Its very diverse. Most people dont realise and I often see people say 'I want to work in marketing'' which is about as specific as saying 'I want to work in IT'.

Even with advertising alone there is 1) buying it, 2) concepting the brand message 3) writing the specific content 4) creating how it looks 5) creating the material and 6) Placing it 7) project managing the process 8) analysing the results - all as separate fields.

And within above people can specialise in specific categories like online, above the line (e.g. billboards), below the line offline (e.g. snail mail), TV, sponsorship etc

And that's just getting ads live....

I googled 'types of marketing jobs' and read about 5 articles and they all have different guides about what makes marketing roles and none seems to cover it.... One article put sales in marketing which is a common misunderstanding of what marketing is, and several times I've seen companies put top sales management in charge of marketing because 'they can sell' which does not work as its a surprising different skill set.

But here's a couple of articles to cover the common areas;

https://www.localwise.com/a/313-21-types-of-marketing-jobs-t...

https://marketingwit.com/types-of-marketing-jobs

Or you could go with the sometimes tech view... the guys that play with crayons and waste money :)

> above the line (e.g. billboards), below the line offline (e.g. snail mail)

What is "the line"?

> What are ATL and BTL activities? They seem simple enough. Above The Line (ATL) advertising is where mass media is used to promote brands and reach out to the target consumers. These include conventional media as we know it, television and radio advertising, print as well as internet. This is communication that is targeted to a wider spread of audience, and is not specific to individual consumers. ATL advertising tries to reach out to the mass as consumer audience.

> Below the line (BTL) advertising is more one to one, and involves the distribution of pamphlets, handbills, stickers, promotions, brochures placed at point of sale, on the roads through banners and placards. It could also involve product demos and samplings at busy places like malls and market places or residential complexes.

http://www.theadvertisingclub.net/index.php/features/editori...

The line is the eyeline. If you’ve looking up - like a highway billboard, it’s ATL. If you’re looking down - at a brochure- it’s BTL.

Of course this definition is not exactly correct or exhaustive anymore, this is just the origin. Now it’s understood as defined by the other commentators.

Interesting, ut I didnt catch what “the line” is. is the terminology related to “above the fold” and “below the fold” from the print industry?

As a terminology aside online retail sales still uses “hard lines” and “soft lines” as product & organization categories!

I'm intrigued that a billboard is above the line, but banners and placards on the roads are below the line.

It has to do with reach - billboards are typically high-volume, low-specificity impressions while placards and banners are typically event-specific and have a lower, more targeted audiences. There's gray area, obviously, like billboards in airports.

> but banners and placards on the roads are below the line

I would include that as above the line. My understanding is ATL is for mass viewing. While BTL directly or reasonably targeted to the individual. I say 'reasonably' as often EDM/DM (emails and mailers) have broad targeting cohorts & elements but are considered BTL.

This is a good post, but OT I had not heard “concepting” before...

https://muddlesintomaxims.com/2016/02/27/verbing-weirds-lang...

Branding or brand strategy would have been better language/jargon... not that this helps with verbing!

Marketing can be super broad - but let's say you run a business that solves a problem for a specific type of customer.

A marketer would find your marketable database of potential customers, work on messaging that appeals to the needs of the different audience types, find ways to target these audiences through channels like email, search marketing, content/SEO, social, etc., allocate budget broadly to test the different channels, and then turn dials accordingly dependent on where marketing budget has the best return.

The daily tasks of this can be anything from producing new marketing collateral, testing new channel tactics, adjusting lead flow and lead distribution to a sales team, managing agency support, cozying up with PMs/engineers to get product features added, calm a sales manager who is pissy about why leads aren't flowing or being properly distributed, etc.

Advertising is a subset marketing, specifically the communication part. The rest of marketing includes pricing, positioning, customer personas, etc.

I would broadly describe my role as a 'marketer' and, in all honesty, I add nothing of any value to my clients.

It's a kind of wealth distribution, nothing more.

I've had jobs in the past where I've been paid more for doing less. I've also experienced the exact reverse. I think a lot of people are in denial because they haven't had the life experience where they can say the same?

> It's a kind of wealth distribution, nothing more.

If this is truly how you feel, why not try to add value for your clients instead of just taking the money and not contributing? I work in digital marketing and what I do, among other things involves:

- conducting split testing experiments to evaluate which types of marketing copy or site UX lead to better conversion

- evaluating client's web properties to improve SEO, things like semantic content layout, redirect types (301 v 302 etc), accessibility, logical information architecture

- writing code for custom event tracking, implementing schema-based markup for better search engine discoverability

- creating outreach campaigns via email, social and paid search channels, each of which requires has its own KPIs and require a fair amount of domain knowledge to implement and measure effectively

- analyzing search trend data to figure out if the product copy language is similar to what users are searching for

I've worked in client side businesses with marketing teams of 5-30 people, two of those in marketing. A lot of the day to day the marketing teams do is manage outside agencies who do the creative, ad-buying, events and present that up to the stakeholders. There obviously is strategy work which is pre-campaign and is what the more senior marketers do (even though this is the most emphasized part in uni.) There are a few more functions which are more likely to not be subcontracted like CRM (emails), content (blogs etc), analytics, social media management and corporate comms.

For your original question, the difference between this and advertising is an advertiser receives a brief and builds creatives appropriate to whatever channels they and the marketer choose.

This is my experience and a few marketers have disagreed with this - obviously it varies between companies.

Depends on the type of marketing, at a large corporation this is broken out into various functions as a lot of roles roll up into marketing. Some categories:

Advertising - digital, physical

Analytics - web traffic, roi analysis, data-mining, segmentation etc

Brand marketing - ads, identity / messaging, etc

Content - creating new content for the business around product/service to support promotional activity

Email - "subscribe to my newsletter", but at enterprise scale and managing content for the millions of subscribers you have

Product marketing - often a function in large enterprises, may be involved with things like messaging within a product

Web - website, seo, design, architecture, UX etc all fall under marketing

There's also a lot of functions that support many of these marketing roles, like the tech that powers all this, keeping things working smoothly, including integrations, compliance with stuff like GDPR, CASL etc

That's a little like asking "What does a blacksmith do? Is it different than making horseshoes?"

I know it was a "stupid" question. But, sometimes I do that in the hopes that someone will provide a guide to a better understanding of the topic. Plus, HN is a good place for anecdotal stuff and "war stories" that are hard to find on other parts of the WWW.

I think it's a fair question. It's not an industry you hear lots about day to day, so the average person has no idea what's involved other than "they make ads".

I've worked in large companies with 20+ person Marketing/PR departments and I'm not actually sure what their day to day job entails, and would totally be curious to know more. It's a major part of society these days, whether we love it or hate it. We all know IT has phone support roles, application development, system admins, project managers, etc... but I couldn't really tell you what all the different roles are in marketing.

Marketing is extremely technical these days, IMO. Learning to work with API's and even learning Python seems like it would really help anyone in most fields.