Marketing can feel more like an art than a science. How can you do market research to see opportunities in the marketplace that will make money for your company? What are the best ways to brand the business and its products or services to meet the customer needs?
There are ways to manage the marketing in your company to discover and take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace. It involves market research, marketing analysis and marketing planning. That process has a name, of course. It’s called marketing management, which is used to wrangle the job of a marketer and help them reach their customer base and respond quickly and accurately to their target customers’ demands.
What Is Marketing Management?
In short, marketing management is when you plan, organize, control and implement the marketing programs of an organization. This includes the policies, programs, strategies and tactics used to create and meet the demand of target customers in order to create profitability.
To ensure you’re making the right decisions, market research is necessary to understand the marketplace and determine what needs are not being met, or how to exploit opportunities that are currently not being served. Market research includes competitive research, key demographics, pricing and the best promotions for attracting customers.
Project management software can help you organize all that research and build effective marketing plans. ProjectManager lets you plan and collaborate in multiple project views like the Gantt chart, task list, calendar or kanban board. Try it free today.
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Why Is Marketing Management Important?
Some might feel dismissive about marketing. There’s a reason why marketing budgets are often the first to get cut when a company is in a financial downturn. If you’re honest with yourself, though, you’ll realize how it has influenced what you buy. The truth is, marketing does work. Advertising is incredibly persuasive.
Of course, your organization isn’t the only one that knows this. Your competitors likely have marketing management processes in place, looking to take your market share. That’s another reason why marketing management is important; you need to stay competitive. Complacency is the death knell for any business.
Marketing management is relevant to both small and large/established businesses. It can drive success by opening up avenues that best reach your customers. That’s how you grow sales. Plus, engaging positively with your audience is how you build a brand strategy. The data you collect allows you to analyze your target customers (and their buying habits) to tweak your marketing plan and make it even more effective.
The Four Ps of the Marketing Mix
Marketing management revolves around what’s called the four Ps:
Product
Price
Place
Promotion
The four Ps are the marketing mix that hold up any marketing plan.
If you follow them, you combine the soft science of psychology with hard physical factors to influence customers. Psychological elements unearth what the customer wants, and influences their buying habits to select your product or service. Physical factors make your product or service better, such as streamlining your channel of distribution or improving the product’s quality.
What are the Functions of Marketing Management?
The functions of marketing management are as follows:
Marketing Objectives: Define what you’re looking to accomplish through your marketing strategies. This can be in the short-or-long-term, but the approach must be clear. Your marketing objectives should align with the overall strategy of the business or organization.
Planning: Once you have your objectives, you must develop a plan that leads to success. The marketing plan should include everything from sales forecasts, strategies, programs, milestones, tasks and resources.
Organization: The organization’s function is to take the marketing strategy and implement it. This means knowing what you need in terms of resources, and then coordinating them to work together. This includes building a marketing structure, assigning teams, defining responsibilities and determining who has authority.
Coordination: Coordination is required during implementation, as it sets teams up to respond to change and ensure the plan stays on track. That means coordinating the marketing program elements such as marketing research, sales forecasting with product planning and development, including logistics such as transportation and storage.
Direction: Direction in marketing management means fostering strong employee leadership, motivation and inspiration.
Control: You must control the marketing plan in order to maximize its effectiveness during execution. Things to look at include standards, evaluating performance and making changes as needed.
Staffing: For any marketing management to function, it must be staffed with the right people. The marketing manager is responsible for staffing up their team. They work with human resources to hire talent who will execute the marketing plan.
Analysis and Evaluation: Any marketing plan is likely to change as conditions change. In order to stay on top of it all, it’s crucial to analyze and evaluate the performance and progress of the marketing plan. After the plan is complete, you should perform a postmortem to discover what worked and what didn’t work. That way, you can learn from mistakes for the next marketing strategy.
Marketing Management Strategies and Plans
To create a successful marketing strategy for your business, you must first define who your audience is. When you know that, it will guide all your marketing efforts. But you don’t want to rely only on market research, as important as that might be. The next step in developing your plan is to test your audience.
This will allow you to understand the buying behavior of your target audience, and from there, you can figure out what the most appropriate marketing strategy is to reach your target customers. Use the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of your target audience to refine your marketing strategy.
There are many ways to reach an audience such as email marketing, social media marketing, digital marketing and public relations. Once you have a strategy, or a few that seem appropriate, take the time to evaluate them to see which is the best. Here are a few options:
Paid Advertising: This is any advertising you pay for, such as print media or digital placement, which can include PPC (pay per click).
Cause Marketing: Link your good or service to an issue or social cause to resonate with your target audience.
Relationship Marketing: Build a relationship with your customer and enhance those existing relationships to build and improve brand loyalty.
Undercover Marketing: A stealth approach, where consumers aren’t aware that they’re being marketed to.
Word of Mouth: One of the most important marketing strategies, but a hard one. That’s because it relies on people giving positive impressions of your good or service, which builds sales and loyalty.
Internet Marketing: Use the internet and other digital platforms to advertise your goods or services.
Transactional Marketing: Use coupons, discounts and events, which can facilitate sales and attract your target audience through promotions.
Diversity Marketing: When you have a wide range of consumers, you need to diversify your marketing in order to respect cultural and religious views.
How ProjectManager Helps With Marketing Management
Marketing management involves creating and implementing a marketing plan. That means creating tasks, as well as monitoring and tracking the progress of your marketing strategy as it unfolds. ProjectManager is cloud-based work management software that delivers the real-time data needed to make insightful decisions.
Keep Teams in the Loop
The marketing team answers to executives in the company, who want to stay updated on the campaign. Our tool has multiple project views that give managers and teams the tools they need to monitor their work. For example, ProjectManager’s Gantt charts turn marketing plans into a visual timeline, where everyone can see the progress. As the marketing plan is implemented, managers get real-time data.
Monitor Progress in Real-Time
Use ProjectManager’s live dashboard to capture status updates and automatically calculate metrics, which are displayed in easy-to-read charts and graphs. For deeper insights, create one-click reports on time, cost and workload. They can be filtered to show just what you want.
Manage Multiple Plans at Once
Most marketing pushes involve more than one campaign. ProjectManager’s portfolio management features give you an overview of all the projects you’re working on, so you can find synergies and share resources to streamline your costs. We help you plan, organize and execute your marketing management.
ProjectManager is award-winning software that gives marketers the tools they need to manage their campaigns and advertising pushes. Automated notifications keep everyone on the same page, while our collaborative platform helps teams work better together. Get more out of your marketing strategies by trying ProjectManager free today.
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