TL;DR
- Marketing is a multi-facted beast
- Marketing managers thrive on cultivating order and efficiency
- Organized marketing produces optimal results
What’s a marketing effort without a management plan? Sounds like chaos. Efficiently managing your marketing is essential to succeeding at marketing and not just totally wasting your resources. Especially as your digital content mountain continues to grow, you need a management strategy and execution capabilities that keep you in control.
Marketing management may seem like an administrative chore that you’d rather avoid—that’s relatable! Get familiar with marketing management and use that knowledge to expertly approach this important aspect of marketing 👇
What is marketing management?
Marketing management is the practice of efficiently organizing and managing all the processes and related content that are pertinent to marketing. Every organization has a unique marketing plan, requiring each organization to develop a customized management strategy.
A marketing manager typically has a range of responsibilities, all designed to ensure that your marketing strategy is executed in the best possible way.
1. Coordinate marketing activities
Marketing managers coordinate the entire gamut of marketing activities. Working across digital channels, marketing managers make sure that your organic marketing, paid marketing, and special marketing initiatives are all aligned.
2. Monitor marketing campaign performance
If you’re running any marketing campaigns, then you need to know how they’re performing. Usually comparing against predetermined performance indicators, marketing managers keep tabs on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
3. Manage marketing content
Creating content is a beautiful thing—but you also need to manage it (all of it!). Marketing managers create systems and execute processes to ensure that your content is stored securely, in the correct file types, and in an organized way.
4. Foster communication and collaboration
The best marketing managers excel at fostering communication and collaboration between the marketing team and various stakeholders. Marketing managers improve marketing operations and effectiveness by cultivating strong working relationships with internal constituents and external vendors.
5. Monitor budgets and spending
Is your marketing spend within budget? A marketing manager may know the answer to that. Part of marketing management is ensuring that the available resources are allocated correctly and efficiently.
6. Report on marketing performance
Your marketing manager is probably comfortable with numbers—that’s because part of the job is collecting analytics to report on marketing performance. Getting regular reports lets you easily stay current on the performance of your marketing strategy.
Why your marketing needs to be managed
Management for marketing isn’t free, but you can do it right and reap many excellent benefits. Like what?
Maintain your strategic focus. Don’t get off track with many competing marketing priorities. Manage your marketing to stay organized and focused.
Manage resources efficiently. You’ve got limited resources—leverage the skills of a marketing manager to use those resources wisely.
Ensure consistent brand messaging. Across content types, digital channels, and time, your marketing manager can ensure the consistency of brand voice and messaging.
Get data-driven insights. You’re generating marketing data—also get the insights. Marketing managers make analytics more accessible and actionable.
Boost your adaptability to change. The marketing landscape is rapidly evolving—always. Marketing managers can boost your ability to adapt or pivot your marketing strategy as needed.
Maximize your ROI. Probably the best reason to expertly manage your marketing—feel confident that you’re getting an awesome return on your investment.
Enable scalability. Ready to scale your marketing effort? Well-managed marketing is a core requirement.
Beginner mistakes when managing a marketing effort
You have lots of ways to mismanage a marketing effort. Some mistakes that you’ll want to avoid 👇
🤦♀️ Lack clear objectives for your marketing management
🤦♀️ Allocate inadequate human and software resources to the management effort
🤦♀️ Deprioritize data collection and analysis
🤦♀️ Not leverage automation tools
🤦♀️ Fail to periodically adapt or optimize your marketing management activities
Manage your marketing like a pro
Want to excel at marketing management? You’ve got this. The process of marketing management goes something like this—
1.Assess your marketing strategy. Start by evaluating your marketing strategy. What are the key components and what’s required to manage each marketing activity effectively?
2. Establish marketing management priorities. After defining your management tasks, you can rank them by resources required and relative impact.
3. Create a marketing management plan. This next step is a big one—use that ranked task list to build a comprehensive marketing management plan. You’ll also need to identify the available resources to execute this plan.
4. Execute the marketing management strategy. Implementing a marketing management plan is a marathon, not a sprint. You’ll likely continue the execution phase for as long as you’re engaged in marketing.
5. Evaluate your management process. Continually monitor and evaluate your marketing management process. Pay attention to systems that can be improved and hunt for opportunities to boost efficiency.
6. Adjust the marketing management strategy as needed. Act on the results of your ongoing observations to make your management activities for marketing more effective.
Still tempted to dive into marketing without a management plan? You’re a brave soul—good luck.
