Over the next decade, the job outlook for marketing managers is expected to grow by 10%, which is faster than the national average among all jobs.

Why?

Likely because this is a complex job that requires not just leadership skills, but creativity, vision, and a deep understanding of marketing concepts. When you look at everything that these managers do, you’ll discover that they hold so many responsibilities. If you want some insights into what it takes, we’ve outlined some of the most essential marketing management tasks below.

Marketing management, or marketing project management, is a role with broad responsibilities. Marketing managers head up marketing teams, which means they oversee branding, strategies, campaigns, project progress, metrics that measure success and investments, and much more.

Organization sits at the heart of marketing management. To oversee all these things while optimizing campaigns and getting projects done on time, marketing managers need high-level organizational skills to help with all the planning, scheduling, and tracking that come with the job.

Project planning software is a huge plus, too. Organizational skills are half the battle — and you’ll need a platform that gives you a place to do all the organizing. Click here to learn how to make project planning simple, intuitive, and impactful with Teamwork.

Like we said, marketing management is a broad role with lots of different responsibilities. While the list below isn’t exhaustive, it covers the essentials that will help build strong brands, meet marketing goals, and ensure long-term growth.

The most important marketing management task is planning and developing strategies and campaigns. While managers don’t do all of this work by themselves (that’s what the rest of the marketing team is for), they do play a key part in this process.

  • Kick off new campaigns, starting with brainstorming and moving through project work to completion.

  • Oversee the entire marketing process — which means one key function is to ensure consistent branding across strategies and campaigns.

  • Organize tasks within campaigns to make sure marketing efforts flow smoothly, and team members know what to do and when to do it.

That’s a whole lot of planning — and even the best marketing managers can’t organize it all without a little extra help. That's where Teamwork comes to the rescue: Check out our marketing campaign template to streamline your planning process.

In marketing management, there are three ways to track and monitor campaigns: resource management, objectives and key results (OKRs), and key performance indicators (KPIs).

  • Resource management means tracking both budgets and human resources to make sure time and money are allocated appropriately.

  • OKRs are measurements (like reaching 1,000 social media followers, or increasing website traffic by 10%) that you establish as milestones to track progress along the way to a bigger goal. 

  • Key performance indicators measure marketing program performance, which makes them crucial to optimizing campaigns.

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In the past, marketing relied almost exclusively on advertising, but today’s marketers must offer more in the way of customer value. This means connecting with target customers through social media marketing and other tactics — like collecting customer feedback. Feedback is an especially effective marketing technique because it builds on customer relationships by encouraging brand loyalty and engagement.

Understanding the organization’s brand is a key part of marketing management, and managers need to be able to take that understanding and use it to build a stronger brand while improving brand awareness.

This means looking at the brand the way customers see it. What are the brand's strengths, and what are its weaknesses? In capturing marketing insights like these, managers can guide branding so that it’s better at communicating value to existing and new customers alike to better communicate value.

New product development means new product launches, which come with their own set of tasks. A big part of the management process will be gathering marketing information about target markets and how new products will deliver value to customers. This will help your team analyze market potential and create ad campaigns that speak to customer needs.

The goal of every marketing department is to boost company sales, and as team leaders, managers shoulder the responsibility when sales rise or fall. Effective managers will know how to leverage marketing opportunities, handle market research, and use that information to help their teams develop campaigns that bring in new leads and new paying customers.

One of the basic principles of marketing is that you need to deliver value to customers and leads in order to drive sales. In practice, this means carefully analyzing both customers and the product itself. Start by learning customer pain points so that you can address them via content marketing or other types of campaigns.

Be sure to also do a deep dive into the product itself. Find out what sets it above competitor offerings, identify what makes it a must-have item, and learn how it will improve the lives of those who purchase it. This is all valuable information to throw into the marketing mix so your team can develop campaigns that sell.

There’s a big difference between marketing campaigns and marketing strategies. Think of a campaign like a sprint: They’re short-term efforts designed to boost sales.

On the other hand, marketing strategies focus on the long term — and they take a holistic marketing approach that often factors for multiple campaigns at once.

In marketing management, it’s important to never lose sight of the overall strategy. That’s because while campaigns come and go, the key objective for most companies is longevity, which requires consistent growth over time.

A successful campaign is a wonderful thing — but it’s even better when you can apply what multiple campaigns have taught you to enhance the long-term strategy.

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All those tasks listed above? Those are just the essentials. In marketing management, these tasks, plus a whole lot more, will likely be on your plate.

This is why it’s crucial to find software that can not only easily organize marketing tasks, but also help you and your team stay on top of deadlines, track important metrics, and make marketing processes more efficient.

Teamwork gives you everything you need for project management — plus lots of useful tools made specifically to help marketers create more successful campaigns. Sign up for a free trial here to see how our platform can transform your marketing operations!