While a management role can sound like there is less hands-on work required, it requires a deep understanding of the entire marketing process to become successful in a marketing management career, and their contributions can make or break brands. In this article we break down the concept of marketing management before breaking it down into a collection of helpful articles, so you can fully equip yourself to take on this role.
What is Marketing Management?
Marketing management is the process of developing and implementing a marketing strategy, built on principles from all relevant marketing practices, to achieve business objectives—this can be anything from increasing sales and engagement to establishing or growing brand awareness through various marketing efforts.
Effective marketing management requires having a proper grasp of the activities and tasks required to take a task from initiation to closure, which means a marketing manager may be inserted at any point in the pipeline to help oversee the execution of a marketing effort. This means an effective marketing manager is capable of a wide variety of tasks, including but not limited to market research and analysis, project management, as well as sales.
Marketing Management: How is it Different?
Because marketing management covers a wide range of disciplines, it can be easy to confuse it with certain roles that have similar responsibilities. While they may sometimes overlap, it’s important to understand the difference—here’s a quick look at marketing management compared to a few other roles:
Marketing information management
Marketing information management deals with the collection and utilization of market data, which is one of many disciplines that may be practiced by a marketing manager. Data can be anywhere from consumer and competitor information, to general marketing research. Some of the key concepts related to marketing info management are SEO, sales data, and customer reviews. This discipline primarily assists marketing teams in positioning themselves in a market space.
Marketing project management
Marketing project management is the application of project management principles in the context of marketing-related projects—it focuses on coordinating the completion of day-to-day tasks and activities that are used to build a working marketing campaign. They make sure that tasks are accomplished on time and to standards, and they keep stakeholders aligned on the status of their respective projects. Marketing managers make decisions at a slightly higher level; often, they are the ones identifying and designing effective marketing campaigns, which are then assigned (by them or other stakeholders) to a project manager for execution.
Why is Marketing Management Important?
Marketing management is important because it allows a business to remain competitive, especially in fast-paced industries, where consumer demands, trends, and behaviors change quickly and frequently. Having dedicated management resources for marketing helps establish a clear direction from the highest levels of the company down to the individual task executions that comprise the marketing effort, which cascades into a solid, unified product, service, or message that consumers can easily engage with and get behind.
Because a marketing manager is able to utilize perspectives across the entire marketing pipeline, it ensures that appropriate research allows for data-driven decision-making once the team enters the planning stages. It then cascades into a more efficient production of marketing materials, which then makes it easy for your customer-facing resources to best satisfy your target customer/s.
A Marketing Manager’s Toolkit
Now that we understand the concept and the importance of having a dedicated marketing management resource, here are some of the key processes that an effective marketing manager should have in their arsenal:
Market analysis
Market analysis focuses on your company’s current positioning and forms the basis for identifying the appropriate marketing strategy to implement—this includes analyzing consumer behavior among other market trends, as well as internal metrics such as your sales, site traffic, and customer reviews. An effective market analysis helps reduce risk when investing in a marketing campaign since you’re using data-driven methods for decision-making.
Goal-setting
Building on your understanding of the market, a marketing manager is also responsible for identifying targets that need to be hit in order to bridge the gap between your current position and the market’s demands. A strategy can be tailored towards various ends such as increasing sales and engagement, establishing new business or customer relationships, or implementing an effective rebrand of your business.
Product management/development
Following the establishment of goals is identifying what kinds of marketing activities best serve them. Here, a marketing manager may work with another, dedicated product manager to determine what kinds of projects are relevant to the marketing strategy—these can range from appearing at business conventions to attract new partners, to creating public or in-store promotions and events to promote a new product or service directly to customers. This is also where more specialized skills apply to managers, such as social media management and email marketing management, among others.
Principles of account-based marketing and integrated marketing apply here, mainly by choosing appropriate methods and channels to best market your intended product or service.
Program implementation
It’s important for a marketing manager to be able to fill in anywhere in the marketing project pipeline, and one of the biggest parts of the effort is the day-to-day project management work that goes into building an effective campaign. In many cases, however, a marketing manager works together with dedicated project management resources to organize, execute, and monitor marketing projects from start to finish. Here, a marketing manager focuses on deploying the right resources to help project managers effectively deliver their assigned work.
Monitoring
Once marketing campaigns have been launched, it’s also important for marketing managers to gain insight into their performance, as this cycles back into the analysis and initiation phases by updating the company’s new positioning. The effectiveness of each campaign and how it affects the business is measured, which then informs changes to the current marketing strategy or the individual activities lined up.
You’ll find that the processes above largely cover most if not all, the phases of a marketing project cycle, which emphasizes the need for a marketing manager to have a good grasp of all the factors that contribute to a successful campaign. By building skills in these key areas, you can expect to add value to your team at any point in the marketing effort.
Build and Manage Your Marketing Strategy with Workamajig
Effective marketing management influences the success of your business from the start to the end of every campaign. This means using real data to make informed decisions about how to best approach, engage, and capture your market, using principles from all marketing disciplines to build cohesive, efficient, and successful campaigns.
With Workamajig, the premier marketing management software, you have an all-in-one solution for planning, organizing, and delegating tasks, and easily transitioning between any of the three. Easily adjust your schedule or modify task requirements and assignees to ensure efficiency, and use native reporting tools to measure your progress, as well as identify and address roadblocks along the way.
