What Does a Marketing Manager Do?
Marketing professionals play a pivotal role in B2B companies spanning industries from healthcare to manufacturing and everything in between. Marketing manager responsibilities often include managing a brand’s identity, maintaining websites and e-commerce stores, aligning with executives and sales professionals on critical business objectives, working with teams of content creators, and so much more. They are typically the people who interface with marketing agencies, like Sagefrog, to discuss the company’s vision and strategy, review and approve tactics, and demonstrate the agency’s ROI.
Everything the marketing manager does is seen by existing or potential clients, adding to the weight these individuals carry throughout their routine workdays. But we’re not here to add to your workload; we want you to achieve more as an individual, contributing more to the B2B company that reaps the benefits of your accomplishments. Keep reading to learn what you need to know to be even better at your job.
Be the Best Marketing Manager You Can Be
Even if you check off all items on your daily to-do lists as a marketing manager, you still might not be doing everything in your power to lead your company to success. We bet you can tell a great manager from just an okay manager—and while we don’t doubt your awesomeness, you can’t study these marketing manager skills in textbooks, and we want to help you foster that extra charm.
Our skilled account managers have worked with hundreds of marketing managers over the years, and we’ve learned what differentiates a good one from a great one. We’ll run through our top five tips for becoming a marketing manager with the most significant impact possible to B2B organizations.
1. Master Your Industry
For starters, you must become the go-to source for company and market knowledge. Learn and master the ins and outs of your company, customer, and competition so that you can make the most effective decisions regarding brand strategy, marketing campaigns, and materials.
Knowing your company’s mission and developing the right initiatives to work towards it is critical for organizational growth and customer satisfaction. When you look at your customer base, what patterns do you see? Understand how your buyers buy, and then flex marketing efforts to fit your ideal customer. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of real-life customers. They lay out the responsibilities, pain points, needs, and other details that you and your team need to better serve your target audience. The last part of this plan is knowing your competition. By understanding what your competitors are doing better or not doing at all, you can capitalize on your marketing efforts and give your company an extra edge.
2. Adapt to Market Shifts
Marketing managers often set plans and goals and adhere so closely to them that they forget to adapt when necessary. Problems and market shifts will inevitably pop up, and it’s critical to be creative and flexible in times of change. Otherwise, your efforts and campaigns will become outdated and ineffective.
COVID-19 proved the importance of adaptability in marketing. No one could predict the sudden, unprecedented changes that businesses faced far and wide. When offices closed, supply slowed, and customer interactions halted, the best marketing managers scrapped previous plans to address customers in a completely new light. In the B2B marketing world, it’s more important to remain flexible than micromanaging marketing efforts and having several back-up plans.
3. Stay Focused on the Team
As a marketing manager, you know that it’s not a one-person show. It takes a team of writers, designers, and digital marketers to create collateral, sales professionals and executives to align on key objectives, and everyone else in the organization to reflect 360 degrees of your company’s goals.
Teamwork is at the core of great B2B marketing, and the best marketing managers realize this and utilize the brainpower around them to make their ideas even better. As a manager, you might provide several others with their day-to-day tasks; to do so effectively, establish a clear vision for the company prior to delineating duties. With everyone on the same page, there’s room to accomplish much more.
4. Keep a Listening Ear
Lastly, listening is integral to your success—listening to customers and their feedback, listening to sales professionals on what’s popular, listening to your digital team about what’s performing well, and listening to your team members to understand how you can be a better leader.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t always have perfect answers or solutions, but providing a safe space for others to be openly communicative with you is a sign of a great marketing manager. By listening to those around you, especially customers, you can do less of what’s not working and do more of what’s working well.
5. Follow Your Passion
One of the most apparent differences between a marketing manager and a truly outstanding marketing manager is enthusiasm. Find what excites you at work and follow it, leveraging positive energy and passion in everyday activities for the best outcomes for your B2B company.
If your marketing plan isn’t exciting to you, then it probably won’t be exciting to your audience either. Think outside of the box, develop thorough strategies, exercise your creativity, and create a marketing plan that invigorates your organization and instills the same boundless enthusiasm on your customer base.
You’re one step closer to leveling up your marketing manager skills, but we know there’s a lot on your plate. As your company becomes more successful, your agenda will only become more jam-packed with tasks. Get in touch to discuss how we can help you achieve your company’s goals.
