Marketing Mastery: Experience vs Education

If you’re in the market (pun intended) to hire a marketer, a marketing consultant, or a marketing firm/team, this read is for you. I’ll help you understand what you need to know about a marketing degree, or the lack of, in your choices.

I’ve seen a lot of marketing talent since my adult professional career began at 18, in 2000. I mean a LOT. I’ve seen a lot of different talents as well. Some marketing talents have very specific niche skills and others are very broad. There’s a lot of subsets of marketing so it’s easy to say a lot of people have a skill in something that’s under the umbrella of marketing. Here’s a challenge that I’ve noticed for many businesses: Experience vs Education. How important is it that my marketer has a marketing degree? How important is it that they have experience? What if I can’t get both?

What’s In A Degree?

To start, let’s briefly define what marketing is. It’s using strategy, pricing, advertising, promotion, and distribution to satisfy customer needs. It also includes researching those customer needs. Some marketers have experience in all of these areas, and some in just one or two. Sounds simple, right?

Now let’s talk about what a marketing degree means. Marketing programs consist of teaching people how to develop and manage relationships with customers, competitors, partners, suppliers, and any shareholder. This teaching is often focused on strong functional connections that exist between marketing & finance, accounting, operations, personnel, IT, business communications, etc. What it basically means is that these graduates have learned best practices, and that can give them a huge head start in the learning curve for marketing.

Now let’s talk about what a marketing degree means. Marketing programs consist of teaching people how to develop and manage relationships with customers, competitors, partners, suppliers, and any shareholder. This teaching is often focused on strong functional connections that exist between marketing & finance, accounting, operations, personnel, IT, business communications, etc. What it basically means is that these graduates have learned best practices, and that can give them a huge head start in the learning curve for marketing.

What Isn’t In A Degree?

One of the most important things you cannot teach is instinct. You have it or you don’t. That’s not trainable. I see many companies require marketers to have a marketing degree, but that doesn’t ensure instinct, experience, or a track record of success. On the flip side, hiring an experienced marketer without any experience in finance, international relations, operations, etc. could hurt. They may have the instinct, and track record, but they may struggle or need time to learn the other aspects important to marketing. What this basically means to you if you’re looking for a marketer or marketing help, is that a marketing degree shouldn’t be required, but it shouldn’t be dismissed either.

I suggest to find out what their history has been in marketing and use their references as a measurement of their success. I have clients available for references for other clients for just this purpose alone. If you really want to determine my efficacy, call someone I worked with. Note that I did not get my marketing degree. I studied social psychology instead. I had the instinct and the experience and that particular study helped catapult the two, but it doesn’t mean the same is true for another candidate.

How To Decide

So how do you decide which is better for your needs? A marketing degree candidate, or an experienced one? What I’ve noticed, since I work with mostly small businesses under 50 employees, is that having a marketing degree can lead to a learning curve. Small businesses have much smaller budgets and need completely different approaches to their marketing than what’s taught in the program. An advantage for someone with a marketing degree, or a lot of experience, for small businesses is that they can help with the other relationships and operations within the company. How to decide is the ask questions. The right questions.

Here are questions I recommend asking candidates for marketing consulting and/or marketing positions. These are regardless if the individual has a marketing degree or not:

• Can you provide references? – These should be people they’ve worked with, trained, helped, etc in a capacity related to the industry of marketing. I prefer 2-3 at least to get a better sense of what people say about this candidate/consultant.
• How long have you been in the industry? – Find out how long they’ve been doing marketing and for whom. What was their job description?
• Where have your clients been located? – Are their clients mainly local or spread out? How much experience do they have with international relationship building? How much experience do they have in dealing with their own communities?
• What industries have you worked with? – If they’ve worked with a variety of industries, they are probably more experienced in having done more of the subsets of marketing, instead of just social media marketing, or just print advertising.
• What other industries do you have significant experience in? – What are their other industries and do they complement marketing? Do they have any experience in international relations, operations, accounting/finance?
• What drove you to pursue a marketing career? – The “why” has always been super important for me. You can really weed out the people who have a passion for marketing vs the people who did it because of a much less passionate reason.
• What is your education level, and why? – Some great marketers never went to college at all. Some received a Doctorate. Find out if they have a degree and if so, in what. Find out why they left college or never went. It doesn’t mean they’re less qualified or skilled. Some of the best consultants I’ve ever worked with were college dropouts that continued to ‘work’ themselves out of jobs.
• What are your 3 strongest marketing skillsets? – This can help you determine if someone is the right ‘fit’. Mine, for example, would be 1) content writing 2) emotional marketing strategies 3) target audience marketing. Ask questions about what their skill sets are and how it will benefit you in your organization.

A few notes to consider are to respect privacy! Many clients will have NDA’s so that someone like me cannot share their operations and business details with any other client/person. If someone is in my position and they are limited with what details they’re able to give you, respect that and try to work around it as much as possible to obtain the answers for the questions above.

Wrapping Up

If you’re still interested in learning more, and you’d like a FANTASTIC read, check out ‘20 Things Every Graduating Marketing Student Needs to Know‘. It’s one of the better marketing blogs out there for marketing degree hopefuls and grads. It will help put more perspective on what’s important and what’s not, so you can pick the best candidate for your marketing needs if you’re a company reading this. If you have additional questions, Let’s Chat! I love conversations like these.