Last Updated: December 8, 2020

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  2. Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU)

    Explore the bond between business and consumer behavior with a degree in marketing.

If you’ve always wondered why most products end in $.99 instead of rounding up, or how companies seem to know what you want before you do, a career in marketing might be for you.

Marketers are business professionals who employ these, and many more, strategies we encounter in our every day lives. These experts explore pricing trends, market data, buyer behavior, and practice professional salesmanship that allows them to suggest marketing and promotional techniques to increase profits at the companies they work for.

These suggestions don’t come lightly, however. Embarking on marketing campaigns is an expensive venture, meaning businesses place a lot of trust in the expertise and education of their marketing personnel.

In order to gain this expertise in the first place, marketing professional enter bachelor’s degree programs focused in marketing. In a marketing program, students encounter numerous opportunities to build up their skills, advance their careers, and introduce themselves to professionals in the field.

What will I learn?

By entering a bachelor’s degree program in marketing, you can expect to gain essential business management and market interpretation skills that will help you in your future career. Whether you’re creating mock promotional campaigns or researching case studies featuring effective advertising strategies, all bachelor’s programs will introduce you to opportunities to make you stand out from your peers.

Bachelor's Degree Facts

  • Those with bachelor’s degrees average weekly earnings of $1,156, roughly $464 more than those with high school diplomas or GEDs.
  • In 2016, the unemployment rate with those less than a high school diploma was 7.4%, compared to 2.7% for those with bachelor’s degrees.

Source: Allen Chen, “More education: Lower unemployment, higher earnings,” Career Outlook, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2017.

Marketing focuses on building relationships between consumers and businesses requiring you to develop a range of interpersonal communication skills explored in bachelor’s programs. Some other skills you’ll master include:

  • Identifying consumer needs
  • Developing products to meet demands
  • Promoting products, services, and brands
  • Monitoring and analyzing customer response

Students explore these skills in a variety of marketing classes they choose from as part of their majors. Most bachelor’s degree programs offer a range of marketing focuses, allowing you to choose from several different classes as you build up your credit hours toward graduation. This allows for some degree of flexibility, depending on the specific program.

In your program, some of the typical classes you might choose from include:

Buyer Behavior

Explore the roles of needs, motivations, personalities, perception, and attitudes on consumer purchasing behavior. Coursework in buyer behavior introduces students to the behavioral sciences and consumer psychology that drives decision-making.

Marketing Research

In marketing research, students learn to develop data connection and analysis techniques to solve problems that rise in the marketing mix. Students will define problems, plan and investigate a research direction, and interpret results.

Professional Selling

Salesmanship is often the first role marketing graduates have in the business world. These classes help prepare students to pitch sales presentations, attract new customers, cater to customer needs, and follow up on closed sales.

Advertising and Promotion Management

Advertising managers help lead all aspects of a campaign, from basic planning to execution. Coursework in management give students opportunities to interpret marketing research, select effective media channels, budget resources, and lead teams on successful promotional campaigns.

Digital Marketing

As marketing channels continue to be dominated by digital media, more marketing professionals will be needed to understand the promotional aspects of online advertising. By exploring digital marketing principles, students prepare to develop social media marketing campaigns and email marketing campaigns.

Increasing opportunities for success

While gaining a solid education in marketing is one of the greatest benefits of earning a bachelor’s degree, the career opportunities most four-year universities offer are arguably just as important.

Enrollment in a university gives you access to student clubs and organizations that help connect students to professionals in their chosen field. For marketing and advertising students, joining the student chapters of professional organizations like the American Marketing Association is the first step they take to future career success.

Additionally, professors and career counselors at universities typically assist students with internship applications, introducing them to companies interested in employing them. With the addition of an internship on your resume, you show that not only do you have the educational backing needed by marketing professionals, you have experience as well.

What can I do with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing?

When you think of the top CEOs and presidents of businesses across the world, there’s a good chance that they got their start with undergraduate degrees in marketing.

With the skills and knowledge you’ll gain in your classes and internship experience, you’ll be qualified for a number of marketing roles as a college graduate. Some careers include:

Between 2005 and 2014, almost 14 million job openings are expected to be filled by workers who are required to have bachelor’s degrees. By earning a bachelor’s in marketing, you’ll prepare yourself to join the ranks of these 14 million workers, thanks to a solid education backing and the leadership of your professors and career counselors.