The dynamic world of marketing offers a multitude of career paths across a diverse range of industries. One of the most effective ways to embark on this exciting journey is through a Marketing Apprenticeship. This blog post delves into the standard of this apprenticeship and what you can expect from this fulfilling occupation.
Marketing Assistant Apprenticeship Occupation Overview
A Marketing Assistant Apprenticeship is found in every sector and industry, be it manufacturing, retail, IT, automotive, service industries, or even not-for-profit organisations. This versatile role can sit within an external marketing agency providing deliverables to clients or an internal marketing team propelling the business forward.
The main purpose of a Marketing Assistant Apprentice is to support marketing activities that drive the demand for a product or service. The apprentice raises awareness and perception, contributes to marketing strategies and plans, and delivers day-to-day marketing activities across numerous platforms and channels. It's an entry route for many marketing professionals who progress into more senior positions.
As a Marketing Assistant Apprentice, you will interact with a wide range of internal colleagues and external marketing suppliers, possibly collaborating with sales, operations, PR, IT, customer insight teams and finance. In some cases, you will be the first point of contact for day-to-day activities in the marketing function, supervised by staff possessing advanced marketing skills and experience.
Your responsibilities may vary depending on the size and structure of the organisation. You could be creating marketing content, conducting background market and customer research, monitoring campaign analytics, using relevant marketing software/systems, or overseeing the work delivery of external and internal marketing suppliers, among other duties.
Occupation Duties
Here's an outline of typical duties you might undertake as part of this role:
- Content Creation: Collaborate with senior colleagues to create and edit content for offline and/or digital marketing channels, like websites, social media, sales materials or event displays.
- Publish Content: Use platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram to publish editorial, creative and video content.
- Manage Suppliers: Specify, purchase, and quality assure marketing goods and services from external suppliers.
- Manage Assets: Manage the cataloguing of offline and digital marketing assets, ensuring compliance with marketing regulations and legislation.
- Evaluate Effectiveness: Monitor and evaluate marketing delivery effectiveness by producing and interpreting reports from one or more marketing tools or systems.
- Planning and Delivery: Contribute to the planning, delivery, or evaluation of marketing activity through written documents and presentations.
- Use CMS: Use content management software to publish and refresh effective online content.
- Research: Use appropriate primary and secondary research methods to gather marketing insight or evaluation.
- Budget Management: Monitor marketing expenditures and activities according to a specified budget and plan.
- Source Creative Assets: Efficiently source creative assets for the production of marketing communication collateral.
- Stakeholder Communication: Establish and maintain effective day-to-day relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
- Marketing Administration: Implement marketing activities such as organising an exhibition display or an event.
Knowledge, Skills, and Behaviours (KSBs)
A marketing apprenticeship equips you with broad knowledge, skills and behaviours. These include a grasp of marketing theory and current technologies, legislation, regulatory frameworks affecting marketing operations, brand theory, budgeting principles, and more.
You will also learn practical skills such as using research software, website content management systems, social media platforms, high-volume email delivery software, organising assets, and proofreading marketing copy.
The apprenticeship fosters behaviours that are invaluable in the marketing profession. You will develop professional and customer-focused conduct, ethical behaviour in planning and delivering marketing activity, a commitment to continuous self-development, and strong attention to preserving output readability.
