You know you can’t handle your company’s marketing efforts alone.
Between running different campaigns, operating in highly competitive markets, changing customer behaviors, and using new technology, there’s no doubt you need a team of experts.
However, managing people and being responsible for their output comes with much pressure. But that’s not to say it’s impossible.
In this guide, we’ll show you what you need to know to build and manage high-performing marketing teams no matter your industry.
Let’s begin.
What Is Marketing Team Management?
Marketing team management refers to a marketing manager’s ability to organize a group of individuals or teams to achieve a common goal specific to the marketing department.
A marketing team manager typically uses their skills, experience, and abilities to ensure team members are motivated and productive while carrying out their tasks. The manager also works to clear up miscommunications and resolve conflicts.
Marketing team management is easier with a tool like CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite. The Suite helps managers coordinate their teams, save time, complete more work, and prove the essence of the marketing team.
Importance Of Marketing Team Management
Let’s consider why the team management responsibilities handled by marketing managers are crucial to your organization.
Increases Employee Happiness
When team members receive encouragement and feedback on their work, it makes them feel happy and motivates them to do more. And it’s simply impossible to ignore the ripple effect it can cause.
Having happy employees can result in productive teams, which leads to improved retention rates, high morale in the workplace, and revenue growth.
Improves Employee Experience
Marketing team management helps you ensure the right people handle responsibilities according to their strengths, experience, or ability.
When managers assign tasks based on what people are familiar with or have experience in, it improves efficiency and helps to complement other team members’ work.
Enhances Collaboration
Proper team management involves establishing a clear chain of command and communication channels, especially when managing a remote content marketing team. This, in turn, enables your team to collaborate more effectively to achieve your overarching marketing goals.
Managing a marketing team, as we’ve already established, isn’t a walk in the park. You need to develop specific skills if you ever want to succeed and consistently steer your team in the right direction.
Here are nine such marketing team management skills.
1. Honesty
Trust is one of the core pillars of any high-performing team. Managers must be honest and transparent with their teams and superiors to build trust.
Honesty breeds a positive and thriving work environment where people aren’t afraid to communicate, share thoughts, and be held accountable.
When other team members see how honest and transparent you are, it’ll also motivate them to do the same.
On the other hand, dishonesty or failure to deliver frank feedback often leads to a lack of transparency and skill development, which are corrosive to team functioning.
2. Leadership
You are expected to show leadership skills that help you drive your team toward a common goal.
A good measure of leadership is when managers focus on their team’s needs instead of making everything about themselves.
Leadership requires managers to delegate, give clear instructions, be flexible, and have strong communication skills, among many other things.
3. Organization
Companies rarely grow in chaos. So as a marketing team manager, it’s crucial to know how to keep tabs on ongoing campaigns and projects, including deliverables, due dates, and who is handling individual tasks.
When your team is organized, it becomes easier to tie up loose ends and ensure you meet all your deadlines.
4. Technical Skills & Understanding
Even if you don’t actually know how to execute the work of the team you’re managing, at the very least, you need to speak their lingo and understand it from a conceptual and theoretical perspective.
It’s also essential as a manager to continuously learn and bridge your skill gaps, to better understand how to improve your teams and, by extension, your organization.
5. Project Management
Part of managing teams is managing their work, ensuring projects move smoothly from start to finish toward a shared goal.
A significant aspect of project management is knowing how to improve your team’s collaboration internally and with other teams within the organization.
6. Active Listening Skills
Understanding your team’s needs starts with clearly interpreting and knowing what they’re trying to tell you.
So, while you’re expected to give instruction, it’s also crucial that you actively listen to feedback from your team members. That way, you’d be able to build an inclusive culture and show that you value what your team members say.
7. Conflict Management
Because of human nature, conflicts are bound to occur in the workplace. As a manager, you should know how to put out the fires of dispute or conflict whenever they arise.
Conflicts could do more than disrupt your team’s work if left unchecked. They could spill over and unfavorably affect other departments and even your customers.
You shouldn’t only know how to resolve conflicts but also how to quickly identify them and build contingencies that’d prevent them in the first place.
8. Understanding Of Fairness
Playing favorites is a fast way to lose favor with the rest of your department. Instead, you should treat each team member with the respect they deserve and acknowledge their contributions to the team.
9. Interpersonal Communication
You don’t have to be an extrovert. You just need some self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and a basic ability to communicate and relate to your team members.
Make sure your team members feel heard and understood. If you do that, they’ll be more likely to come to you for guidance.
Factors like your company’s size and industry often affect how you set up your marketing team roles. As such, some marketing teams might have specific roles that others do not.
Here are some of the most common marketing team roles you can expect to find in an organization.
SEO Specialist
Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists are crucial hires for a marketing team — mainly if your company operates a blog.
SEO specialists ensure your website has the best chance of showing up when your target audience searches relevant queries on search engines.
Their responsibilities include but are not limited to selecting the right keywords that’ll drive inbound traffic, staying updated about any search engine algorithm changes, and making technical recommendations to developers.
Product Marketer
A product marketer is responsible for promoting new products that a company makes. This marketer controls the narrative around a new product’s branding and positioning.
Product marketers are expected to know these new products like the back of their hands. And they typically share their expertise with the sales teams so they can sell more products.
Public Relations Manager
A public relations manager handles how the general public perceives a company. Their role involves building relationships with media outlets, publications, and journalists. In addition, they also manage PR campaigns and press releases.
Brand Strategist
A brand strategist helps companies differentiate themselves from competitors in the same market. They also improve a company’s reach across various channels while maintaining consistent messaging.
Graphic Designer
A graphic designer creates or designs on-brand visuals and text that help to promote a brand.
These visuals include videos, infographics, logos, and illustrations that often appear on the company’s website, ebooks, product packaging, and swag.
Content Marketer
A content marketer creates content like blog posts, ebooks, and guides that helps a company attract inbound leads.
Other roles and responsibilities of a content marketer include creating content marketing strategies, optimizing content for search engines, generating content ideas, developing content calendars, and tracking and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs).
Web Developer
A web developer creates websites and ensures they run smoothly. With over 64.4% of the world connected to the internet, companies need websites so their target audience can quickly find all they need in one place.
Let’s consider how to manage a marketing team to make it as good as possible.
Use Agile Marketing
Agile marketing means using agile methodologies and processes to manage a marketing team.
With agile marketing, high-value projects are identified and worked on in sprints. After each sprint, the process is assessed to identify ways to improve it.
Managing a team using agile marketing helps you save time and resources since you can quickly tell what’s working.
In addition, agile marketing helps teams make fast changes in reaction to the market, easily identify campaigns that work, and make informed decisions backed by data.
Recognize Team Management Roadblocks
Roadblocks are sure to pop up on your journey to effective team management. If left unhandled, these roadblocks could negatively affect your team’s output, so it’s best to get them out of the way.
Here are some of the most common roadblocks and how to manage them.
Siloed Teams
The team you’re managing will likely need to collaborate with other teams.
But, if those teams are siloed, that can make getting things done difficult.
There are a few reasons for that:
- Getting teams on the same page can be challenging, and you can’t move faster than the other team is willing to go. They likely have other projects and priorities beyond just what you’re collaborating on.
- Different processes can clash. They have their way of doing things, and you’ve got yours. If the two can’t be reconciled, work starts to break down.
Lack of Clear, Shared Goals
Rallying your team to success requires having a shared goal.
Otherwise, what are you actually working toward?
Without some sort of objective, you’re liable to do a lot of stuff, look busy, and accomplish nothing.
That, in turn, leads to a burned-out team working hard but with nothing to show for it.
Lack of Leadership
If no one’s steering the ship, you’ll never be where you want to go.
And if you’re reading this, odds are leadership falls on your shoulders.
Management and leadership are skills that take years of experience to develop. Likewise, excelling at helping others excel takes years of intentional practice.
Fortunately, you don’t have to depend entirely on hard-fought lessons in marketing and business’s rough and tumble trenches.
For one thing, you’re reading this blog post. So that’s a point in your favor.
Disorganization
When people and processes are disorganized, everything else downstream tends to fall apart.
It starts with little things like misplacing files and forgetting to reply to emails, which could result in missed deadlines, increased stress, and loss of revenue.
Egos
Unchecked egos and selfish behavior can completely undermine a team’s success and make managing one much more difficult.
The fact is that teams win and lose as a group. One person thinking they know better than anyone else can throw everyone’s efforts off track and generally create an environment where no one wants to work.
This problem is pervasive enough that authors David Marcum and Steven Smith wrote in the book Egonomics that ego is “the invisible line item on every company’s profit and loss statement.”
Incorporate Software To Streamline Management
There is only so much you can do by yourself when managing a marketing team. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it all by yourself.
You can now use software to make the management process run smoothly like a knife through butter.
With Coschedule’s Marketing Suite, you can manage your entire marketing operation and bring your team together.
The Calendar Organizer gives you a centralized view of all your projects to see how everything connects at a glance.
You can also use the Calendar Organizer to schedule campaigns and create workspaces for team members.
That’s not all. Using the Work Organizer lets you get a daily, weekly, and monthly overview of your team’s progress with specific projects.
There’s also the team management dashboard where you can view the tasks assigned to each team member. You can delegate and reassign responsibilities from this dashboard depending on their importance.
The campaign report feature from the Work Organizer comes in handy when you want to prove the marketing team’s value to stakeholders.
CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite was created with marketing managers and teams in mind to help get more done while improving team performance daily.
Give it a try for free today to coordinate your processes and manage your team more efficiently.
This piece was originally published in December 2018. It was updated in August 2023 by Nathan Ojaokomo. Ben Sailor’s original writing contributed to this post.