What Skills Does A Good Manager Possess?
Being a successful head of marketing is demanding, and it takes years of training and practical experience to get to a high level. There are various types of marketing managers that we’ll mention later, but their soft and technical skills are the same across the board. If you’re wondering how to be a good manager, you should know that hard work and determination are your starting points. Soft skills like an eye for detail, strong communication and organizational skills, flexibility, and agility are crucial and equally hard to develop as functional skills. By those we mean that a good manager must understand a company’s products fully and find the right marketing tactics to generate leads and accelerate business growth.
But that’s not all. Leaders must always keep track of the latest trends to identify new avenues for success and experimentation. It’s obvious that being a top manager is no easy feat. So, if this is your main professional goal, you should keep reading to find out how you can reach your “Mount Everest.”
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In this guide, you will find…
What Does A Marketing Manager Do?
Let’s not focus on the personal qualities of a marketing manager but on their job duties. While each marketing management role differs, some duties are similar. Brand awareness is one of the main responsibilities, as you are asked to provide help with online promotional campaigns, marketing plans, email marketing projects, and various other tasks. An effective manager also often collaborates with content creators to deliver various materials, including articles, promotional videos, brochures, and social media posts. What about company events? In some cases, marketing managers may be asked to take care of photo shoots, venue arrangements, and physical product launches.
Moreover, eLearning marketing relies a lot on maintaining close relationships with stakeholders. This means that to be a better manager and leader, you must keep up with new trends, evaluate whether they should be implemented or not, create ads, and enforce solid SEO. Tracking all these marketing efforts goes without saying—good results keep upper management and stakeholders happy. Lastly, in cases where you work with external agencies, a manager must lead every conversation so all PR events go as planned.
Different Types Of Marketing Managers
There are many different types of marketing managers, and depending on the company and industry, you may find even more titles than the standard ones. For example, content marketing manager, digital marketing manager, brand manager, inbound marketing manager, product marketing manager, social media manager, marketing analytics manager, advertising manager, and email marketing manager are a few of the most common ones. However, before you even decide your path in strategic marketing leadership, you should learn how to be a great leader. It’s not only about being an expert in your field and acquiring all the technical and functional knowledge. You also need to be a people person. Why would anyone follow your mark if they don’t respect and value you? That’s why leadership qualities for managers are even more important than hard skills.
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10 Tips On How To Be A Good Manager
1. Know Your Team
Let’s state the obvious: you don’t need to be your team’s best friend to be a good manager. You just need to know enough about their personalities, priorities, and interests so you can communicate effectively and delegate tasks accordingly. For example, someone may prefer written comments and messages rather than meetings that may take more of their time or vice versa. So, once you start working with your team, ask them a few things to get a better idea of who they are. Talk about their career goals so you know which corporate training courses suit their needs and which tasks they are willing to work on. All that while ensuring each person’s work stays aligned with company objectives.
2. Communicate And Collaborate
Successful managers are, above everything else, great at communicating with every company employee, especially their own team members. Your goal is to generate targeted leads, and to do that, you must ensure smooth operations for everyone. For example, building an online campaign requires smooth collaboration between content marketers, graphic designers, and social media and email marketers. So, everyone should know exactly what the expectations are and who they should contact depending on their query. Your goal is to communicate project goals and individual responsibilities without having to constantly interfere. You must trust that everyone understands their job and can deliver the best result without you micromanaging their every step.
3. Show Empathy
Empathy and active listening should be among a marketing director’s personality traits. There is no professional in any field who doesn’t want to feel valued and listened to by their managers. The best way to make everyone feel respected is to listen to their ideas and viewpoints and ask questions. Arrange weekly meetings with your team and each team member separately to discuss pressing matters. Someone may have content marketing ideas that can skyrocket your company’s performance. You have to be open to listening and engaging with people to improve these ideas and implement them effectively. The same empathetic stance can also help you understand what your audience needs and how to give it to them.
4. Give And Receive Feedback
To be a good marketer, you have to be a humble leader. It’s natural for employees to get feedback from their managers, as it’s instrumental to their improvement and success. So, don’t be afraid to speak your mind and provide guidance. However, don’t talk to people like you are superior to them. Request changes and make suggestions, and above all, be open to discussions. Maybe someone disagrees with an option and wants to propose an alternative. Additionally, if you want to be a better boss, you must request feedback from your team members. No one is perfect—there’s surely room for improvement.
5. Be Creative And Offer Solutions
Creativity is what drives the marketing world, as everyone searches for unique ideas to create the best marketing campaigns. How do you increase your creativity, though? Effective managers should take time for themselves to read books, listen to music, enjoy physical activity, and brainstorm in an effort to make space for new ideas to form. But it’s not always about implementing groundbreaking tactics. Sometimes all you need is traditional marketing techniques that have proven successful. That’s what makes a great manager: the ability to analyze every situation at hand and offer the best solution possible.
This brings us to another skill, analytical thinking. It means analyzing your target audience, evaluating market conditions, forecasting outcomes, and making informed decisions. You should do that not only before creating a campaign but also after it is running, in case you need to make changes.
6. Set Clear Goals
Every decision you make and every campaign you set should have a very specific goal. Some of them may wish to generate high-quality business leads, while others may want to boost conversions. Whatever your campaign’s goals, you should ensure it aligns with organizational objectives and every team member knows exactly what is expected of them. Being able to make decisions effectively can make a worker more independent. Therefore, they don’t have to come to you again and again for clarification. They simply provide you with updates about their work, and you engage in meaningful conversations that have an overall positive impact.
7. Lead By Example
Now, this is crucial. Why would anyone implement your SaaS growth strategies if they don’t respect you? To be a good manager and instill a sense of trust and loyalty, you should do as you say. Are you preaching for prompt communication and no delayed deadlines? That’s exactly what you should adhere to. Also, you should show your appreciation for everyone’s accomplishments and create a sense of camaraderie within the team. Do you often talk about the importance of a healthy work-life balance but answer work emails even while on holiday? This is definitely not a good manager tip we’d advise you to follow.
8. Be Patient
So, why is it important for managers to provide stability through direction? Well, because most marketing activities take time to show results. For example, your SaaS lead generation tactics may take months to provide great results and conversions. Each team member needs to perform their tasks efficiently, meaning within a certain time frame. You can’t expect people to rush just because you want to push a campaign as quickly as possible. Also, when a campaign or lead magnet is live, you can’t give up on it too soon. Keep making modifications to see what sticks. Maybe the first month will be bad, but the second one can be triumphant.
9. Create A Psychologically Safe Environment
In a 2023 State of Workforce Mental Health Report, it was discovered that 40% of employees question whether their leaders have created a psychologically safe environment. That happens when leaders ridicule, shame, or punish others for their mistakes. Good management practices include asking every team member to share their thoughts and feelings in front of everyone without making them feel voiceless. Discuss their viewpoints with respect, and even if you won’t move forward with them, show appreciation for the input. Even when mistakes happen, help people see what they did wrong and reassure them that it’s okay. Improved psychological safety increases productivity, engagement, and team performance. You don’t want your team to be afraid to take risks and try out new things, do you?
10. Be Curious And Adaptable
To be a good manager, you should always be curious about everything in your field. The latest trends, consumer behavior changes, and even political events can play a significant role in your lead generation techniques. The more you know about your audience, the better you can cater your content and campaigns to their liking. For example, knowing the best AI use cases for B2B marketing allows you to leverage new methods to appeal to your clients. For instance, why not create a VR or AR campaign, given the popularity of the technology?
Lastly, you should remain adaptable and agile given the constant changes in the online world. Keep monitoring your campaigns and always strive for something better. Don’t stick too long to a strategy that has proved to be harmful to your brand.
Challenges Standing In Your Way
1. Keeping Up With Trends
Marketing industry trends change all the time. And they affect the way you market your company to the world. For example, AI is completely altering the way companies approach SEO and content creation. To leverage as many of its possibilities as possible, you may be required to create a prompt engineering guide to help your team ace their requests. The more you discover about recent trends, the more your company stays competitive.
2. Creating Cohesiveness
We already mentioned a few great management skills you should possess. The purpose of them all is to allow you to create coherent and cohesive projects. Your job isn’t only to communicate with other marketing team members but also with sales reps, developers, and upper management. Maintaining impeccable communication paths between teams is not an easy feat, and many leaders have trouble fostering such great relationships.
3. Using Resources Appropriately
This may not be one of the core digital marketing skills, but it is a talent you can cultivate. Like all company departments, marketing also gets a spending budget. Allocating resources wisely is a skill that takes experience. Even if your budget is limited, it’s your job to do the best you can with it. That’s the tricky part that many marketing executives fail to deliver. As a result, their teams can’t work optimally, and their projects aren’t as impactful as necessary for corporate success.
4. Align All Efforts With Business Objectives
At the beginning and end of every year, companies and their leaders usually craft new online marketing strategies based on their new goals. This means that your marketing team is also given new tasks and goals to achieve. Managers are responsible for overseeing daily tasks aimed at the end goals. Also, your team members may be wondering, “What do I need from my manager to be successful?” This is another aspect of the equation. Can you help employees develop according to their needs while guiding them to reach corporate goals?
Key Takeaway
We always talk about how the future of digital marketing never stays the same, and no one can actually predict it. Similarly, the concept of the ideal manager has changed a lot. Now, companies don’t search for leaders who push themselves and their team members to work endlessly. They want people who can guide team members to reach their personal and corporate goals with impeccable communication and collaboration skills. So, using we-oriented communication helps a manager make everyone feel like an important wheel of the same machine. While anyone can have personal victories, it’s always better when the whole team can celebrate together. A few key soft skills that help leaders drive growth are empathy, patience, and curiosity. All that should be within a psychologically safe environment where everyone is free to share their thoughts.
So, not everything is about growth hacking strategies and campaign creation. And while challenges may arise, you should stay strong and remain open to new learning opportunities. Keep analyzing your work, ask for feedback, and improve your work accordingly. The goal shouldn’t be to dominate your team but to provide them with help and listen to their viewpoints.