- The essence of Marketing Management
- Modern-day challenges in Marketing Management
- Marketing Management from a Virtual Office
Q: What is marketing management? Should I outsource marketing management services?
A: Marketing management is the procedure that details the organization and execution of your marketing initiatives to retain existing customers better and bring new customers in. To know whether you should outsource marketing management or not, keep reading!
Creating a product or service that people will pay you for is difficult, but figuring out how to get the word out about your offerings is even harder. Not to mention, ensuring that your marketing, sales, and offerings are strategically aligned can be frustrating too.
Determining who your target audience is, where they spend their time online, and how to ensure that these individuals will become repeat customers is a lot of work. Additionally, advertising is expensive, and money that’s not well spent on marketing initiatives is quickly wasted with little to show for your efforts.
Thankfully, through marketing management, you can take control of the planning, analysis, implementation, and control of your marketing strategies, programs, and tactics. Marketing management encompasses a wide range of activities aimed at promoting products or services while meeting the needs and wants of customers.
More than anything, marketing management incentivizes synergy between your marketing efforts and the rest of your operations.
A whopping 90% of sales and marketing professionals understand how impactful it is to unite their efforts and work together, but that same 90% also feel misaligned across their companies’ various departments.
With a strong approach to marketing management, you can nullify these frustrations and bring your team together. The current entrepreneurial landscape is inundated with businesses trying their hardest to get as much consumer attention as possible.
Through the use of efficient management, your marketing productivity can go through the roof. Whether that involves the use of a marketing work management platform, agile marketing efforts, or marketing resource management is immaterial; the fact is that concise and well-planned marketing initiatives are highly effective.
Today, we’ll help you understand the core of marketing management, explore some modern-day challenges in marketing management, look at strategies to enhance marketing management efficiency, and then see how marketing management from a Virtual Office could benefit your business.
So, if you’re pouring over Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Marketing and trying to find a better way to spend your advertising dollars, you’re in the right place. Keep reading for more!
- The essence of Marketing Management
- Modern-day challenges in Marketing Management
- Marketing Management from a Virtual Office
Understanding the Core of Marketing Management
To understand the core of marketing management, we first need to ensure the definition is clear. According to the American Marketing Association, marketing management is the process that begins with setting goals for your organization, includes the planning required, and ends with analytic measurements of how your initiatives performed.
Although the overarching themes of marketing management haven’t changed in decades, the primary goal of all advertisers is still spreading information about the company. That said, the rapid advancements in technology have completely shifted how this is handled.
Marketing management has undergone a profound transformation to align with the demands of the digital age. The traditional landscape was one characterized by mass media and highly limited data.
In recent years, the marketing management landscape has become a dynamic and interactive environment shaped by online platforms, social media, and advanced analytics. Marketing managers now harness the power of big data to gain insights into their target audience’s behavior.
Below, we’ve put together a quick list of some of the more obvious changes. It’s important to understand how marketing has changed so you have a better frame of reference with the tools you can access.
Social media
- At its inception, social media was mostly considered a fun way to keep up with old friends and family. Now, marketing managers utilize social media not just as a promotional tool but also as a means to build communities around their brands.
- Through social media, marketing managers are provided with platforms for direct consumer interaction. This real-time nature of social platforms creates an environment where marketers can then get immediate feedback, which enables
companies to gauge consumer sentiment over time.
Content creation
- Content creation is another facet that began as education and information but has evolved into a cornerstone of digital marketing management. Marketing managers need to focus on producing high-quality, relevant content to engage and educate their audience.
- This may include blog posts, videos, infographics, and other formats tailored to the preferences of the target demographic.
Influencer collaborations
- Influencer marketing has gained real prominence as a way to leverage individuals with significant online followings. Marketing managers may identify influencers whose values align with the brand and collaborate with them to reach a wider audience.
Advent of e-commerce
- E-commerce has transformed the way products and services are sold. Marketing managers need to craft strategies that acknowledge e-commerce’s importance by encompassing online retail platforms.
- This guarantees that customers receive a seamless and compelling experience. Marketing managers optimize websites for user-friendliness, implement secure payment systems to keep customers safe, and devise digital marketing campaigns that drive traffic to specific online stores.
Access to big data
- A sometimes-frustrating side-effect of the digital age is the abundance of data provided by the proliferation of digital interactions.
- Marketing managers can leverage big data analytics, often found on the social media platforms they’re using to post content, to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends.
- This data-driven approach allows for more targeted and personalized marketing strategies, improving the overall effectiveness of campaigns.
Consumers bombarded with ads
- The increased digitization of advertising has created an environment where consumers are regularly inundated with promotional messages and content.
- To cut through the noise, marketing managers need to employ strategies that prioritize relevance and personalization.
As you can see, the goals may remain the same, but the methods of attaining them look far different than they did even a few decades ago.
If marketing management seems overwhelming, you might be considering outsourcing marketing management. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.
Weigh the cost of learning how to handle marketing management yourself vs the cost of hiring outside help. Often, hiring an uninvolved third party to help you with early marketing management efforts will teach you enough to handle future initiatives alone.
Read more: Should You Outsource Your Business Marketing Management?
Now that you understand what marketing management is and how it’s changed with technology, let’s look at the three key components of marketing management in the modern era.
- Market analysis and research
- Strategic planning and implementation
- Performance measurement and optimization
Market analysis and research
Understanding the market is paramount to effective marketing management.
This involves researching and analyzing market trends, consumer behavior, and competition. Market analysis provides insights into customer needs, preferences, and the overall business environment, enabling informed decision-making and the development of targeted marketing strategies.
Unsurprisingly, market analysis and research are the most important aspects of a marketing manager’s position. If the research and analysis aren’t handled correctly, the next two steps may be in vain.
Without a distinct understanding of how the market works, where your target audience is, and how your competition is succeeding, you won’t have any frame of reference when it comes time to sell your offerings.
Strategic planning and implementation
Marketing managers are responsible for developing comprehensive marketing strategies aligned with overall business objectives. This includes setting goals, defining target audiences, and outlining the product, price, place, and promotion.
Once the strategy is in place, effective implementation involves coordinating various marketing activities, campaigns, and channels to reach and engage the target audience.
Implementation is important, but implementation can be edited as your marketing initiative goes on. This means that even if your marketing efforts aren’t landing initially, you can take the time to make changes as required.
Performance measurement and optimization
Marketing management involves regularly evaluating the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
This includes monitoring key performance indicators in marketing like sales, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and return on investment.
By analyzing the performance of marketing campaigns, managers can identify what works well and make data-driven adjustments to optimize future strategies for better results.
This iterative process is crucial for adapting to changing market conditions and improving overall market performance.
As you can see, although the core purpose of marketing management remains static, the methods used to achieve these goals have changed as technology has advanced.
Modern-Day Challenges and Solutions
To keep up with marketing management’s shifting meta, entrepreneurs need to understand when to outsource their marketing management, when to consider a consultant or consulting firm, when to dedicate resources to building an in-house team, and the goal of either strategy.
Read more: Small Business Marketing: Is It Time to Hire a Consultant? The Key Factors to Consider
Although each business is different and no solution will function the same for every organization, there are issues that all modern marketers face that you can prepare for.
Below, we’ve put together a brief list of issues that modern marketers encounter in their day-to-day activities, as well as modern solutions to these problems.
- Generating leads
- Accurate ROI calculations
- Seeing poor marketing initiatives through
Generating Leads
According to a recent HubSpot survey, nearly half of all marketers surveyed claimed that generating traffic and leads was the most difficult challenge in 2023.
While we don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution to securing leads, proper marketing management and understanding what is working and what isn’t will help you allocate resources to the marketing that is working rather than wasting capital on failing campaigns.
While generating leads is an issue that advertisers have faced forever, the modern problem can be explained by oversaturation.
If your marketing management can acknowledge the sheer volume of your competition, identify your target audience and the advertisements that they’re currently susceptible to, and use this information effectively, then generating leads won’t be as stressful for your business as it is for the business with no frame of reference.
Accurate ROI Calculations
Another problem that countless marketers experience is an inability to effectively calculate ROI for their marketing initiatives.
Many entrepreneurs are used to creating a marketing plan, determining the cost, and evaluating ROI when the initiative is complete. In the modern world, this will not work.
Several online platforms use a bid system for available ad space, so the amount you spend will likely vary over time.
Rather than waiting to calculate ROI, you need to be fully aware of how much you’re spending, how under or over your budget predictions you are, and how effective your current ads are.
Not Cutting Losses
The last issue we’ll cover is refusing to cut your losses. Modern marketing needs to be malleable.
If an initiative isn’t working, don’t waste good money trying to revive it. Instead, acknowledge the problems with your campaign, determine how you can fix these issues, and try again.
One of the most dangerous aspects of marketing is that it is incredibly easy to waste good money chasing bad ideas. This is why it is paramount to your efforts for your marketing management team to pay as close attention as possible to your marketing campaigns.
As you can see, almost all of the problems modern entrepreneurs face concerning marketing relate to inattention during the campaign.
Fortunately, you can circumvent these issues through solutions like Marketing Work Management platforms and Agile Marketing.
Marketing Work Management Platforms
Marketing work management, or MWM, platforms are designed to make marketing projects easier to manage.
These platforms typically offer services like easy communication on specific projects, simple collaboration, automated workflows, several different project templates, project views, resource allocation tools, and more.
With the right marketing work management platform, you can easily identify areas where you’re doing well and others where you’re falling short.
Agile Marketing
Agile marketing is a modernized approach to marketing that understands how important malleability is for any successful advertising campaign.
To cultivate this malleability, agile marketing often includes self-organizing and cross-functional teams that are regularly building on their current efforts while receiving and using constant feedback.
Agile marketing understands that attention is everything. Agile marketing teams are often more experimental, release more content, and focus entirely on pleasing their audience.
By utilizing Alliance Virtual Offices’ tools like Virtual Offices and Live Receptionists, entrepreneurs can make better use of agile marketing and marketing work management platforms.
With a Virtual Office, entrepreneurs have a centralized hub to keep track of all their marketing campaigns. Not to mention, a Virtual Office is exponentially more cost-effective than a traditional office, giving businesses more capital to allocate to focusing on growth.
Read more: Unlock Explosive Growth Using Ecommerce Strategy
With a Live Receptionist, your business is prepared to handle the influx of new business after a successful campaign.
Harnessing Outsourcing and Technological Advancements
If you’ve looked at the issues marketing management faces and determined that you’d be more successful outsourcing your efforts, that’s fine. It’s better to reach this conclusion before you’ve spent money rather than after.
Many entrepreneurs think that outsourcing marketing management is more expensive when, in reality, it’s often cheaper than the alternative.
This is because so many entrepreneurs will spend money hand over fist on advertising efforts that fall short without acknowledging that they’ve spent considerably more on failed advertisements than the cost of outsourced marketing help.
This is why it’s so important to understand the cost-efficiency of outsourcing marketing before you’ve spent excessive capital learning that marketing isn’t your strong suit.
Read more: Small Business Cost Savings: A Simple Way to Grow Your Income
Some of the benefits of outsourcing marketing management can be found below.
Fresh perspectives
- Regardless of the specifics of your business, getting new eyes on your marketing efforts is a great way to identify problems you may not have noticed.
Working with professionals
- Working with marketing professionals who understand the industry is invaluable. Not only are you exposed to information you wouldn’t typically have access to, but you also can use the opportunity to pick up helpful tips and tricks for your next marketing campaign.
Cost-efficient
- Outsourced marketing management is often a better deal than trying to explore the world of marketing for yourself. This depends on how capable you are of your business’s marketing efforts, but spending money to ensure all of your marketing campaigns are effective is usually a better deal than spending a similar amount of money for marketing campaigns that simply don’t work.
Small staff
- If you’re outsourcing marketing management, your in-house team can be smaller because you don’t have to handle the marketing campaigns yourself. This will save you capital that can be allocated to other areas of your company.
Effective scaling
- One problem that some entrepreneurs face is experiencing a successful marketing campaign before they have the infrastructure to handle the increase in volume. Good marketing management will help you prepare for successful campaigns and ensure that when the volume of sales increases, you’re ready for it.
Although it depends on your goals, your business itself, and how much capital you have access to, outsourcing marketing management is often a great way to get a feel for how marketing works in the modern day.
For those of you who have past marketing experience but haven’t kept up with the impact of technology on marketing management, this is a great way to inform yourselves.
Virtual Phones and Meeting Rooms from Alliance help you to accommodate outsourcing marketing management without breaking the bank.
Your Virtual Phone will ensure you never miss an important call from the firm you’re working with, and our Meeting Rooms allow you to host in-person or virtual meetings of any size whenever necessary.
Through Alliance, you can ensure that your marketing management, outsourced or otherwise, is in the best environment possible.
Marketing Management from a Virtual Office
Marketing management is the operation and control of a variety of marketing activities and the employees engaged in overseeing these activities.
Although marketing management looks worlds different than it did even a couple of decades ago, the goal of marketing management remains the same: securing attention, spreading brand awareness, and, ultimately, increasing sales.
To keep up with the rapidly changing marketing management environment, entrepreneurs need to understand that agile marketing and marketing work management platforms are vital to their success.
Gone are the days of creating an initiative, sending it out, and evaluating its success after the fact.
To be competitive in the modern market, your marketing management team needs to iterate on your marketing attempts in real-time.
Through the use of Alliance’s digital tools, a robust marketing work management platform, a keen understanding of agile marketing, and the ability to determine when you should outsource your work, you can create incredibly effective marketing initiatives.
Further reading
- Should You Outsource Your Business Marketing Management?
- Small Business Marketing: Is It Time to Hire a Consultant? The Key Factors to Consider
- Unlock Explosive Growth Using Ecommerce Strategy
- Small Business Cost Savings: A Simple Way to Grow Your Income
Alliance Virtual Offices offers Virtual Offices, Live Receptionists, Meeting Rooms, and more for established entrepreneurs, new business owners, and more.
If you want to improve your marketing management, Alliance has the tools you need to succeed.
Contact us today to see how Alliance’s offerings can make your marketing management smoother, and be sure to check out our Virtual Office Blog for more helpful information!
