6 Vital Skills for Successful Marketing Managers

The role of Marketing Manager in business is increasingly important. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment opportunities for Marketing Managers are set to grow 10% in the next decade. 

The term “Marketing Manager” is a broad one.

The day to day operations of a Marketing Manager vary, depending on career stages, industry and individual approach.  In a typical workday, a Manager in this discipline might be working across strategy development, workflow, business leads, and taking charge of motivating their team. Also integral to the role is the managing and interpreting of data.

The role requires a broad range of skills, including, excellent communication and leadership skills, attention to detail and solid aptitude in maths.

What is the purpose of Marketing

The key purpose of marketing is to get people interested in the products or services of a company. This happens through market analysis, research and contemplating the interest of a business’s ideal customers and attracting them through messaging which would be educational and helpful to a business’s target group.

What marketing is reliant on is the skills and tools exercised by the Marketing Manager and teams charged with delivering timely and impactful results to budget and achieve corporate goals.

Our Top 6 Skills for the Marketing Operations Manager

We frequently work with clients in such roles across a range of industries (more information is available on our case studies page) and we’ve listened carefully to their needs. Here’s the top six skills we believe are the most essential for the Marketing Operations Manager who want to get ahead.

1. Understand Technology and Automation

Automating your marketing campaigns reduces cost, time and effort and helps your marketing team function more efficiently. A good Manager knows how to how to use technology to streamline marketing processes such as customer segmentation and data integration. An outstanding Manager will do all this, and will also have a handle on what systems work best for which campaign.

Once you know how to maximise the technology and automation systems that are available, your marketing campaigns will skyrocket.

2. Know how to Optimise and Analyse Social Media

How did that last tweet do? Why did that LinkedIn post resonate more than the other one? There are a dizzying array of tools and platforms available to help you optimise your Social Media marketing. But whichever one you choose,  gathering and examining historical data, behavioural data, and customer data is more vital than ever for optimizing campaign success and improve future performance.

3. Get to Grips With Your Data Management

Just as you should have an understanding of technology and automation systems, it is important to understand marketing data management. Gathered data allows for accurate campaign analysis and reporting and offers great insight moving forward. Know how to use Google Analytics.  (While there are a range of courses available to extend your knowledge, never underestimate how much you can teach yourself online!)

Take special notice of the arrival of GA4 Introducing the next generation of analytics, which will transform Google Analytics and will affect your digital marketing strategy. Using such analytics dashboards can stress test marketing strategy for just in time seasonal and situational adjustments.

Know how to gather accurate data, from your colleagues, your marketing research sources and your social media accounts. Don’t forget email marketing data generated from marketing emails, they can deliver great insights. Know the best tools to present what you have to the people who need it.

4. Stay on Top of Workflow Process and Development

When you’re heading up a team, one of your primary jobs is ensuring that work is completed to a high standard, on time. Get efficient, well oiled workflows in place that you can repeat for each and every campaign. Ensure everyone knows the process for routine tasks.

The more team members understand their roles and responsibilities, the less you have to intervene. Take time to evaluate and fine tune those processes, and don’t be afraid to try new tools if you feel these will help improve output.

5. Enhance Your Talent and Skills Development

How’s your team looking right now? As the saying goes, “Leaders are people who do the right things; managers are people who do things right.” As a Marketing Manager, you need to be a mentor, motivator and coach.

Find creative ways to bring out the best in your team. Identify their skills and talent and use them to produce innovative work. Encourage brainstorming, recognize areas of strength, work together on improving areas of weakness, and be open to hearing out new ideas.

6. Understand Project Management

We know this one’s a biggie, which is why we talk about it extensively in some of our other blogs. Project Management encompasses a wide range of skills but, in a nutshell, Project Managing is planning.

Use the resources at your disposal to meet your marketing goals and oversee tasks and functions. You need to be able to multi-task as you are constantly planning, strategizing, and organizing. You are managing resources and motivating team members, all to ensure that you meet project goals and finish them within the promised constraints.

In Summary

Data analysis, automation and workflow are sometimes considered a less important part of the marketing process. However, these define operations in many ways and are no less critical to your success. Investigate the best tools to deliver your marketing strategies and projects. Make sure your team members feel like they are on an equal footing with one another and keep an open mind for fresh ideas will all give your strategic marketing a vital boost.

We start every new project with a detailed consultation, because we find that those conversations often lead to lightbulb moments. They are opportunities for our clients to identify the weaknesses and pain points in their processes so we can help fix them!

What Did We Miss?

This list is by no means exhaustive and we’re adding to it all the time. Working with our clients and getting to know more about their operations helps us to develop new innovative apps to support them. However, we believe that if you focus on the above you can achieve the results you need.

Our complementary solutions including Smartsheet, and AppSheet, and a range of APIs to integrate these with the software you rely on. See effective results whether you’re working in the office, remotely, or offline. For more information on our Smarter Controls for Sheets range of tools and solutions, watch our demo video below. 

Further Reading

For more information on Project Management, we take you through the Best Tools for Project Management in our blog.