Marketing Management: How To Exceed Expectations As A Marketing Manager

Marketing managers have the ability to carry the entire marketing process on their backs. Seeing it through from start to finish requires many strong qualities and alongside that, many responsibilities. Balancing all of this can seem overwhelming. Allow us to break down the common characteristics, qualifications, and responsibilities of a marketing manager. Consider this guide as a kickstart to your marketing management journey so in the future you can hit the ground running.

Marketing managers have a lot on their plate to say the least.Marketing management, in a nutshell, means handling and overseeing the entire marketing process from start to finish. Although their workload can be daunting, it doesn’t take a superhero to become a successful marketing manager.

Here are the common qualifications and sought-after skills that are well within your reach to become a successful marketing manager.

Acquire The Qualifications

When seeking candidates for marketing management positions, there are marketing qualifications that businesses hiring won’t budge on, and on the flip side, there are qualifications that they would prefer you to have. These qualities fall into the “it’d be nice” category, and can increase your chance of landing the position. To ensure you have the qualifications businesses value, here are some leads to get you started.

Get Hands On Experience

The average amount of experience required for a marketing management position is 3-5 years in marketing and/or sales. Time is of the essence, and to ensure your time is spent effectively, you can use entry level marketing positions as your experience. These positions can offer unique benefits and provide opportunities, serving as the perfect stepping stool when climbing the ranks to a marketing management position.

Complete Your Bachelor’s

Businesses, more often than not, require a candidate to have a bachelor’s degree in either sales, business, or marketing. Obtaining this degree not only reassures businesses that you are well-versed in this profession, but it also allows your work to speak for you.

Strive for Your MBA

Acquiring your MBA can provide you with long-term benefits, by opening doors to more opportunities, higher pay, and increasing your chances of landing strong management positions in marketing. Having an MBA guarantees you’re suitable to match or exceed the bar, which companies searching for candidates can appreciate.

Gain The Skills

If you’re thinking of pursuing a career in marketing management and are interested to see if you carry the qualities and skills needed from a marketing manager, here are some basic guidelines of strong attributes all impactful marketing managers have.

Skills required for this position can be split up into two groups: hard and soft skills. If you’re unfamiliar with these terms: soft skills refer to how you do your job, for example the lasting impression you make on an employee or a client, whereas hard skills relate to your direct understanding of how to complete a task.

We’ll start with the soft skills.

Relationship Building

To ensure strong rapport with customers, it’s important to uphold a solid, mutual relationship with your audience. This ensures loyalty between you and your customers and opens the door for future connections.

Analytical Thinking

Tapping into the analytical side of thinking enhances your ability to analyze data. There’s a difference between seeing the data in front of you and then actually being able to take that data, study it, and make solid decisions for your marketing strategy based on that.

House Creativity

On the flipside of having the eyes to report and analyze data, it’s just as important to address your creative side. Thinking outside of the box and being able to take a step back and pivot your perspective can serve your business in ways that standard logical thinking can’t. Creative thinking boosts marketing efforts and finds opportunities that aren’t necessarily right in front of you.

Now on to the hard skills expected from marketing managers.

Master Analytics

Marketing managers are required to have a heightened understanding of their marketing analytics. To boost growth and propel their marketing efforts forward, you need to know what strategies are pulling their weight and which ones need to be cut loose. By mastering your marketing analytics, you get full visibility of your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from your current marketing strategy.

Supervise Management

Within the realm of marketing management, there’s different aspects that all need attending to and require hands-on management. A marketing manager focuses on and puts out fires in all different aspects of marketing, efficiently and effectively. Balancing various aspects of marketing is necessary from marketing managers as they are the first to know of all marketing information, good or bad.

Emphasize SEO

To reach full potential and optimize all marketing efforts, SEO should be at top priority. Putting a strong emphasis on search engine optimization, overall, ensures you’re a step ahead. On top of that, you can be sure the hard work on your marketing efforts don’t go unnoticed. Focusing on search engine optimization attracts organic search traffic to your site, increases brand awareness, and builds a sense of trust between you and your audience.

You’ve got the qualifications and the proof to show for it, now it’s time to showcase your skills and experience in an organized way. Download these resume templates to advocate for yourself effectively and let your resume speak for itself.

Although we’ve concluded that marketing managers supervise many, if not all, marketing efforts, let’s break down their workload. Here’s a deeper dive to focus on their main roles and responsibilities, day-to-day work, and review the different types of marketing managers and their areas of expertise.

Roles and Responsibilities

Marketing managers are responsible for handling all tasks related to marketing and serve to increase the business’s sales, which also plays a role in the marketing management process.  Marketing managers have all of the business’s marketing efforts at their fingertips–predicting, analyzing, and ultimately choosing the best decisions that align with their marketing strategy for the business.

Coordinate Marketing Strategies

Marketing managers are responsible for overseeing and conducting the business’s marketing strategy from beginning to end. Ensuring that the process is seamless and no detail is left unattended, marketing managers keep a close eye on all marketing efforts.

Predict Marketing Forecast

It’s expected that marketing trends do not stay sedentary for long. The marketing world is ever-changing and if you’re not one step ahead, you’re behind. An important part of succeeding as a marketing manager is being able to anticipate trends, try new things, and analyze results.

Optimize Marketing Impact

Marketing managers are able to take results from their research and know the next best step relating to their marketing efforts. Marketing managers can look in the right places and find the right opportunities to boost their marketing efforts, resulting in stronger, more effective marketing strategies.

Day-To-Day Duties

Consider these day-to-day duties as a sneak peek into what a day in the life of a marketing manager would look like. These duties indicate typical priorities marketing managers focus on daily.

Oversee Current Campaigns

Within a business’s marketing efforts, there’s sure to be multiple marketing campaigns launching and starting at similar times. It all falls under the marketing manager’s umbrella to attend to numerous campaigns, overcoming potential roadblocks, putting out fires, or simply pushing the project forward. Whatever the situation calls for, the marketing manager is already on top of it.

Guide Research Efforts

As a marketing manager, it’s vital to have a good eye when conducting marketing research.

Having the ability to ask the important questions, dig beneath surface level research, and reveal helpful insight about products and services, while understanding your customers on a deeper level is extremely valuable.

Analyze Data

By analyzing the data, marketing managers are refusing to let all the hard work and research go to waste. Only when using research and results, is the given data really put to use. Marketing managers that can accurately analyze the data in front of them are essential to a business.

Know The Different Types Of Marketing Managers

Marketing managers across the board share similar objectives and in the end strive towards a shared goal, but there are different types of marketing managers that specialize in separate aspects and bring something different to the table.

Content Marketing

A content marketing manager has the ability to take a content strategy from scribbles and notes, to put it into action, and give it legs to stand on to optimize potential to drive foot traffic for the business. Content marketing managers specialize in creating, planning, and executing the entire content strategy, directing their focus to media channels and publishing effective content.

Affiliate Marketing

The main priority in an affiliate marketing management position pays close attention to building rapport and strong business related relationships between organizations. Affiliate marketing managers are hyper aware of the current state of their relationships with fellow organizations and anticipate how to improve, enhance, and propel those relationships further.

Product Marketing

Product marketing managers are responsible to run meetings, prepare future agendas, and troubleshoot questions that have a tendency to land in gray areas. Behind all the product related tasks, however, there is a strong passion for customer service. It’s not enough for a product marketer to have a solid understanding of product sales and marketing. Empathizing and truly understanding their customers makes a good product marketing manager a great one.