5 Traits you need in your marketing manager

For many chief executives and entrepreneurs, the need to review the performance of the current team, and ensure that the talent within the organisation is capable of delivering the next year's business goals, is a make or break decision. As an agency, we too are reviewing our talent and how they perform with clients marketing needs. It is very important to ensure that clients needs are addressed and that as a company, we hit every KPI the client has set out for us.

As we hire mostly marketing managers and marketing executives, over the years we have worked out what makes for a high performing marketing manager or executive, and importantly, what traits we can't live without.

Marketing Managers need to understand the purpose of their discipline

If you get too bogged down in day-to-day marketing activities, it becomes very hard to look at what you are doing from an overarching perspective. Sometimes marketers forget what is the purpose of what they are doing, and get stuck in tactical delivery. If you don't understand the purpose, it is impossible to ensure that all tactics are delivering to the end goal. In our business, the purpose of our marketing managers and marketing executives is to be the 'outsourced marketing department' for our clients. That means that they need to take responsibility for the marketing outcomes of the business that they are representing. Like any internal marketing manager, it is their responsibility to understand the sales teams needs and what customers want from the business. There is no point in being really good at tactical marketing without delivering these tactics with a firm purpose on achieving a companies goals.

Learning and development is ongoing

If you are a marketing manager and you are not learning something new every day, you are doing something wrong. Marketing is changing and evolving at an alarming pace, and no day goes by without a new technology being launched, a campaign that failed or succeeded, or new ways being launched on how to gain great insight into a markets needs. There are thousands of webinars every week for marketing managers to do lunch and learns at their desks, and the resources online are endless. It is important to have a marketing team that is committed to learning.

Desire to be the best

If you have a marketing manager who is ambitious, they will go over and above to reach their personal goals and in doing so, will help your business achieve yours. If someone wants to be the best, they will take it upon themselves to understand every area of marketing, and find ways in which to be more successful in their roles as a marketing manager. This desire to be the best needs to be nurtured and encouraged, with management giving individuals who are inclined to go that extra mile and give more to the company needing to ensure that this is fairly compensated.

Technology savvy

Technology helps marketers work faster, smarter and with better results. Knowing that by using technology, you are able to automate so many processes that take a lot of time to do, gives marketers an ability to be more flexible, and targeted in what they do. 

Ability to write a marketing strategy

If your marketing manager cannot write a comprehensive marketing strategy, then they shouldn't be a marketing manager. While they don't learn at University how to write a proper marketing strategy, they should learn by the time they reach marketing manager status. It's the first thing we teach our marketing managers at Marketing Eye and it helps them when they go on to do marketing consulting to be able to ethically give clients the best possible advice. A marketing strategy should be written yearly and incorporate all aspects of the marketing mix.

Other traits that are helpful to marketing managers is analytical capabilities, decision making skills, excellent content writing and verbal communications skills and the right personality.