What Is the Best Strand in Senior High School for Marketing?

Marketing is a broad field that offers a wide range of opportunities in almost any industry around the world. Marketing is a vital function for all businesses, enabling them to understand and connect with customers. With its variety of professions, marketing can be a lucrative career choice. If you intend to work in Marketing after graduation, you should start by choosing the right SHS strand for marketing. 

Keep on reading to learn more about marketing, what SHS strand best suits marketing, what career opportunities you can expect, and how to choose a strand for SHS.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is a field that centers on attracting customers and maintaining a positive relationship with them. The discipline involves activities like market research, identifying strategies, creating content, and many more to help clients promote and sell their products or services. This field is constantly evolving with new trends, practices, and technology.

Marketing professionals accomplish this by combining business theories, data science, psychology, and a dash of creativity. So, if you want to work in marketing, be prepared for a dynamic career.

As a marketer, you may work as part of a brand’s in-house marketing team or for a marketing agency that handles a variety of portfolios. Either way, there are plenty of opportunities to explore. Here are the sub-fields of marketing you may focus on after graduation:

Public Relations: Working in PR involves communicating and fostering relationships with the media. You handle corporate communications to promote new products and company updates or handle issues to maintain a positive image for the company.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM): These professionals tailor a website’s marketing content to search engine algorithms and requirements to get more users to visit and/or purchase from the site.

Social Media Marketing: Here, professionals create and implement a social strategy to build a brand’s image and form relationships with its target market. Social media teams often manage a brand’s social media accounts.

Email Marketing: This sub-field combines data analysis and editorial strategies to deliver engaging and valuable content to newsletter subscribers.

Brand Management: Brand managers work on a brand’s or a product line’s brand persona. They oversee internal and external communications to make sure it all uses one voice reflecting the brand persona.

Product Marketing: Product marketers act as the bridge between product management, engineering, sales, customer service, and marketing teams. They are key to understanding customer needs and pain points and using that information to develop products and effectively promote them.

Event Marketing: These professionals organize and promote experiential marketing stunts, such as pop-up shops, corporate tradeshows, and competitions to promote a company.

Content Marketing: Content marketers strategize and create written content that promotes a brand or its products or services through engaging and relevant stories.

Influencer Marketing: Professionals here connect with influencers to increase brand exposure and trust on social media. They formulate strategies and campaigns to leverage the reach of influencers.

There are different professions within the field of marketing, each requiring different skills and qualifications. To take on any of these positions, you need a marketing strand SHS and take up degrees like Marketing, Marketing Management, Business Administration, and other similar programs.

Choosing an SHS Strand

Online senior high schools in the Philippines offering online education have five academic tracks focusing on unique sets of knowledge and skills to prepare students for their chosen professional fields. Marketing is a complex field, requiring both technical knowledge and soft skills. Students need to choose a strand that can prepare them for these requirements.

Before we discuss the best SHS strand for students aiming to enter a marketing program in college, it can help to understand what the different tracks are:

• Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM): This strand offers classes on science and math, ideal for those who wish to pursue engineering- or mathematics-related courses.
• Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS): This strand focuses more on social sciences, communication, and literature. HUMSS is a great choice for those who want to become lawyers or psychologists.
• Accounting, Business, and Management (ABM): This strand offers classes that tackle accounting, business math, marketing, and management to prepare students to start their own business.
• General Academic Strand (GAS): The GAS strand combines key courses from all the other strands. This is designed to prepare students for any course in college. This is the best choice for those who are still undecided on what course to pursue.
• Technical-Vocational-Livelihood (TVL): This strand focuses on technical skills that will enable students to work right after graduation.

To get a better understanding of the different strands, you can look into our guide to all strands in senior high school. Our guide can help you better understand what to expect from each track and whether those align with your plans and academic interests.

What SHS Strand to Take for Marketing?

Marketing brings together business, data science, and creativity. To become a marketer, students need an education that would build their foundations in business and data science, as well as hone their creative thinking.

Among the academic tracks, the Accounting, Business, and Management (ABM) strand is the best senior high school strand for those interested in studying marketing. You may be curious, “Is marketing part of the ABM strand?”

Indeed, it is!

Marketing is a vital part of business. While marketers are not directly concerned with running a business, they do need to understand how key business elements work, such as operational processes, finances, and product development to name a few. Thus, marketers also need to have a strong knowledge of business theories.

The ABM strand’s curriculum revolves around mathematical application, business theories, and problem-solving. It introduces students to concepts of business management, finance and accounting, information and technology, entrepreneurship, and marketing.

The ABM strand’s curriculum includes these fundamental courses:

• ICT for Professional Tracks
• Fundamentals of Accountancy, Business, and Management
• Organization and Management
• Business Math
• Principles of Marketing
• Entrepreneurship
• Business Ethics and Social Responsibility
• Applied Economics

This strand is designed for students who are interested in taking up college degrees related to business and management. Students are bound to gain practical skills that will help them excel in marketing. The ABM Strand’s curriculum aims to:

• Develop students’ communication skills and confidence to express their ideas, which is necessary in a field that requires collaboration and revolves around communicating with people.
• Inspire a resilient mindset that seeks solutions to any problem they come upon.
• Hones critical thinking and mathematical skills that empower them to analyze data and turn them into actionable insights. 
• Instills moral values that should inspire ethical business practices as they grow into their careers.

Students can be confident that they will graduate with sufficient knowledge and skills to take on college courses related to ABM, whether it’s marketing or another business-related course.

Is ABM and Marketing the Right Path for Me?

Choosing an SHS track that will affect the trajectory of your future is intimidating, which is why it’s important to fully understand what the ABM track and marketing are about.

One advantage of the ABM track, however, is that will not tie you to marketing. Should you change your mind, you can still rely on your senior high school education to prepare you for any other business-related course or any field that requires critical thinking and problem-solving.

But to help you make the right decision, try reflecting on these questions:

• Are you willing to dedicate your professional life to analysis, conceptualizing, and communicating with people and audiences?
• Do you want a career that marries numbers with creativity?
• Are you interested in a career that’s constantly evolving and requires continuous learning?
• Are you willing to find ingenious ways to present brands or products and express ideas? 

If a career that involves all these things sounds exciting to you, then you should have no reason to doubt your interest in taking a marketing strand in senior high school. We’re sure that you’ll find more reasons to love this field as you learn more about it.

Take the ABM Strand at OEd Senior High School

Take the first step toward becoming a successful marketer with OEd Senior High School.

There are plenty of schools in the Philippines offering online education, but none are as dedicated as OEd SHS to providing high-quality education to SHS students. Our ABM strand is designed to empower students with a balanced combination of soft and hard skills that are relevant to their chosen fields.

Do you want to learn more about our course offerings? Get in touch with us today.