Professor Michael Buchanan‘s two Bridge to Business sessions on marketing basics and digital marketing helped me to better understand my own interest in a career in marketing.
Tactics, Strategy, Objectives, Goals
During his lectures, Professor Buchanan outlined how marketing elements come together to create a greater strategy. He explained that the lowest element in marketing is tactics, which include tasks like running social media or generating newsletters. Tactics support marketing strategy, which is the theory behind a target market. In turn, strategy supports objectives, which measure what a firm would like to accomplish. Objectives ultimately support goals, which are the highest level of the marketing strategy. During the course of the lectures, I learned that my first job in marketing may be more focused on tactics, but that ultimately, my promotions will likely follow this chain upwards into the more strategic marketing.
Marketing Tactics Experience
During these sessions, I was able to insert my existing marketing experiences from my internship with the Dahlonega Lumpkin Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau into a larger theoretical framework. I realized that my internship had been highly tactical, like many entry-level positions, because it focused primarily on managing social media, graphic design, data analytics, and newsletter campaigns. As a result of these two lecture sessions, I felt even more confident that my internship experience had prepared me for tactical entry-level digital marketing positions.
Strategy Mindset
When Professor Buchanan advised us on the value of critical questioning in marketing, I realized that my critical thinking and analytical skills from my degree in Women’s Studies were incredibly applicable to marketing strategy. Because of this skill set, identifying a firm’s company, customer, collaborator, competition, and context (five C’s) came very naturally to me. My liberal arts background also provided me with the strategic background necessary to feel confident generating customer personas, meaning profiled to represent key attributes that are specific to a target demographic.
Through these two marketing sesssions I realized that my internhsip experiences had helped me to bolster my tactical marketing skills, while my liberal arts education had helped me to build my strategic marketing skills.
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