A Day In The Life Of A Marketing Manager | Digital Thoughts

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a Marketing Manager? Eight years back when I made the jump from IT to marketing. I wouldn’t have imagined how my career and day-to-day tasks would be. One thing I knew for sure was that it would be exciting. And, it is. Every day is completely different, which is something that I love, but it is often made up of a set of key elements.

I work here at The Digital Group of Companies that has recently launched a new line of IT solutions in enterprise search, intelligent HR and test automation. In addition to overseeing the entire launch from branding to advertising, one of my primary tasks is to create a consistent Omni-channel customer experience.

Here’s a list of the things that tend to take up most of my time.

• Monthly Calendars: every marketing manager has a long line of marketing campaigns, promotional events, and product launches and announcements in the pipeline throughout the year, and it is really important for him and the team. Talking about planning out events for the calendar year, my experience tells me that the only way to approach this is to come up with a process. While the initial set-up of the process can take time and a lot of brainstorming, once it is in place, all you need to take care of is the daily/weekly maintenance that ensures you’re always on track and never miss a deadline for current as well as new projects.
• Management of Campaigns: campaigns are the at the core of the activities of any marketing team and it’s no different here at The Digital Group. Be it blog content, social media, email campaigns, promotional campaign for a new launch, lead generation campaigns or just an SEO campaign for the list of websites, the marketing manager has to be adept at managing several campaigns at once and keep a tab on the progress of each. As the marketing manager, you’re also the one that has to come up with impressive strategies, sometimes even at the last minute, to save the day and make it work.
• Managing your Team: with the responsibility of managing the marketing and branding of your organization, there comes the added responsibility of being available for the people in your team when they are looking for advice and guidance. After all, it’s your team and being the marketing manager, it’s up to you to make sure that your team knows that they have your time and that they can walk up to you with queries and new ideas. You should take efforts to keep your team motivated and inculcate in them the confidence that you can teach them new things and novel approaches to tasks.
• Marketing plan: writing a marketing plan is a time-consuming exercise for any marketing manager, but it forces you to think through your strategies and relevant tactics. it is a detailed roadmap that outlines your marketing strategies, tactics, costs and projected results over a period of time. Your marketing plan and budget keeps your entire team focused on specific goals.
• Budget: managing the marketing budget is often something that sits with the marketing manager. This means you need to be good at numbers and be able to effectively forecast how much something might cost, so that you don’t spend more than you have to or that was planned.
• Reporting: staying across the numbers is a daily task for any marketing manager. This can include things like social account growth, website performance, customer engagement, campaign conversions (how many people actually showed interest in your campaigns), media monitoring, and email marketing or reporting to executives on the status of a project or content plan. Almost everything you do as a marketing manager needs to be measured, so reporting forms a huge component of our work.
• Relationship Management: now, my experience tells me that relationship management forms a very crucial part of the marketing, and this refers to both, the relationship within the organization as well as that with clients. The success of any campaign or activity relies heavily on the relationship building skills of the team and how well they can interact with people and are able to get the things rolling. Interactions and coordination with other teams within the organization are also important for successful execution of campaigns on different products and services. As the person heading the marketing team, you should come across as approachable and friendly and should be able to build third-party connections. In other words, you should have connections with the right people to get the best results. 
• Writing and communications: the devil is often in the detail and this is ever true for marketing managers. You need to be a good writer, great at editing and have a keen eye for detail and design. Often you will be the final checkpoint for content or creative before it goes to upper management or is sent live to market. Being able to pick up small inconsistencies and errors is absolutely something that will set you apart.
• Data Analytics for Managers: The ability to visualize data effectively and present it in a manner that flows like a coherent story is an increasingly valuable skill for marketing managers. While everyone with the skillset may be able to present data visually, building a ‘narrative’ from the data that can drive a meaningful discussion between the CMO and stakeholders is a distinguishing skill that not every marketing manager can bring to the table. It is all about presenting the data in ways that ordinary (non-analytics people) people can relate to and use it to do their job better.
• Continuous Learning: for a marketing manager is about further expanding our skill-set in response to a changing environment and new developments. This is very important because we are called to respond to changes daily; so whether it is from shifting from traditional marketing process to marketing automation, excel analytics to data analytics, we should be ready for the change that may be required to be at the top in the market.

Conclusion: When I started out in marketing I had a natural sense for few of these things, but mostly I learnt to harness the skills I needed over time. If the above list sounds exciting to you then you are more than halfway there. When you have a passion for something the rest usually just follows.