What is a Marketing Analyst? Explore the Marketing Analyst Career Path

The Day-to-Day as a Marketing Analyst

The role of the Marketing Analyst varies from company to company but most Marketing Analysts help companies make informed decisions based on their market. Their responsibilities vary from researching to inform pricing and production quantities to optimizing marketing campaigns based on statistics. They work on a team of digital marketers or solo as a freelancer or consultant. Their team might include Designers, Pollsters, Data Scientists, Statisticians, Marketing Managers, Search Campaign Managers, and other marketing professionals.

Marketing Analysts can work in almost any industry with business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C) marketing campaigns. They usually work a typically 40-hour work week but sometimes might stay late to work on last-minute changes. Marketing Analysts are most commonly employed at marketing agencies and large corporations but can also be found at startups or contracted by smaller businesses. This constantly growing field is predicted to continue growing quickly over the next ten years.

The daily activities of a Marketing Analyst depend on their employer but you might find them providing analytical support for a certain marketing channel, meeting with clients or marketing teams, preparing reports, strategizing for the next marketing campaign, choosing the proper target audience for a client or company, leading focus groups, performing competitor analyses, following market trends, analyzing buying habits of customers, researching the next campaign, measuring the effectiveness of a campaign, and optimizing their work for each channel.

What Skills Should Marketing Analysts Have?

Marketing Analysts should have a strong foundation of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, social media marketing (SMM), pay per click advertising (PPC), and other digital marketing skills. They should also understand industry lingo and paid search campaigns like Google Ads. Marketing analysts will spend a decent amount of time researching and optimizing campaigns and they may be required to use tools like Moz or Ahrefs depending on their employer. A Marketing Analyst must also have a basic understanding of data analysis and using Google Analytics.

Marketing Analysts must be able to think critically, solve complex problems in data and in marketing, and understand how a specific industry functions and changes over time. They need to know how to model and understand their audience, analyze customer behaviors, and perform competitor analysis. They must be able to translate all of their information from research, analysis, and problem-solving exercises into quantifiable and understandable results. They’ll need to effectively communicate those concepts with their team and their clients. Marketing Analysts might also lead focus groups, depending on their employer, and will need to be able to clearly and effectively communicate in those scenarios as well. A Marketing Analyst is most successful when they can think empathetically, build strong relationships with their consumers, fellow researchers, clients, and management.

Tableau and Excel are the most common tools used for analysis in the marketing industry and any Marketing Analyst should be proficient in each. As they move up the ranks, they might find that learning the basics of R or Python will move their analysis more quickly and open up other tools for their use like Jupyter Notebook or RStudio. Some Marketing Analyst positions will require basic programming skills and data mining using SQL, R, SAS, or Python.

Learn the Skills You Need to Become a Marketing Analyst

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing utilizes the internet and web based digital platforms to promote products or services. This includes the use of digital advertisements, social media, brand identities, and more.

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Excel

Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft that runs on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. It is used for calculation, graphing, data visualization, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro programming.

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SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic using tactics like keywords and backlinks to create organic, high-ranking search engine results.

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Google Analytics

Google Analytics measures your advertising return on investment while tracking your video, Flash, social networking, and applications. Google Analytics works by tracking website activity through a block of JavaScript code that the web developer, designer, or website owner, embeds within pages on a website.

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Tableau

Tableau is a data visualization tool. This tool can be used to simplify raw data, reformat data, and perform efficient data analysis. Tableau can also be used to create data visualizations, dashboards, presentations, and worksheets.

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Google Ads

Google Ads is the new name for Google AdWords. It is an online advertising service that allows advertisers to pay for the display of brief advertisements, video content, listings, and calls to action within the Google Display Network (GDN) to web users. You'll see Google ads on the GDN which includes Google Search, YouTube, and over 2 million other sites.

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Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the practice of using social media platforms to connect with your target audience or end-user. Social media marketing aims to build brand awareness and loyalty, increase sales, convert leads, and drive website traffic. Social media management can be done through content creation, keyword and target audience research, and the use of social media management platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite.

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Email Marketing

Email marketing is the practice of sending a commercial message to a group of a target audience using email. These emails might be advertisements, business requests, offers, services, sales solicitations, newsletters, donation requests, petition signature requests, and other calls to action.

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Typical Qualifications to Become a Marketing Analyst

Most employers will require a Marketing Analyst to hold a bachelor’s degree at the minimum. This could be in statistics, math, computer science, economics, marketing, business administration, communications, or consumer psychology. Some positions will require you to hold a master’s degree in business or market research. Some Marketing Analysts do not have a degree but instead attended a data analysis or data science bootcamp and got certifications pertinent to digital marketing like Google Ads. Certifications like Professional Researcher (PRC) from Insights Association and Certified Market Research Analyst (CMRA) from the International Institute of Market Research and Analysis are both well-respected certifications in the Digital Marketing field in the United States. It is possible to get started as a freelance Marketing Analyst with no degree and some certifications, but the learning curve may be steep depending on your skills and experiences.

Searching for Marketing Analyst Jobs

Marketing Analysts can find jobs at marketing agencies, corporations, tech companies, startups, retail companies, and more. Freelance Marketing Analysts are in demand at smaller businesses, startups, and companies looking to expand into new territories. There are remote, full-time, and freelance opportunities for Marketing Analysts. Plus, there is an abundance of upward mobility options and salary growth potential for this role as long as the candidate is willing to learn more technical skills.

Marketing Analysts can find jobs on these sites:

Marketing Analysts can find freelance and remote gigs on these sites:

Tips to Become a Marketing Analyst

Marketing Analyst is a results-oriented position. As such, most employers and recruiters will be looking for results. If you don’t have much experience, it helps to demonstrate results from previous companies you’ve worked with, or do practice projects on open source data so that you have some examples to share. You can find free data sets from many different industries included in your Tableau download. You can put these projects up on a blog in a report style to further demonstrate your skills. If you’re having a hard time finding a job with minimal experience, consider trying freelance work or working with a local business for a reduced or free rate.

It might help your job search to find your niche before you begin searching. You can always pivot into a different niche later, but specializing can help you stand out and become a stronger expert in the field. This is especially true for freelance Marketing Analysts. This niche might be refined by industry, type of research you do, type of company you work for, the region you work in, etc. It helps to speak to a more experienced market research professional to narrow down the best place for you to start.

The best way to get a job in this modern climate is most certainly networking. Network with digital marketers, market research professionals, data scientists and analysts, and recruiters. You can find networking opportunities through sending letters of introduction on LinkedIn after researching the people you’re attempting to connect with, attending meetups in-person or virtually, scheduling informational interviews with professionals in the field to learn more about the job, and reaching out to your former educators if you attended university.

What Job Titles Would a Marketing Analyst Hold?

Marketing Analysts can find a variety of opportunities to expand this role into something more broad and in-turn promotable at larger companies or to become an extremely niche expert Market Researcher in a specific area. Either way, the opportunities for upward mobility and pay raises are only going to continue to grow over the next decade.

Marketing Analysts should look for these job titles:

Marketing Analyst
Market Research Analyst
Junior Marketing Analyst
Associate Marketing Analyst
Junior Data Analyst – Marketing
Marketing Operations Analyst
Market Data Analyst
Human Insights Data Analyst
Digital Marketing Analyst
Social Media Marketing Analyst
Search Engine Marketing Analyst
Marketing Performance Analyst

The Day-to-Day as a Marketing Analyst

What Skills Should Marketing Analysts Have?

Learn the Skills You Need to Become a Marketing Analyst

Digital Marketing

Excel

SEO

Google Analytics

Tableau

Google Ads

Social Media Marketing

Email Marketing

Marketing Analyst Salaries

Typical Qualifications to Become a Marketing Analyst

Searching for Marketing Analyst Jobs

Tips to Become a Marketing Analyst

What Job Titles Would a Marketing Analyst Hold?

Related Careers

Salary Comparison to Marketing Analyst

Digital Marketer

Digital Analyst

Search Manager

Web Optimization Specialist

Digital Strategist

Marketing Manager

Social Media Strategist

Paid Search Manager