Marketing Management Overview: Definitions, Disciplines, Types, & Challenges

Good marketing management can help your team execute efficiently and effectively. On the other side, poor marketing management could lead your marketers astray from the path toward your goals.

The following is a complete guide to marketing management to help you and your team understand and succeed at this discipline.

What Is Marketing?

What Is Marketing Management?

Marketing management encompasses various marketing disciplines, from defining your company’s goals to organizing every plan, to the final execution of your strategy.

Philip Kotler and Keven Lane Keller define marketing management in their book, aptly titled Marketing Management, as “the development, design, and implementation of marketing programs, processes, and activities that recognize the breadth and interdependencies of the business environment.”

Why Is Marketing Management Important?

Look at any business that has achieved success and upon a deep study, you will realize how proper marketing management strategies aided that success. As a market manager, you must recognize the vitality of aligning your business goals to your budget and then working on your marketing plans accordingly. It also enables you to focus better on your objectives and work together with your team as a coherent unit.

A capable marketing management team can easily overpower competition in the market and stand undefeated. The key, of course, lies in realizing your consumer’s needs and using their words to attract other potential consumers. Properly utilizing your market research will help you easily attract more new consumers.

Marketing management also helps you to use your resources effectively. Your business needs to focus on the opportunities at hand and make the most of them with the help of your resources. But alongside that, make sure to also pay heed to the relatively small details of your marketing plans!

Efficient and experienced marketing management teams with people of varying and valuable skill sets can help businesses prosper and grow. Further, you can push up your marketing management and get your work done faster by using the right marketing tools.

What duties does a marketing manager take on? Marketing managers are generally responsible for making decisions for research, strategy, resource, coordination, execution, and measurement duties.

Marketing Management Research Disciplines

Target Market Research

Understanding your target audience is the first step. An in-depth analysis of your target market allows you to unearth exactly how your product or service fits into the customer’s needs.

Market research helps you develop efficient marketing plans and sales techniques that easily hook your desired audience.

Competitive Analysis

Identifying your competitors in the market is the second most vital step. Upon successful identification, try to find out how they engage the market and what marketing channels they rely on most. A proper analytical study of your competitors allows you to learn from them and helps you figure out their mistakes.

Product Market Fit

Are you sure that your product or service solves a need in your niche? Try questioning your product/service to determine whether your customers would find any use for it. While doing this, ensure that you look at your product/service from a customer’s eyes and not as a business owner.

The product marketing strategy template is a solid framework for marketing managers to understand their own positioning.

Business Analysis: SWOT

Efficiently research the needs of your business. Find out whether an overall change in the way your company runs is essential or not. Identify and define business solutions that you think will push up your profits.

Using the SWOT  (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) model can be helpful for analyzing your business. It helps you explore these four vital aspects of your business. After this deep analysis, you will be ready to ascertain whether a change is necessary or not.

Strategic Marketing Management Disciplines

Methodologies: Mission, Vision, & Values

Marketing managers hold themselves accountable for executing marketing programs that align with the organization’s mission, vision, and values statements.

This doesn’t necessarily mean marketing managers create these frameworks. Rather, these statements serve as a “north star” that guides all marketing efforts to fulfill the organization’s goals and objectives.

Brand Management: Visual Identity, Brand Voice

A core marketing management discipline is branding. Marketing teams are typically the champions of visual branding identities and brand voice editorial style.

Marketing managers define these frameworks and hold their teams accountable to these expectations.

Objectives: Growth

Marketing management must define goals, objectives, and key performance indicators for their teams that align with overarching strategic objectives.

These growth frameworks enable marketing teams to focus marketing programs on opportunities that have the highest likelihood of influencing lead and lag indicators that will ultimately result in strategic business growth.

Marketing Activities & Program Management

Marketing management defines the tactics, channels, and content that marketers leverage to influence their goals. Based on market research and business strengths, marketing managers are responsible for identifying the greatest opportunities an organization may leverage to result in growth.

Resource Management Disciplines

Team

Having an experienced and knowledgeable marketing team to work with is essential for your business to prosper. Your team has several aspects to research, from building greater awareness about your brand to promoting your products. It generally includes individuals possessing different skill sets who work together for a shared goal.

Tools

Various marketing tools can make your task as a marketing manager much more effortless. Marketing tools may include customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, social media, website, blog, search engine optimization, analytics, editorial content calendars, and more. You can choose suitable marketing tools to work efficiently based on your marketing strategies.

Budget

Defining your marketing budget helps you outline how exactly your business wishes to spend its finances to influence results. It incorporates various factors like the amount spent on paid advertising, sponsored content, and other marketing tools.

Marketing Coordination Disciplines

Ceremonies: Processes & Meetings

Hosting meetings regularly with your marketing team and even with other relevant departments in your company is vital. It helps you coordinate efficiently with your employees and work together better.

Stakeholder Relationships

Forging mutually beneficial relations with other third-party groups or organizations is essential to make your business succeed. It helps your business build networks and unifies common voices about products and services vital for your venture.

Marketing Execution Disciplines

Expectations

A crucial marketing management function is setting expectations for those contributing to marketing programs. This means outlining who does what with clear responsibilities and task assignments. Determine the time your team needs to spend on each aspect of marketing execution, and have them work accordingly.

Accountability

When marketing management sets expectations for each contributor, the business can hold team members accountable for completing their work according to specifications.

Consequences

Marketing managers must hold team members accountable for meeting expectations. This means marketing managers are responsible for initiating critical conversations when team members aren’t collaborating, creating, communicating, or delivering against expectations such as due dates and deadlines, tool usage, communication expectations, standards of performance, and any additional expectations.

Consequences marketing managers may implement to correct behavioral issues could include performance improvement plans.

Marketing Measurement Disciplines

KPIs

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, help you assess how your marketing strategies perform. From analyzing the financial aspect of your business to sales, there are different KPIs that help you figure out how your company is working to achieve its goals.

Iteration

Iteration refers to repeating a given process to analyze the outcomes thereby. Based on the results, you can accordingly modify your strategies to improve the efficiency of your marketing planning.

The six functions of marketing management are resource management, operations management, program management, campaign management, project management, and work management.

There are many types of marketing management.

Some notable terms that may come to mind are brand management, social media management, and content management. Marketing terms such as these certainly describe types of marketing that need management.

However, the core functions of marketing management apply across all types of marketing.

Therefore, the following marketing management functions exist as a unified whole to align all marketing activities and experiences with strategic business objectives.

This list starts with the broadest management functions (resources) down to the most granular functions (work).

Marketing Management

Marketing management is the practical application of resources, operations, programs, campaigns, projects, work, and assets that align all marketing activities and experiences with strategic business objectives.

Marketing Resource Management

Marketing resource management is the planning, scheduling, allocating, and governing of budget, people, supplies, and technology to align these marketing resources with strategic business objectives.

Marketing Operations Management

Marketing operations management organizes people, procedures, and technology to optimize the efficiency, scale, consistency, and results of marketing activities by aligning practical implementation with strategic business objectives.

Marketing Program Management

Marketing program management leads, strategizes, and standardizes the vision, implementation, and measurement of ongoing marketing initiatives.

Marketing Campaign Management

Marketing campaign management communicates a single message and creates a unified marketing experience by planning, executing, tracking, and analyzing projects across multiple tactics, channels, and types of content to achieve a specific goal.

Marketing Project Management

Marketing project management is the initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control, and closure of marketing deliverables, campaigns, and programs.

Marketing Work Management

Marketing work management provides visibility throughout the project supply chain progression by organizing the communication, collaboration, workflows, and approvals necessary to complete tasks, handoffs, and milestones.

Marketing Asset Management

Marketing asset management is the process of organizing, ingesting, structuring, naming, tagging, storing, sharing, distributing, governing, and auditing of compliant, approved, and up-to-date work-in-process creative as well as finalized deliverables.

What are some different types of marketing management?

Eight common types of marketing management include brand, social media, content, product, digital, channel, information, and digital asset management.

It may be simple to think that marketing management is all about the big picture of how all marketing work is executed. But no! There are disciplines within marketing management that marketing managers are typically responsible for implementing.

1. Brand Management

Brand management refers to implementing useful techniques to increase the credibility and authority of your brand in the market over time.

2. Social Media Management

Social media management talks about regulating, controlling, and maintaining your brand’s social media presence. It incorporates vital steps like creating, posting, and even analyzing your content to further your reach in the market.

3. Content Management

Content management refers to the essential process of collecting, delivering, and looking into the overall management of content in any suitable format. From using the proper SEO-based keywords for the right platforms to writing and creating copy, there are several aspects that content management entails.

4. Content Marketing Management

Content marketing management is the way you manage and handle your content. It also involves organizing your marketing efforts such as blogs, social content, and newsletters.

5. Product Marketing Management

Product marketing management is the positioning, messaging, and branding of your product. Businesses have complete control over their product to effectively communicate the product’s value.

6. Digital Marketing Management

Digital marketing management is the process of regulating, controlling, and maintaining your brand’s online presence.

Connect with potential clients using digital marketing tactics – social media, email, search engines, etc. – to further reach your target market.

7. Marketing Channel Management

Marketing channel management is the process of managing your marketing channels — the outlets or platform through which your business connects and communicates with your target audience. It provides an opportunity to reach more people and expand brand awareness.

8. Marketing Information Management

Marketing information management involves gathering, organizing, and analyzing marketing data. From sales reports to metric results, marketing information management helps make decisions to improve your marketing strategy.

9. Digital Asset Management

Digital asset management is the process of storing and categorizing digital files. Maintain brand consistency with shareable assets within your organization.

While marketing management procedures and tactics have developed significantly over the past few years, there are still challenges yet to overcome.

1. Keeping Up With Trends

Keeping your product or service updated to the recent trends in the market is a vital factor that several businesses often fail to realize. Thus, they are prone to more significant losses in the market than anyone else.

2. Staying Focused On The North Star Business Objectives vs. Daily Grind

Marketing management needs to focus on day-to-day activities and marketing metrics to understand the value that their consumers receive from their products and services. Marketing managers often fail to balance the north star business strategy and their daily grind. This often leads to their downfall.

3. Building A Stronger Bond With Stakeholders

Businesses need to realize the vitality of stakeholders in their business and thus value their presence. Holding conferences and keeping in touch with them is essential in building a stronger bond with your stakeholders.

4. Working As A Coherent Unit

Coordinating marketing management team members and even cross-functional team members is vital to work collaboratively towards a shared goal. It is only through effective communication between team members that you can achieve greater collaboration.

5. Optimization Of Your Processes

Optimizing your marketing processes, frameworks, ceremonies, etc., as your team continues to work is also a tough challenge for several marketing managers today.

6. Proper Utilization Of Marketing Resources To Maximize Output

Proper usage of marketing resources, like tools that fit efficiently into your company’s budget, is essential. However, marketing managers need to ensure the company’s overall success is achieved by remaining within the constraints of your resources.

7. Cultivating A Culture Of Happy & Productive Team Members

Above all, marketing managers must not forget to propagate a healthy and happy working environment in the workplace. When your employees get a welcoming and encouraging workplace, they can boost their productivity.

CoSchedule Marketing Calendar

CoSchedule Marketing Calendar brings together all marketing initiatives into a centralized digital workspace to optimize productivity and workflow.

Resource Management

Work toward overarching business goals by seamlessly monitoring important projects and campaigns.

Operations Management

Use task templates to organize projects and create consistent processes so team members know what to do and when.

Program Management

Consistently execute recurring marketing initiatives (i.e., monthly newsletters, webinars, and reporting) to improve workflow and team productivity.

Project Management

Prioritize important projects while managing each task throughout its lifecycle (i.e., planning, testing, tracking, and reporting).

Marketing Work Management

Help manage the pipeline of upcoming and in-flight projects by enabling clear communication between team members. Start a discussion, leave a comment, or attach a file.

Asset Management

Organize and share work-in-process creative and final deliverables by sharing files in a project.

Or, seamlessly integrate various software to create a single unified system. Popular integrations include Dropbox, Google Drive, Mailchimp, WordPress, and OneDrive.

Create your free Marketing Calendar today.

CoSchedule Marketing Suite

Coschedule Marketing Suite is a family of agile marketing products to coordinate teams, projects, and processes to actualize strategic business goals.

Products in Coschedule’s Marketing Suite include:

• Calendar Organizer to enable global visibility over every project and campaign.
• Content Organizer to triage projects, drive strategy, and create content.
• Work Organizer to seamlessly manage and automate team and individual workflow.
• Asset Organizer to store, index, and manage brand assets.

Resource Management

Use the calendar view to plan, execute, and track marketing campaigns seamlessly.

Operations Management

Break work into actionable pieces and automate complex workflows to ensure projects meet industry and company standards every time.

Program Management

Consistently execute recurring marketing initiatives through reusable templates.

Campaign Management

Create marketing campaigns across multiple channels and use different tactics to stay aligned with business goals.

Project Management

Execute projects from ideation to completion while triaging the project intake process with request forms.

Use project backlog to refine and prioritize work into actionable tasks.

Marketing Work Management

Enable clear communication among team members by adding a project discussion, attaching files, or checking off tasks.

Asset Management

Monitor company assets through a systematic approach to maximize ROI.

When an asset is updated, CoSchedule updates that asset across every instance.

Additionally, grant read-only access to any project, campaign, or contract for a stakeholder to view.

Schedule your Marketing Suite product demo today.

What Are The 4 Types Of Marketing Management?

The four types of marketing management typically refer to the four Ps of marketing mix: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place.

However, the marketing mix is not marketing management. Some types of high-level marketing management include resource, work, project, and operations management.

What Is Marketing Management Used For?

Capable marketing management helps your company overpower competition in the market and stand undefeated. It also allows you to effectively use your resources and work well with your team to create greater awareness of your brand and promote it furthermore.

What Are The 5 Marketing Management Functions?

Traditional marketing management functions include research, planning, implementation, deployment, and measurement. Marketing managers have added agile practices with a sixth very important function: iterate.

What Does Marketing Management Include?

Marketing management refers to the extensive process of planning, organizing, monitoring, and executing your marketing programs, policies, and strategies to achieve your business objectives. It helps to generate greater profits by effectively bringing in more potential consumers to your base.

What Is The Marketing Management Process?

This piece was originally published May 27, 2022. It was updated December 7, 2022, again in February 2023 and April 2023. Nathan Ellering contributed to this piece.