Marketing. You, me, your friends, family. All of us market ourselves on a daily basis. Marketing is proven to have a big impact over the years and is an important skill for people to have for the future.
Sarah Edwards is the marketing and DECA teacher at Rolla Technical Institute.
“I think marketing is important as a student because you need to be able to market yourself and let people know how awesome you are,” Edwards said.
Kaitlin Brothers, senior strategic communications consultant for Kummer College at Missouri S&T holds a similar opinion.
“When I was in high school…I somewhat marketed myself because I wanted to be, you know, really good academic-wise but also be really nice to everybody, even if I didn’t like them…So I think everyone, even if they don’t know it, they might do that [market themselves] to some degree,” Brothers said.
Marketing goes beyond the walls of high school. As social media seems to be here to stay, anyone who is entering the workforce must consider the image they are sharing with potential employers.
“You might need to market yourself for an interview. So you need to know how to put your best foot forward. You market yourself by the body language that you use. I feel like the way you talk to people, you’re marketing yourself,” Edwards said.
Marketing has changed over the years and people market themselves in more ways than one.
“There’s just a lot of different avenues that you can market yourself. Social media is a huge one now because that wasn’t a really big thing ten years ago or twenty years ago…like Facebook was a big thing, and then now it’s Instagram and TikTok,” Edwards said.
Social media isn’t the only huge more recent marketing style.
“Almost every company is marketing some sort of AI product…But a lot of companies are somewhat putting AI to use to some degree, even if it’s just a chat bot for their clients. They’re [businesses] marketing that to people that they’re using AI and they’re growing and they’re advancing into the future, and they’re using AI to create some sort of image, text or video to help their marketing content,” Brothers said.
All of your words, actions and how you present yourself in person and on social media all relate to marketing in some way. Beyond marketing yourself, it is also important to know how you are being marketed to as a consumer.
“I think that it’s important as a consumer…that is going to want to buy things someday, to understand how people are marketing to you too,” Edwards said.
Marketing reaches all aspects of life and Rolla schools offer courses designed to learn these skills. Both Edwards and Brothers graduated from high schools that did not have marketing programs. Students interested in learning more about marketing should reach out to a counselor and consider adding a marketing course to their high school schedule. Edwards encourages students to get involved in marketing no matter what they plan to do in the future.
“It doesn’t matter what job that you’re going to have. You could want to have a lawn mowing business or you could want to be a lawyer one day or an engineer…you might own your own business and you have to be able to market yourself to get customers,” said Edwards. “So it’s important no matter what job you’re going to want to have.”