into new roles or niches.
An MBA promotes career adaptability by encouraging well-rounded training in several relevant areas: organizational behavior, financial management, and quantitative decision analysis, to name a few. This comprehensive skill set makes it easier for marketing leaders to adapt as the industry evolves.
Versatility
Through exposure to new (and highly relevant concepts), MBA candidates can set themselves up for success in many fields, including not just digital marketing but also product development, project management, and business analytics.
Additionally, with experience, it is possible to move into marketing careers or niches that blend various elements of the business world — for instance, marketing analytics management or marketing finance management. Add opportunities spanning numerous industries, and it’s easy to see why marketing is so appealing to those with a desire for maximum career flexibility.
Competitiveness
Today’s top marketing professionals are fierce competitors who understand their ultimate goal is to outmaneuver business rivals. This drive underscores everything they do and, among MBA-trained marketing leaders, is evident purely based on the selection of their degree program. After all, the MBA is a highly esteemed degree that conveys a driven, passionate, and competitive mindset that will be useful in the dynamic world of marketing.
Cross-Functional Knowledge
Cross-functional skills are crucial in marketing and are thoroughly developed through comprehensive MBA coursework. For example, analytical concepts regularly enter the picture in marketing classes, and soft skills such as decision-making are part of courses on financial management. Through their interactions with a variety of students and professionals, MBA candidates also learn how to draw on the in-depth knowledge of others as they emphasize cross-functional teams and relationship-building.
Analytical and Data-Driven Approach
Data drives our modern economy and marketing is no exception. Increasingly, employers value analytical thinkers who can back innovative concepts with technical acumen and hard data. Later, we provide a more detailed look at how data analytics plays into modern marketing. In general, however, today’s marketing professionals can expect to blend creativity and communication with data-driven solutions.
10 MBA Skills to Elevate Your Marketing Career
Now that you recognize the value of the MBA, you realize this graduate program offers a purposeful approach to skill development and acquiring the field’s most in-demand technical and soft skills. As you enroll in an MBA program, you could expect to develop these career-boosting essentials:
1. Strategic Thinking
Strategic thinking represents a powerful mindset, in which a range of critical variables are carefully considered before arriving at nuanced decisions. This thought process is complex, in part, because it blends analytical competencies with management and communication skills. Leaders cannot accurately be referred to as strategic thinkers unless they bring a systematic approach to the problem-solving process, taking the time and effort to gather a wealth of information and question their assumptions.
2. Data Analysis
Data literacy is a must in many areas of management, and with such a strong focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics, it’s clear that data skills are the key to success for modern marketing campaigns. This is evident in feedback from employers surveyed by GMAC, too; while communication skills remain top of mind, most also make it clear that they prefer to work with professionals who have a solid grasp of data analytics.
In marketing, analytics offer powerful insights into how campaigns are run and which strategies have the greatest impact. MBA graduates should be comfortable using cutting-edge analytics solutions, which contribute to today’s most effective forecasting and visualization strategies.
3. Market Research
Not to be confused with data analytics, market research involves the purposeful effort to learn as much as possible about target consumers so that branding efforts and products or services can be developed accordingly. This is a central topic covered in marketing management coursework, but skills relevant to the market research project are also developed through courses that center around economics and even business ethics. Graduates come away knowing how to analyze and interpret marketing data — and how to draw on that information to inform targeted, consumer-centric marketing strategies.
4. Consumer Behavior
Data can tell us a lot about consumer trends and opportunities, but marketing professionals need to understand the why behind consumer behavior as well. This is best explored through marketing elective courses, which delve deep into the many factors that drive consumers. MBA candidates also learn how consumers can be influenced, drawing on a blend of qualitative and quantitative considerations to reveal how customers interact with various brands and what can be done to shape those interactions moving forward.
5. Financial Acumen
Budgetary concerns are a reality for every marketing professional, especially within marketing management. Leaders need to understand how limited budgetary resources can be allocated to produce the best possible return on investment (ROI). These critical skills are developed in courses centered around financial management and accounting. Graduates come away feeling more confident about essentials such as financial analysis, contract theory, and even managerial behavioral economics.
6. Leadership and Management
It’s obvious why leadership skills are important among aspiring marketing managers, but this can also be powerful within many niches and at all levels of the profession. Marketing analysts, for example, may need to align their work with overarching business goals, while content strategists oversee a variety of creative professionals while also working closely with clients and handling complex scheduling concerns. In MBA programs, leadership skills are developed through foundational coursework and practiced while completing targeted capstones.
7. Negotiation Skills
Marketing professionals are constantly negotiating everything from budget allocation to creative strategies. These negotiations may involve clients, executives, or marketing team members. While seeking their MBA, marketing leaders can become adept negotiators, gaining extensive practice through demanding projects plus fascinating discussions with faculty members or fellow MBA candidates.
Coursework delving into organizational behavior and social entrepreneurship explores the nuances of business communication and negotiation, allowing MBA candidates to practice these crucial skills and gain much-needed confidence along the way.
8. Innovation and Creativity
Marketing is an inherently creative field, but constraints are to be expected. To that end, the ideal graduate program would encourage creative expression as well as integrate practical concerns and opportunities to demonstrate what it’s like to apply a creative mindset in real-world environments. This can be expected while completing rigorous MBA programs, which also reveal how cutting-edge technological solutions will play into the creative opportunities of tomorrow.
9. Project Management
We have entered the age of the project economy, and these days, a project-oriented mindset is relevant across many business practices — including marketing. Project management skills help marketing managers identify key risks and opportunities while making the most of available resources, too. The marketing project manager’s goal — as is true with any form of project management — is to complete relevant projects on time, under budget, and within the approved scope.
Because project management plays an outsized role in today’s MBA programs, aspiring marketing managers gain an in-depth understanding of what exactly allows a project to succeed. Also encouraged is the development of relevant technical skills, such as quantitative decision analysis.
10. Problem-Solving
In marketing, every day brings new and unexpected challenges. Strong problem-solving skills allow those with high-powered MBA careers to view obstacles as opportunities. Strategic thinking plays heavily into problem-solving abilities, but marketing leaders must also be capable of taking decisive action and, when necessary, adjusting strategies that previously seemed prudent.
Within the context of the marketing team or department, problem-solving might mean stepping in to help team members resolve conflicts. In other situations, problem-solving means finding innovative ways to make the most of limited budgets or to ensure that projects are completed on time. MBA programs provide ample opportunities to practice problem-solving in its many manifestations and also within the narrower scope of marketing management.
Upskill With an MBA at UTC
Are you excited about the possibilities for advancing your career in marketing management? An MBA could take you far, providing confidence, leadership skills, and a huge boost for your resume. Learn more about UTC’s MBA program today, or get started with the application process.
