Marketing Management – 8 Things You Need to Know

As a marketing manager, you are responsible for more than just creating cutting edge, catchy campaigns. You are probably accountable for multiple projects and possibly an entire team. And it can be challenging to ensure that everybody has the right task to do to advance each marketing project in a logical sequence.

A marketing manager effectively has to combine all the theories and best practices of management with those of marketing. He or she has to oversee all the organization's marketing campaigns, coordinating with other stakeholders, such as the Sales department. They lead the brainstorming with their team for new campaigns and monitor those currently underway. Then, they analyze the data of continuing and completed campaigns, evaluating their success.

In this post, we look at some of the essential tasks that a marketing manager has to undertake and some of the areas where successful marketing managers focus.


Marketing Management - 8 Things You Need to Know:


1. Marketing Managers Need to Focus on Their Goals Continually

Goals are vital for marketing managers. Setting goals should be one of the first things you do as a marketing manager. They should almost remain uppermost in your mind. 

You need to ensure your goals are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Targeted. 

When setting your goals, try to answer these five questions to ensure any goal is specific enough:

  • What do I want to accomplish?
  • Why is this goal important?
  • Who does this goal involve?
  • Where is it located?
  • Which resources or limits does the goal involve?

Some people forget about the 'A' requirement of a SMART goal. They set goals that they know will be impossible to achieve. While they may think that this will challenge them, there is a real danger that they give up because they are not attaining this unattainable goal. If you are a small online retailer, don't set a marketing goal to outperform Amazon, for example. 


2. Marketing Managers Need Project Management Skills

Of course, using specialist project management software, such as Monday.com can help marketing managers ensure that they manage their projects smoothly. For instance, Monday.com, along with quite a few other project management platforms, allows you to see your project's bigger picture. It gives you a high-level overview of where things stand at a glance. At the same time, you can view any team member's progress on a project and quickly shift tasks between people if it appears any logjams are occurring.


3. Marketing Managers Have Many Transferable Skills

As a marketing manager, you build up a repertoire of many transferable skills. This could be very useful if you choose to move sideways in the future. 

Transferable skills that a marketing manager typically possesses include:

  • Communication, such as persuasiveness, assertiveness, information sharing, empathy, customer networking, effective speaking
  • Planning, such as goal setting, project management, managing people
  • Initiative – self-sufficiency, creativity, innovation
  • Technology – computer literacy, marketing software, willingness to try new equipment

4. Know Your Brands Well

As a marketer, you need to know your brand well. This includes both the company and its products. This is relatively easy for an internal marketer within a firm selling its own product, particularly if it has only a small line of products. But this is just as important for a marketer in an agency. He/she needs to dig deep to learn everything about all the clients and their products.

This ties in with the importance of focusing on your goals. You need to know your company's mission and what it stands for. Again, if you are a marketing manager in an agency, you need to analyze every one of your clients' missions.

Analyze past marketing campaigns. What has worked well and what has been less successful. Have any campaigns totally tanked? And if so, why? Which campaigns, both offline and online, have done well in the past?


5. Know Your Customers and Competition

It must be challenging to market or sell a product if you don't fully understand it or the people to whom your organization is attempting to sell it. You need to know your market well.  

You need to understand the dynamics of your target market fully. Closely examine any existing data. What common characteristics and demographics do your current customers possess? Do they follow any common interests, and have your past marketing efforts recognized this? 

Some firms strongly believe in creating buying personas to define "people" who represent your target customers. Sure, you buying personas aren't real people, but they represent your typical customers. They are the types of people who you consider the target audience for your marketing efforts. You want to know their goals, pain points, and buying patterns. You want to craft marketing messages targeted specifically to them.

At the same time that you analyze your customers, you also need to examine your competition. You can't have blinkers on, operating in a silo, assuming your competitors don't exist. What do they do right? What do they do wrong? Are they doing anything that you should copy or preferably improve upon with your twist?


6. There Are Many Useful Tools for a Marketing Manager

We mentioned Monday.com earlier in this article. This is just one of many specialist project management platforms that marketing managers can use to ensure that their projects and tasks coordinate across their teams. Most of them focus on improving the efficiency and workflow of your teams. 

In the case of Monday.com, you build boards to represent your workflow. However, you can visualize your data virtually any way you want. The boards are totally customizable, making it easy for you to depict your workflows. You can automate repetitive tasks, and integrate with many of your other apps, too.

You can use the platform to collaborate within the context of your work. It helps you maintain ongoing communication between your teams and departments. 

Of course, with all this flexibility, a marketing manager may wonder where to start. This is where Monday.com's templates come in handy. You will find more than 100 marketing templates, including content planning, campaign tracking, competitor analysis, social media calendar, A/B tests, keyword research, content calendar, and more.

If Monday.com doesn't meet your needs, you will find many other useful tools that may better suit you. These include Workfront, Basecamp, Wrike, Workamajig, and Teamwork, amongst others. 


7. Take Advantage of Software Integrations

As we have already seen, marketing managers have many useful tools to help them perform. One thing that helps with this is that many software tools recognize and interact with each other. You don't have to keep your work siloed inside separate apps.

For example, if you use Monday.com for your core project management, it seamlessly integrates with many other tools. These include, amongst others:

  • Microsoft Outlook and Gmail – you can automatically convert emails into action items to track and manage inside Monday.com
  • Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive – you can easily attach, share, and preview files stored in these file-sharing apps from within Monday.com
  • Slack – you can share information, updates, and files in Slack #channels directly from inside Monday.com
  • Zoom – set Zoom calls within any Monday.com board to communicate in context
  • Excel – easily import and export any Excel sheet into a board with just a few clicks
  • Adobe Creative Cloud – you can visualize your entire design process by managing all your creative workflows directly in Adobe Creative Cloud

Monday.com also includes more marketing-focused integrations, including SurveyMonkey, Mailchimp, Facebook Ads, HubSpot, and more.

You will find that many of the other project management platform apps include similar integrations. Also, many of these apps integrate with each other. It makes sense to take advantage of any integrations that exist between the software apps and platforms you use, as it means you can use your time more efficiently.


8. Become a Master Storyteller

Source: mdirector.com

Most successful marketers are also master storytellers. You tell the story of your brand to its potential customers. As master marketer Seth Godin says, "Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell."

Storytelling enables you to connect with your customers. You use it to demonstrate closeness and empathy, rather than people viewing you as a soulless brand. You can use storytelling to show potential customers how the product you represent can assist them in their everyday lives, often by demonstrating how it has impacted others' lives. 

While marketers can tell stories using virtually any medium, social media has added a whole new storytelling dimension. Social networks are designed for people to tell stories, whether by words, pictures, or videos. Even a 15 second TikTok video tells a brief story. It is by no means accidental that one of the most successful types of social media posts in recent years is the Story, told in a series of images and video clips that you can add to as your Story unfolds.

However, a master storyteller knows that a story needs a structure – even an unconventional one like a short TikTok tale. 

It can't be all about you for a start. You quickly bore of the guy who comes up to you at a party and rambles on about his achievements. Well, a marketing story by a brand is no different. It needs to be much more than just a message about selling a product. People have no interest in social posts that look like traditional ads, for instance. You need to bring your audience into your story

Your story needs to convey the following: brand values, emotion, strengths of the product, and a hook. Don't underestimate the importance of emotion to good storytelling. However, you need to ensure that you select the appropriate emotion for your brand and its target market. 

About the Author
With over 15 years in content marketing, Werner founded Influencer Marketing Hub in 2016. He successfully grew the platform to attract 5 million monthly visitors, making it a key site for brand marketers globally. His efforts led to the company's acquisition in 2020. Additionally, Werner's expertise has been recognized by major marketing and tech publications, including Forbes, TechCrunch, BBC and Wired.