How to Find a Suitable Manager for Your Marketing Team

Marketing is one of those things that you just can’t afford to ignore. When done right, it can be the strongest aspect of your business. The best product the world has ever seen is worth exactly nothing if nobody even knows it’s there. But here’s the thing:

Marketing is a double-edged sword. Do it wrong, and it can hurt your business profoundly. Many a company has taken backlash and even lost sponsorships or valuable clients after marketing went wrong. Therefore, an insensitive, poorly thought out, or out of touch marketing campaign should be avoided at all costs.

At the helm of your marketing efforts is your marketing manager. They are the ones in charge of making sure that your marketing helps rather than hurts. Picking a good one then is spectacularly essential. So, what are you looking for?

1. Do they understand the client?

A marketing manager can’t market to a community they do not understand. Someone with a financial background isn’t likely to understand the ‘rawe ceek’ meme in a Formula 1 community, and an avid F1 fan isn’t likely to know what a speculative investment is. They might, but you’ll want to make sure before you hire them. Because a stranger to the community they’re talking to, isn’t going to know how to engage with that community effectively. People can of course always learn and expand their horizons but finding someone already comfortable with the people they’re marketing to is starting one step ahead of any other candidate.

2. Are they responsibly creative?

Creativity is a difficult thing to measure, but it’s vital. Marketing is nothing new, and out of the hundreds of millions of businesses out there, you aren’t the first to try to market your product. Standing out is vital. But you’ve got to stand out the right way. Osama Bin Laden stood out, but not in a way you’d want your business to be even remotely associated with. Having both the creativity to market in a way that catches attention, but also having the knowledge, maturity, and wisdom to make sure that you get attention for the right reasons, is crucial to successful marketing. 

3. Do they have thick skin?

Marketing is not easy, and not every campaign will be a total success, some will be total failures. Even the best of us gets things wrong sometimes, it’s the curse of creativity, marketers sometimes need to leap to try and make a mark, and sometimes it doesn’t work. What matters is a Marketing Manager with the maturity and insight to regularly review the data, see what’s working, what isn’t, and implement changes that continuously optimise your marketing efforts. Learning that your big idea did not work, accepting it, and working to make sure the next idea is better based on the feedback you got is valuable in every position in any industry, but perhaps even more so here. When told that they didn’t do well, you don’t want an argument. You want to hear, “Okay, I’m going to find out why this didn’t work, and get back to you asap with a better plan.”

3. All the regular requirements

Being punctual, responsible, able to work within a team, polite with customers, and pleasant to work with are requirements that always apply, marketing managers are no exception.

Now that you know what you need, how on earth do you find that person?

Enter the Digital Marketing Agency…

Marketing agencies solve that problem by retaining these exact people on staff. The only thing that needs to be done when signing up with one of these agencies is which manager to pair with which client. You’ll be onboarded, and the manager will be brought up to speed with who you are, what your business is, and what your marketing needs are. Not sure exactly what your marketing needs are other than the fact that you just need marketing? They can help with that too, providing bespoke marketing strategies for your brand, and helping you implement them.

It’s not just one person though. Some agencies provide access to their own virtual marketing assistants designers, web developers, writers, and ad specialists so that you have an entire team of specialists working together to create and deliver on a strategy tailored to your needs. That’s an incredibly powerful asset. And with your Marketing Manager taking the reins, all you need to do is check-in occasionally. That saves time for you to focus on your business, safe in the knowledge that your marketing is being taken care of by an experienced, qualified professional.