Marketing gets a bad reputation due to the sales-y nature of advertising. No one really wants to be sold to, at least not in a conspicuous way. Although the two work together, they aren’t the same, which can be confusing.

Marketing is the industry, and advertising is a practice that falls within it. In fact, the American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as the “activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Good marketing is strategic. It’s about developing products and services that actually help people, not sales at any cost.

Marketing has undergone several major shifts throughout the past 150 years. During the time of the Civil War, people were pretty self-sustaining. They made their own products, traded goods, and had clothes made if they weren’t adept at sewing. As technology grew, factories were built and production became quicker and easier. Ads began to appear.

Following World War II, businesses began to form research departments and solicit customer feedback. When they used the feedback, sales increased and new needs could be identified to create new products. The mindset shifted from making numerous products to making sure customers were satisfied with their purchases. Today, the most successful companies build their business around customer satisfaction being the top priority—a new age of marketing.

What’s Included in the Marketing Industry?

It feels easy to use the term sales and marketing synonymously, but there’s more to the industry than it might seem at first glance. There are actually many types of marketing.

The AMA defines ten types of marketing, including:

  • Influencer marketing
  • Relationship marketing
  • Viral marketing
  • Green marketing
  • Keyword marketing
  • Guerilla marketing
  • Outbound marketing
  • Inbound marketing
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Content marketing

While some of these terms may seem unfamiliar, you likely encounter them all more often than you think, particularly influencer and content marketing.

There are also four important aspects of marketing: product, price, place or distribution, and promotion. Essentially, marketing includes the product itself, how a business charges for it, as well as where and how it will be sold (for instance with coupons or special offers).

3 Smart Ways Marketers are Using Photoshop

Good marketing is about people and how well you know them. It’s about creativity, communication, and flexibility. Marketing professionals are experts in reading the room and figuring out how their product or service can help others.

The unique way Marketers communicate and tell stories involves many types of graphics and visuals. Adobe Photoshop can be a helpful and desirable skill for clients and/or future employers. It’s often used in conjunction with Illustrator and InDesign for maximum customizability and design power.

Some of the most common ways the marketing industry uses Photoshop are to create: branding elements, graphics for promotional materials, social media graphics, and website graphics.

Branding Elements

Marketing professionals often lead a business’s brand development—building a business’s public appearance and messaging. Items such as logos, icons, color palettes, and fonts are critical to creating a meaningful and recognizable brand that people want to purchase from and support.

Photoshop is useful for creating brand assets because of the level of design customization available with individual elements such as shapes and color. Professionals can build from an existing image, or start with a blank canvas and create almost anything they can imagine. Out of the mainstream Creative Cloud apps, Photoshop is the most flexible in the assets it can create.

Photoshop works with images in pixels, which means that every detail, down to the single point of color, can be manipulated and updated. Knowledgeable users can pull in Adobe Fonts and use layers to create a multi-dimensional set of assets. Professionals can also create a color palette to use throughout any Adobe program, making it easy to stay on brand no matter what they’re creating.

Graphics for Promotional Materials

Have you ever been to a presentation and received a brochure or flyer? Or gotten a mailer in your mailbox? That’s promotional material. In marketing, promotional materials are shared to boost brand awareness and sales. Some other common forms of promotional materials include: brochures, pens, keychains, and branded packaging.

Photoshop is an effective tool for creating graphics for these types of highly designed promotional materials because of the flexibility and ability to be custom and creative down to the smallest detail.

It’s simple for professionals to create eye-catching graphics to use on these materials, and try out all sorts of colors before settling on what looks best. For shorter documents like flyers, it’s also easy to add cut lines if the goal is to have people take a slip off of the bottom of a flyer or something more interactive.

Social Media & Website Graphics

Social media sites and websites are digital hotspots for bringing in customers and clients. With numerous platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, professionals in the marketing industry must be able to design striking graphics in all sorts of sizes and formats. Not to mention websites designed to convert sales.

Photoshop is a great place for marketing professionals to design these graphics because of the way they can work with layers and add imaginative elements that capture the audience’s attention. Cute animals are always a big hit, for instance, but people love it when they see cute pets with hats or animals doing human things, which is possible with Photoshop manipulation.

Photoshop can also save and work with numerous file types, which is helpful if the project is multi-faceted. Graphics are likely only one piece of any marketing puzzle, which means the ability to work easily with Illustrator (AI), InDesign (ID), and create image files (PNG or JPEG) is extremely useful.

Where to Learn Photoshop Skills for Marketing

If you’ve got an interest in marketing and want to add Photoshop skills to your toolbox, there are many learning opportunities for in-person, live online, and certificate courses.

Noble Desktop offers several Photoshop courses. From Photoshop in a Day to Photoshop Bootcamp to Advanced Retouching, there are classes for beginners and more advanced users.

If you’re not into learning in-person, you can find live online Photoshop courses using the Noble Desktop Classes Near Me tool. The Classes Near Me tool offers a concise way to see what training courses are available from reputable training schools. You can use the same tool to locate Photoshop courses in your area.