Why we care about marketing management

Effective marketing management can help your organization achieve key objectives for your business. For example, your brand might want to gain exposure, improve revenue, or break into new markets. In a highly competitive environment, effective marketing management helps you to remain competitive.

Below, we introduce some of the basic concepts of marketing management. 

What’s inside:

• What is marketing management and why is it important?
• What are the different types of marketing management?
• Top marketing management processes to know
• Agile marketing management team development 
• Measuring the results from marketing management
• Resources for learning more about marketing management 

What is marketing management and why is it important?

Marketing management is a process that helps you plan, develop and implement promotional strategies and campaigns with the right team members and teams. With the best people executing the right marketing plans, you can promote your company’s services and products, adjust pricing, and increase your profits while reducing costs. This process may take time, including learning brand awareness techniques, increasing conversions, and expanding your business reach. 

Marketing management focuses on the strategies you develop and deploy to better engage with and reach your target market. As you face challenges with developing your products and services, marketing management continues to move your brand forward with that strategic vision. 

What are the different types of marketing management?

Good marketing management helps your brand initiatives and marketing campaigns stay on course. With so many areas to consider with your marketing efforts, here’s a quick breakdown of some important types. 

• Brand management: You maintain and improve your brand’s reputation by building brand equity, awareness and trust.
• Product management: This aims to develop or bring a new product to the market. It focuses on the successful implementation of your product lifecycle. This is closely related to “go-to-market” strategies.
• Sales: Your sales team’s job is to sell your products or services to customers, converting qualified leads into buyers.
• Business development: This process is essential to establishing and maintaining prospect relationships. Your business development team will also focus on understanding your buyer’s persona and recognizing new growth opportunities.
• Customer marketing: One benefit is that it goes beyond simply acquiring customers. You identify and market your products to existing customers, but you also work to retain them as longtime customers. Then, you can work to develop them into advocates for your business as part of referral generation.

Clearly, some types of marketing management are more relevant to B2B marketing or high-consideration consumer purchases than to mass marketing of low-cost products. They do, however, offer a quick snapshot of the options available. Your emphasis will change based on your relationship with your customers and your type of business. 

Top marketing management processes to know

A marketing management process isn’t a one-time deal you design and never use again. Instead, it should be part of your marketing plan. The process in many cases should extend over the long term and evolve with your company’s growth and development.

A strategic marketing management process aims to accomplish the following:

• Market analysis: Conduct a market analysis to determine how well your business is positioned within a particular vertical and how your competitors are performing.
• Customer analysis: Analyzing customer data involves understanding the composition of your market, its needs, and its satisfaction levels.  
• Product development: This refers to the entire process of conceiving, developing, and launching a product on the market.
• Strategy and goal development: This step involves developing your company’s specific objectives. 
• Monitoring and reporting: With monitoring, you check the status of your marketing management process. Then, with reporting, you review and analyze the outcomes. 

As you fully embrace the marketing management processes, you’ll take risks and push your company and your teams to perform better. All the while, you’re monitoring and reporting as you further optimize your operations. 

Agile marketing management team development 

Agile marketing is an approach which takes its cue from agile software development. It emphasizes teamwork rather than top-down direction, and the achievement of specific short-term objectives in a series of “sprints.”

One key to making agile marketing management work is putting the right team members in the correct positions. In addition, you must have team members willing to adapt to the new approach. Your agile marketing team has a flat structure where neither silos nor hierarchies exist. You will encourage your team to work collaboratively and cross-functionally on projects. 

To prepare a team for agile marketing, follow three key steps: 

• Establish what an agile team structure looks like for your company.
• Put processes and platforms in place for agile marketing management.
• Train team members on the agile way.

Building agility into your marketing is a simple way of helping your team and/or department respond to changes in a fluid manner.

Dig deeper: Learn about the Agile Marketing Navigator

Measuring the results from marketing management

Marketing management is likely to have the key objective of reaching your audiences and converting them at the lowest cost. You’ll use benchmarks, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine your overall results. Here’s a quick overview of that process: 

• Define how you will measure success as part of your marketing campaign.
• Determine your marketing channels.
• Calculate your KPIs by determining the cost of each marketing channel.
• Assess your revenue impact by measuring the ongoing (and ultimately lifetime) value of your customers. 

Resources for learning more about marketing management 

Marketing management sounds easy to understand, and the initial concept is simple. What’s more complex is how you take these relatively basic ideas and use them to manage the complexities of marketing in alignment with sales, product development, and customer service.

Despite the challenges, marketing management represents the opportunity to improve your sales and customer relationship management continuously. Your business can tap into and evolve with the channels and technologies to meet current and future needs.  

Here’s some further reading:

• Here’s an overview of the field from Western Governors University.
• Project management software vendor Wrike takes a deep dive into the concepts of marketing management.
• Here’s another deep dive from customer experience management platform Sprinklr.
• A related topic is the kinds of work management software available to support marketing management. You can download our “Enterprise Work Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” here.