Managers are high-performing individuals in modern business that often wear many hats, balance many projects, and manage one or more teams. A marketing manager is, without a doubt, a person that has to keep numerous balls in the air at all times and use their skills, experience, and innovative thinking to bring amazing ideas and tactics to life. Needless to say, the professional life of a marketing manager can be a difficult and taxing one, but you can achieve better results with little to no stress if you adopt the right mindset, implement the best practices, and dedicate yourself to continuous improvement.
After all, the work of a marketing manager is never done. In this age of marketing personalization, remote work, and digital omnichannel experiences, a marketing manager becomes the glue that keeps the company together and delivers better results with each campaign. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Here are the five techniques you can start using yourself to become a high-level marketing manager and push your company to new heights of success in 2021.
Work on improving your analytical skills
High-level marketing managers that take entire organizations forward in the digital world are visionaries, dreamers, creatives, but they’re also calculated, prudent, financially savvy, and very analytical. In the work of high-level marketing management, you can’t define yourself just as a creative, or just as an analytical person – you need to be both, and you need to be able to wear many hats with ease.
After all, your team members want to work with a leader that understands them and their processes, a person who can guide them and help them achieve their goals. You can’t hope to be an effective marketing leader if you don’t understand all aspects of your marketing department, especially the analytical side.
With that in mind, you have to make sure that you understand various analytical functions like estimation and allocation of budgets, targeting and segmentation, omnichannel tracking and management, forecasting and strategic planning, and more.
Improve your strategic thinking and decision-making
While different team members focus on the specific tasks, you as the leader and the person behind the vision need to focus on the strategy, the long-term goals and objectives. You need to lead your team towards the desired outcome, and in a very real sense, it all falls on your shoulders. As a high-level marketing manager, it will be up to you to empower and equip your team to achieve the goals and meet the expectations you laid out for them.
For example, improving customer experience can be a short-term, mid-term, and long-term goal, but you need to set the strategy and the micro-goals that will make these objectives a reality. This means that you need to be able to set up, manage, and optimize everything from ad campaigns to content strategies, email campaigns, all the way to social media, possible influencer collaborations, and much more. Most importantly, you need to do all of this with a strategic mindset, laying the groundwork for a positive long-term ROI on each tactic you employ.
Learn to lead an international team
Whether you’re managing a decentralized, international team, or if you’re managing a localized team in another country in person or remotely, you have to be able to connect and engage with them in the most effective way possible. Leading international teams is a cumbersome and complex task, especially when it’s a marketing team where you have numerous creatives and analysts. You need to be able to speak to them in a language they understand best, to achieve the desired results.
For example, if you have marketers from France in your team, you might be tasked with going to the French office to set everything up. Before that happens, you should consider taking some French lessons online so that you can connect and communicate with the local team more effectively. You don’t need to become fluent in the language, but you do need to make the extra effort to engage with your team, and that goes for when you’re communicating with them remotely, as well.
Elevate your project management skills
Project management is one of the most important, and consequently one of the most complex processes in any company. There’s a reason why project managers are so respected in the modern business world, and when it comes to marketing, companies will pay top dollar to get an experienced project manager on their team.
If you want to become a high-level marketing manager in 2021, then project management needs to be one of your top skills. Every strategy you implement, like an international content marketing strategy or a comprehensive social media campaign, is actually a complex project that you need to set up for success and minimal financial waste.
Improve your collaborative and technical skillset
And lastly, you have to know how to collaborate with your team members to maximize their potential, inspire and motivate them, and facilitate productivity across the board. Managing the people in your team is one of the biggest challenges you will ever face, but it often comes down to setting the right culture that will help you achieve these goals.
As a good manager, you should invest in the right values to motivate your team to love what they do and be passionate about their work. These values should include equality and transparency, collaboration and trust, as well as mutual understanding.
Over to you
A marketing manager’s job is not an easy one, especially if your goal is to become a high-level marketing manager, and a leader in this field. That said, these techniques and skills will definitely help you elevate your standing in the industry and become indispensable to your company in 2021 and the years to come.
