5 Guaranteed Ways to Move Up in Your Marketing Career

As a marketer, your goal should always be to move forward and up if you want a long-lasting and fulfilling career. However, getting there is much easier said than done. Marketing is an incredibly competitive landscape, making it increasingly difficult to stand out and easy to feel stuck.

Nevertheless, highly-skilled marketers are always able to push their careers forward. They continuously evolve, learn new skills, and are incredibly motivated to work hard and become an exceptional marketer.

The Key to Growing Your Marketing Career to the Next Level

Marketing Recruiters Want You to Excel: Here’s How

Are you ready to move onto something bigger in your organization? How do you best approach your manager about taking on more responsibilities and getting promoted to a new role?

While it can be intimidating, any good leader should be encouraging and enthusiastic of you actively seeking to grow professionally. Here are some ways marketing recruiters advise marketers approach this conversation in order to advance their careers and get ahead.

Self-Assess

The first thing you should do is to self-evaluate your capabilities and motives to see if you’re truly prepared for a bigger role. Do you genuinely want to move up or do you solely want the weight of the title?

Any promotion will involve more responsibilities, so you must be prepared to take on challenges you’ve never had to deal with before. Assess if you’re currently mastering your current responsibilities and if you’re ready for the next level. If you’re not exceeding your current goals and performing above average, you’ll likely to stay in the same position until you can prove that you’re ready for more.

Have a solid yet flexible career path in mind and make sure the role you’re seeking aligns with it. Understanding your career path and the skill sets you need to get there are key to progressing in the right direction.

Take Advantage of Gaps

Assess the needs of your team. Are they being met or is there a shortage of resources preventing your team from successfully meeting goals?

Roles in organizations are created from needs. If you see any holes in your team you believe need to be created and that you can provide value to, speak up. Open up the opportunity for yourself and present your best case to your manager about why there’s a need for the role and why you’re the right person to fill it.

If you can prove that you understand what the parameters of the role would be, the type of value you can contribute in it and present the impact it would have on your team, your boss should see that promoting you would actually solve problems and improve efficiency.

Additionally, if you identify anything from a marketing perspective or a gap in the marketing strategy that’s never been discovered before, present it. Find a way to boost engagement through social or identify a new audience segment to target. This will set you apart from others who proceed with the same ordinary thinking and thought process – something that will hold you back in the marketing world.

Get Actively Involved

When you identify the role you want to go after, invest time in engaging more with your manager or someone in a similar position. This will give you a different perspective and insight into the job firsthand, and prove to your manager how eager you are to get it.

As you start to explore, ask to be involved with more projects to demonstrate your commitment to taking on more responsibilities. When you go into meetings with your manager and other leaders, think like the executive team and speak their language by offering valuable perspectives and ideas. Be over-prepared and confident about your points. You will progressively earn their trust and enhance your credibility if you offer knowledgeable insights.

Evaluate Annual Reviews

Are you exceeding your KPIs and goals in your current position? Are you getting excellent feedback on annual reviews?

Evaluate how your boss perceives your performance in your role. If he or she doesn’t believe that you’ve been mastering your current responsibilities, it’s going to be challenging to persuade them that you’re ready to move up.

However, if your boss has been saying you’ve been exceeding goals over an extensive amount of time, use that to prove that you can handle something bigger. Leverage your outstanding performance and quantifiable results to talk to your manager about where you want to take your career and the skills you’re looking to gain within the company to place you in the right direction of getting there.

Become a Lifelong Learner

As an experienced marketing talent agency, we continuously emphasize the importance of continuous learning as a key to progressing your career.

Identify an area where you want to develop skills and improve, and proactively take charge of expanding your skill set. Marketing isn’t easy and doesn’t slow down for anyone. Leaders want people who are highly eager to grow and who are willing to work hard to earn their spots. Going the extra mile and putting in more work than everyone else is the pathway to leadership and key to setting yourself apart.

Final Thoughts

Taking on a bigger role comes with greater challenges and responsibilities. However, the right position will be incredibly rewarding in accelerating the progression of your career.

In order to get your career moving forward and to earn that promotion, you must be willing to work for it. Don’t let the rapid pace and complexities of the marketing space hold you back. Take full control and direct your career path exactly the way you want it to be to get the most out of your opportunities.