Managing marketing campaigns across multiple channels isn’t easy. And it’s almost as difficult to find a marketing management guide that addresses all of your concerns.
What’s more, without sight of what’s working, it’s hard to know if your marketing management framework is effective.
All of this adds up to serious struggles when it comes to moving the needle toward business growth goals.
It’s time to stop playing guessing games with your marketing. Keep reading to find effective, easily replicable marketing management strategies that work.
In this definitive marketing management guide, we look at:
- What marketing management is (and does)
- Setting the right marketing goals and OKRs
- How to build a successful marketing framework
- Which tools work best for marketing management
- How to streamline the marketing framework process
- Helpful resources for effective marketing management
What Is Marketing Management?
Put simply, marketing management allows teams to focus on each stage of a marketing plan, outlining the steps needed to have the greatest impact.
“With a marketing management framework in place, your team can be confident that the right content is being delivered to the right audience, through the right channels, at the right time.”
Lauren Detweiler
Making sure that you’re reaching (and converting) the right audience is key to successful marketing and an impressive bottom line.
Let’s talk about how you can ensure that your marketing is on target…
Setting the Right Marketing Goals
What’s the secret to a thriving marketing plan? Measuring performance.
According to Google, 89% of leading marketers use strategic metrics to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.
The biggest benefit of having metrics is being able to know when and where to spend your marketing funds. You’ll also be able to make more informed marketing decisions, including which channels are best.
Whether you call them Key Performance Metrics (KPIs), North Star Metrics (NSMs), or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), marketing metrics help to measure and monitor performance.
You’ll be able to capture insights into campaign performance, and learn how to improve it. Plus, metrics help to prove the value of spending funds on marketing to the rest of your team.
What are OKRs?
We prefer to frame our marketing metrics around OKRs. That’s because this term uses the two key elements for creating goals and measuring impact.
- Objective: The desired outcome you want to achieve.
- Key Results: The measurable markers of when you’ve reached it.
An OKR framework is used across an entire organisation to ensure all areas align and are working toward the same objectives. That’s why organisations like Google, Airbnb, and the Gates Foundation use it.
Here are a few examples of marketing OKRs successful businesses track:
Product Marketing OKR
For example, if your objective was to clarify your messaging around the release of a new product:
- Conduct 20 user-testing sessions
- Find 5 new content distribution channels
- Run 15 ads on Facebook and measure performance
Content Marketing OKR
For example, if your objective was to attract new visitors to your site with a weekly newsletter:
- Increase the number of subscribers by 1,000
- Boost the click-through rate (CTR) by 5%
Social Media Marketing OKR
Your objective here may be to grow brand awareness by increasing social media audience size:
- Add 1,000 followers on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram
- Increase the number of monthly views on YouTube by 2,000
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) OKR
If your objective is to improve your website’s SEO ranking:
- Add 100 new backlinks
- Increase organic traffic by 50%
📕Further Reading: The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Goals & OKRs
You need a solid foundation for your marketing
Just like your skeleton shapes and supports your body, a marketing management framework gives your marketing plan shape to support its long-term success.
It isn’t a planning tool, like SWOT or PEST analysis – it’s a template that contains instructions for delivering your marketing plan.
A marketing management framework is used in the creation of your initial strategy, helping you to identify the goals you should meet for top sales performance.
Building a Marketing Framework
Your marketing goals will shape your framework, so there’s no one-size-fits-all option, but having one is crucial to the success of your campaigns.
You’ll be able to assess your overall ROI and which channels are lucrative. Your framework will also allow you to see what may need fine-tuning to improve your marketing efforts and results.
Here are 6 steps to building a marketing management framework:
1) Set your goals
Goals are there to provide clarity, purpose, direction, and vision. They are what leads to success for you, your department, and the business as a whole.
That’s why it’s important to work with your entire company, from top to bottom, so you can identify every need and objective.
From here, you can create clear and ambitious marketing OKRs that will ladder up to delivering overall profitablity in business.
2) Identify your target audience
Who do you want to reach? It’s essential that you know exactly who comprises your target audience.
It may sound obvious, but many businesses overlook this step in favour of trying to appeal to the majority. This is a sure-fire way to lose engagement.
💡Top tip: Conduct market research and study industry trends to identify where your product or service can offer the greatest value.
3) Create a plan for distribution channels
Once you know who makes up your audience, you need to uncover where you can find them. Make a detailed list of which channels (both offline and online)you’ll use to reach them.
4) Understand and monitor the competition
Who else is trying to reach your audience? Refer to your SWOT analysis. What tactics are the competition using? How successful have they been?
💡Top tip: Take a look at the LinkedIn or Facebook engagements of your top competitor. What type of posts are they creating, sharing, and liking?
5) Create your content and campaigns
Taking all the previous points into consideration, outline what content types and promotion methods you’ll use to reach your target audience. This will form your marketing plan.
💡Top tip: To maximise the reach of your content, create a checklist of key channels where it will have the best chance of getting in front of your target audience.
6) Measure and adjust
The best thing you can do to identify the effectiveness of your new marketing plan is to test it. But the metrics you choose depend on the nature of your goals.
Spend some time running a variety of marketing experiments to see what methods will deliver the highest ROI for your team.
📕 Further Reading: How to Develop a Marketing Management Framework
Best Marketing Management Tools
The right marketing management tools help to improve accuracy, collectively meet goals, and prevent a lack of transparency that can happen when teams work in different systems.
Having a marketing management guide like this one helps, but your best bet is to compare popular marketing tools, and see which option is right for your company.
To choose the best marketing software, ask yourself:
- Do they provide goal planning, projection, and forecasting?
- Are you able to eliminate manual processes via automation?
- Can you integrate results from your marketing tech stack?
- Will you have access to real-time tracking updates?
- Is the platform stagnant or continually adding new features?
💡Top Tip: Compile a list of just four to five vendors to streamline the evaluation process, and reach out to each supplier to arrange a demo or trial of their product.
📕Further Reading: What Is the Best Marketing Management Software?
Streamline Marketing Management
First thing’s first, clarity is essential in any marketing management process. Without it, members of a team can effectively work in silos, with no oversight into what their colleagues are doing.
Lack of clarity is a major issue for speed, as it makes it difficult for marketers to decide on plans, execution, and reporting. So, how can your team prevent this disconnect?
The simplest solution is with the right processes. We’ve pulled together a
Take a look at our simple 5-step process for effective marketing campaigns:
1) Set clear expectations from the start. All meetings should have detailed agendas, with no doubt about who owns each particular part of the process.
2) Agree on a cadence with your team: Align on how often you’ll do certain tasks. lLook at the data, review whether you’re on track, adjust tactics, etc.
3) Eliminate red tape: Automatic approvals for some campaigns can drastically improve the speed at which a process is actioned. Set up marketing automations to save time and trouble.
4) Shorten the test-measure-learn loop: A consolidated testing approach (and bespoke metrics) makes it quicker and easier to track the progress of a campaign.
5) Centralise the process: Combine as many marketing tools as you can to improve campaign creation speed. With all the necessary tools in one place, the whole process can suddenly seem far more manageable.
📕Further Reading: How to Streamline Your Marketing Management
Marketing Management Resources
Marketing management can feel like a juggling act. And there never seems to be enough time.
That’s why we’ve pulled together some courses and podcasts to help you find the best marketing practices – without losing any more hours (or your mind).
Marketing Courses
HubSpot Academy: A wide range of free certifications covering essential marketing skills for those who want to take their abilities to the next level.
The Content Marketing Institute: A top industry organisation dedicated to adding value through the most useful and informative content. CMI maintains a variety of regular publications, including podcasts and a quarterly digital magazine, Chief Content Officer.
MarketingProfs: A comprehensive B2B marketing resource, offering practical and informative content in a variety of formats, including online events, structured training programs, and conferences.
Marketing Podcasts
Cemoh Marketing with Simon Dell: A marketing, entrepreneurship, and business podcast dedicated to interviewing high performing CEOs, business leaders, entrepreneurs, and marketing experts.
Pipeline with Dave Gerhardt: No fluff — just the hard-won tactics CROs, CMOs, and other B2B sales and marketing leaders are using to build pipelines.
Behind the Numbers by eMarketer: Explores the impact of marketing on the business world. They use in-depth interviews and short segments to reveal how your marketing impacts both industries and individuals.
📕Further Reading: 20+ Marketing Management Books, Courses & Podcasts
Create Your Marketing Framework
To sum up, a successful marketing framework must be goal-focused, measured, and regularly assessed, so that you can adjust your marketing to drive engagement and sales conversions.
That’s why creating a marketing framework with marketing goals and OKRs that align with your growth goals is a surefire way to generate demand, deliver ROI, and business growth.
Remember, campaigns should not be static. That’s why a “test and measure” approach is crucial, as it allows you to improve campaigns at any time.
This helps you to course-correct and adjust to changes in customer demand, advances in technology, or changes in legislation. Adaptability is key to ensuring that you meet your marketing goals.
Get started with creating your marketing management process today.
