The right audiences—potential customers and your existing customers—are reached through effective marketing, which showcases your product or service. The outcome? brand recognition, leads, recommendations, and sales. Great, isn't that right? “marketing management“.
But effective marketing management is sometimes easier to say than to accomplish. Your marketing efforts may be strengthened by hiring a specialized marketing manager to handle these tasks. This will free up your time and energy so you can concentrate on expanding your business.
What is marketing management?
The management of marketing activities, including managers who are participating in such activities, is referred to as “marketing management.”
Relevant activities often include:
- Setting goals
- Step execution
- Performing market research
- Devising marketing campaigns
- Identifying a company’s target market
- Managing content on various channels and across different mediums
What do marketing managers do?
A marketing manager is in charge of delegating and planning to carry out a company's marketing strategy.
Relevant activities often include:
- Putting in place a standard operating procedure (SOP), which describes how certain (and often mundane) tasks should be carried out.
- investigating the consumer base and target market for the company.
- Planning, organizing, and executing our campaigns.
- Producing and disseminating sponsored content on social media (e.g., Instagram or TikTok).
- Managing email campaigns and newsletters.
- Keeping track of important statistics like website visits, social media activity, and email open rates.
- Creating print and/or digital content to increase brand recognition.
A solid understanding of numerous platforms, such as Google Analytics, social media channels, such as Facebook, and marketing best practices is necessary for the role given the diverse range of duties a marketing manager may perform (e.g., best times to send email blasts).
A marketing manager may also need to be knowledgeable in search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, or content development, depending on the type of business and its marketing goals. For instance, an ecommerce business would need an SEO specialist to help content rank on Google, but an event business might need a social media expert to generate buzz and draw attendance. A generalist may take on a variety of tasks to assist the business in generating revenue and building proficiency in certain fields over time.
The size or sector of the business might also influence the range of duties of a marketing manager. For instance, a marketing manager at a bigger company can be in charge of a group of experts. In a smaller company, a marketing manager could do a lot of the tasks herself.
5 things marketing managers do
Although the duties of marketing managers differ depending on the company or sector, in general, you can anticipate them to either direct or support the following:
1. Evaluate product/market fit
In an interview with Shopify CEO Harley Finkelstein, Martha Stewart offered businesses the following product-development advice: “Does the customer require it?” Does the customer want it? You're probably onto a winning business or product concept if the answer to either of those two questions is yes. A marketing manager must make customers realize how your products satisfy their demands and desires.
To achieve this, they could conduct a survey of your customer base to learn about the characteristics of your products and to get input on customer satisfaction and product/market fit. Using the company's email list as an example, a marketing manager may send out a survey asking customers to assess their satisfaction with the product, how often they use it, what could be offered to make it, and how they would feel if it disappeared from the product.
This procedure identifies the qualities that your customers value while also highlighting potential areas for improvement. Positive feedback might appear in marketing materials because it conveys what your current customer base appreciates about your product back might appear in marketing materials because it conveys what your current customer base appreciates about your product. The product development team or business owner may be directly informed of areas that need improvement so they can make changes.
This task may be assigned to a product marketing manager in a big business. However, a generalist marketing manager will take the reins of this tiny team.
2. Craft a marketing strategy
The foundation of marketing management is creating and executing a marketing strategy, which serves as a road map for getting your income from point A to point B. This is a detailed product that makes use of many platforms and channels to advertise the company's goods and services.
Although the ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to increase sales, a marketing strategy entails much more than simply giving customers a reason to click the Buy button. It develops a customer journey that takes the prospective customer from the time they first learn about your brand to the point at which they make a purchase—and beyond. There are three phases to this customer journey:
- Awareness stage. A customer acknowledges that they have an issue that has to be solved and that your brand could have the answer (e.g., someone is planning a hiking trip and realizes they need better hiking boots).
- Consideration stage. The customer examines possible solutions (e.g., they read the specifications of your hiking shoes to determine if they might fit the bill).
- Decision stage. The customer decides to buy after doing their research (e.g., they determine that your shoes are of better quality for a reasonable price, and they buy).
A marketing strategy will outline the various customers and the type of content that should be presented to them.
3. Create brand messaging
The value proposition(s) of a brand's products are communicated to customers via brand messaging, along with the company's purpose and personality. Or, to put it another way, brand messaging communicates what your company stands for, who it is for, why it exists, and what makes it special.
A marketing manager will provide innovative suggestions and strategic knowledge to help direct the creation of marketing messages. They'll specifically produce:
- A mission statement
- Positioning statements
- Ad taglines
- Website copy
- Channel-specific copy for social media, email, and more
On a small team, they’ll own this process completely.
4. Track marketing metrics
To evaluate the success of a campaign, a marketing manager may define objectives and monitor important indicators, such as:
- Website traffic. Page views, bounce rates, and time spent on each page are examples of website metrics.
- Social media. A social media team or marketing manager keeps tabs on the rate of followers, comments, and shares across all platforms.
- Email. Email subscribers, open rates, click-through rates, and conversions are important email marketing metrics.
- SEO. Search rankings, organic sessions, click-through rate, new users, and top keywords are used to gauge the success of an SEO strategy.
- Advertising. To gauge the success of their campaigns, advertisers monitor their cost per lead, cost per click, return on investment, and conversion rate.
Tracking these metrics provides useful information on the state of your marketing campaigns and their effects on your small business. You may measure the effectiveness of your email newsletters at attracting clients' attention by tracking the open rates of your emails, for instance. Are there not enough openings? You may change the subject line or include emojis and photographs. Reviewing page views once a month or once a quarter may provide a business with useful information about its SEO strategy and the effectiveness of its content (or not). A marketing manager may use such information to take well-informed action, such as deciding where to focus more resources, where to put marketing activities on hold, or where to adopt an entirely new strategy.
5. Build a great team
A marketing manager may need to assemble a team as your business expands to manage an expanding to-do list and get critical support.
- Sets expectations. A marketing manager sets quantifiable objectives and explains what is expected of the team.
- Review output. Periodically reviewing the team's output and performance allows the marketing manager to make modifications. What fresh tactics, for instance, can help increase the number of likes, shares, and followers if social media engagement is declining?
- Act as a leader. A marketing manager becomes a manager of people and marketing projects when they create a team. They will guide aspiring channel experts and acquire funding to support the team. They'll communicate with the leadership to create goals and report outcomes.
- Oversees tools and resources. The necessary tools for the work may be acquired with the aid of a marketing manager, and these tools may include a social media scheduler, an email marketing platform, a design program, a task management tool, an SEO keyword research tool, analytics tools, and marketing automation tools.
- Create processes and workflows. For the team, a marketing manager may design customized procedures and processes. To keep everyone on task, having a workflow in place may reduce concerns about what has to be done, when, and by whom.
- Manage the marketing budget. A marketing manager may also be in charge of the marketing budget, which may include expenses for tools and software, pay for employees, events, and advertising.
Making the first marketing hire might help small business owners delegate marketing duties to a professional. Sales should increase as a consequence, giving the business owner more time to think strategically. The key to success is marketing management, and employing a competent marketing manager is a crucial part of that key.
