What skills should a Marketing Manager have?

When you’re in the role of Marketing Manager, you have a lot of things that you’re responsible for. Let’s dig in:

A Marketing Manager needs to know about Marketing Planning

You need to have a plan. That’s always step number one. You can use the 5Ps to kick off your planning exercise.

Purpose: What problem are we solving with our marketing?
People: Who is executing the marketing? Who is the marketing trying to reach?
Process: How are we executing the marketing?
Platform: What tools do we need to execute the marketing?
Performance: What is the measure of success with our marketing?

Answering those questions will give you a great foundation for your overall marketing plan. You can create multiple plans that roll up into your business strategy.

A Marketing manager needs to know about Market Research

This is key to understanding your target audience and what they want. You need to know what their pain points are and where they get their information from. Where do they spend their time finding solutions and making connections? If you don’t know that, you will be wasting your marketing resources.

You can do this through user groups, surveys, and general data analysis. At the end of the day, you’re better off asking people want they want instead of trying to guess.

A Marketing Manager needs to know about general and specific Marketing Tactics

Once you know who you are reaching, you need to find a way to get their attention. This means reaching them where they are. You’ll want to know a bit about all of the possible channels you can use. And there are a lot! Here are just a few:

– Paid Ads
– Organic Search
– Email Marketing
– Direct Mail
– Social Media
– Affiliate Marketing
– Influencer Marketing
– SMS
– Streaming/Terrestrial

This isn’t an exhaustive list. Your company will also likely have resources that specialize in different marketing channels so you don’t need to be an expert in every single one. You should, however, have a general understanding of the role that each channel plays. Understanding how ad bids, SEO, and metrics work will benefit you. How the data is collected and what with it is a priority.

A Marketing Manager needs to know about great Communication

What happened? What did it happen? What are you going to do about it? These are the basic questions that you need to be able to answer about marketing, but you also have to communicate with the rest of the team. You need to be able to delegate, set expectations, and support. Creating processes and documentation is the best and easiest way to accomplish this. You will be responsible for helping others understand what is working and what isn’t, and what to do next. Being able to analyze and interpret data is essential.

Here’s the good news – you don’t have to be an expert in absolutely everything. This is what the rest of the team is for. If you’re thinking about becoming a Marketing Manager or just looking to brush up on your role, take a look at your skills. You likely have a lot of great skills already but you can also figure out where there is room for improvement.