Marketing: master the English of your profession!

If you’re heading to work in a marketing department, we recommend doing a little research first to understand the size of the team and the structure of roles within it. A marketing team can be big or small, ranging from hundreds of people in a major multinational company, to a singular individual in a new startup.

A marketing team could include any of the following people (and many more!):

• Brand strategist: conducting analysis and market research to understand consumer behaviour
• Social media manager/community manager: taking care of a brand’s social media channels in terms of content, customer communication, and tracking
• Digital strategist: developing methods to enhance clients’ visibility and market shares
• Copywriters: writing content for websites and products

If you work in a small marketing department, the likelihood is you could be doing the work of more than one of the above roles, such as taking care of social media and managing the company website content. If you work in a large company, you may have an even more specific role, such as optimizing the company’s Instagram account alone.

A quick fix for improving your English for marketing is learning new vocabulary. By discovering new terms, you will expand the possibilities of your workplace communication. Let’s take a look at some common marketing vocabulary:

• Brand
• Brand identity; brand guidelines; brand strategy
• Consumer
• Campaign
• Cost
• End-user
• Image
• Launch
• Product
• Market research
• Trademark
• SEO
• Engagement
• Email blast
• Organic content
• Native advertising

How many of those words do you already know? This is only a short selection of terms that are useful in marketing, so it’s only a starting point.

If you’re planning on entering the fast-paced world of marketing, you need to be ready to understand and use common expressions that your customers and colleagues will be familiar with. Let’s take a look at some typical English expressions that we hear all the time in the marketing world:

• In the pipeline: something is being prepared and is underway
• To be sold on something: to be convinced of something
• To deliver the goods: to provide what is expected
• To price yourself out of the market: to sell something at such a high price that no interested consumer could afford it
• Something that does what it says on the tin: a product or service that is simple and
• A unique selling point: an attractive feature that sets your product or service apart
• To be out the door: when something is ready to go
• To stay ahead of the curve: to be innovative and market leading
• To see the big picture: to look beyond the details and the short-term effects of something
• To reinvent the wheel: to unnecessarily create a product or service that already exists

Even if you only add a couple of these to your vocabulary, you’ll sound a lot more at home in the marketing world!

Improving your English to work in a marketing department is an entirely realistic objective, if you have the right tools at your disposition. If e-learning is the way for you, you’ll be delighted to know that GlobalExam has a whole learning path dedicated to honing your English skills for marketing. Let’s take a look at some example exercises to give you an idea of how it works.

This is an example online exercise designed to help you improve your English marketing skills. The exercise requires you to put vocabulary into the correct order to complete a sentence. Your answer is instantly corrected and you’ll be provided with an explanation to help you understand where you might have gone wrong.

In this example exercise, you must match the marketing job role with the job descriptions. Can you figure out which role the description above goes with?

Our online exercises are varied, requiring you to complete sentences and answer questions that test your knowledge of marketing vocabulary introduced to you in the preceding learning situation.

The fact you’re reading this article suggests that you’re already serious about improving your marketing skills. Working on your English is a big step in the right direction, but what else can you do? Here are a few suggestions.

Hone your writing skills

A big part of marketing is written communication, whether that’s putting together a sales pitch, drafting a consumer survey, or writing a social media post caption.

Stay up to date on industry news and trends

To be a good marketer, it’s essential to stay up to date on what your customers are doing, interested in, and passionate about. Stay in tune with the things that affect your business and channel it into your marketing strategy.

Stay creative

Marketing is a creative business role: it requires imagination, thinking outside the box, coming up with original ideas and executing your ideas in an engaging and often aesthetic way. Whether it’s using your own social media channels or brainstorming innovative products, keep your imagination active and practice producing engaging content and ideas.

The business courses at GlobalExam will help you to learn and develop the language skills for sales and marketing by studying real life situations such as cold calling clients. The course will give you the opportunity to improve your existing business skills further and work on your weaknesses.

The GlobalExam Business course covers a wide range of marketing topics, from understanding the overall purpose of marketing in an organisation through to the process of marketing a new product or service.

Users will learn specialist vocabulary and phrases by listening to conversations and learning useful phrases within those conversations.

An example transcript might be similar to this one:

Reception: Hello Reception, how may I help you?

Consultant: Can I speak to the marketing manager?

Reception: Is he expecting your call?

Consultant: No, I’m a new sales manager and I wanted to talk about our new services.

Reception: Oh, I’m afraid I won’t be able to transfer you if he’s not expecting you.

Consultant: Is there a better time I can get in touch with them or is there someone else I could speak to?

Reception: You could try calling back tomorrow and asking for Terry.

Consultant: Thanks, I really appreciate your help. I’ll try again tomorrow.

This conversation is full of common phrases and it’s important to learn them accurately if you want to improve your language skills in the marketing sector. Phrases such as ‘How may I help you?’ need to be second nature. Other phrases like ‘Is there someone else I could speak to?’ need to be accurate or it could cost you a sale. There are very few second chances when you’re cold calling customers!

As you think about entering English-speaking workplace, you won’t be surprised to learn that one of the most effective ways you can improve your communication skills is by interacting with other English speakers. Independent learning with vocabulary and grammar provides an excellent grounding in the language, but nothing beats actually speaking it.

On GlobalExam, we offer the opportunity to learn through online classes. There are two types of class: a half-an-hour individual lesson; or a one-hour group lesson.

All our online lessons are guided by a TESOL-certified native English teacher with experience in teaching Business. If you opt for an independent lesson, you can determine what and when you study. If you prefer group learning, you can choose on of our pre-scheduled lessons on one of the following topics:

• How to make a phone call
• How to plan a meeting
• How to give a presentation
• How to participate in video and conference calls

If improving your English for marketing is the goal, why not try out our group lesson on giving a presentation? The next time you need to present your brand strategy to a potential client, you’ll have done all the preparation you need to.

Here are a few more things we think you’ll love about learning through virtual lessons with us:

• Our online lessons are desktop and mobile friendly
• There is a maximum of six people per group lesson
• Our English teachers receive a score from their students
• Group lessons are supported with teaching assistants
• Group lessons can be divided into smaller rooms for one-on-one conversations
• A technical support team is on standby in case of problems

The GlobalExam Business course is an online training course to help people learn the English language necessary for a business setting. Many different areas of competence are covered such as meetings, telephone calls, management interactions, business correspondence and more. Vocabulary and phrases related to negotiation, writing a professional email, managing a project,managing interculturality, recruitment, answering the phone, travelling in business, conducting a meeting or greeting a client are also covered. Language specific to particular career paths such as marketing, customer services and communication. There are courses for those who want to follow a more Industrial path such as tourism, banking or logistics.

The GlobalExam course deals with hundreds of different situations that reflect real business situations and there are videos with example dialogues using native English speakers. There are transcripts so you can follow along and activities to check your understanding. There is plenty of practical advice including the opportunity to create a professional CV (resume) in English too.

English for marketing is one of 7 Business online courses dedicated to job skills, here is the list of the others you can find:

• English course for communication
• English course for Human resources
• Business course for sales
• English for purchasing
• English course for management
• English online course: Customer Success Management

The GobalExam Business course offers training at 3 different levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced and there is a free online level test to ensure that users take the course most suitable for them. Course participants receive a certificate of completion at the end of each course. Don’t delay, start the Business course today to boost your career!

Find out more and learn top 10 tips to stay motivated when learning English online. Do not wait any longer and start taking a professional English course online with GlobalExam!