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Account Management, Agency Management

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7 Key Competencies for Creative

Marketing Managers (Updated) 1

by Brad Egeland, August 21, 2017

Update: This article was orignally published on January 26, 2015 and was updated with
new information on August 21, 2017

So you’re a marketing manager in the creative management industry. You’re in good

company.  

As of May 2015, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that there
are 192,890 marketing managers in the US. They work in a range of environments
that include actual advertising agencies as well as in-house marketing departments
for larger companies.

A marketing manager’s role is to plan, direct, or coordinate marketing policies and

programs.

So what skills do you need to be a marketing manager? How can you be more
effective for your organization, to lead your team, and to successfully deliver on your
projects for your clients or your own organization?

We’ll share some of the key competencies for marketing managers in this post.

What Does a Marketing Manager Do?

 To understand a marketing manager’s key skills and competencies, it’s important to
rst know what marketing managers actually do.

Marketing managers manage the marketing of a product or service. Depending on

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products/product categories (usually in smaller companies and agencies).

If you’re the marketing manager for a product, you are responsible for every
marketing message - planned or unplanned - created and distributed for that
product. If there is a TV ad, a press event, a public gaffe from the lead product
engineer, it is your responsibility to approve and/or resolve it.

The best way to understand what this job involves is to check descriptions for open
marketing manager jobs.

For example, here is the job description for a brand manager at Apple:
 In short, a marketing manager has to:

Develop multi-channel marketing plans 1 .

Measure the success of marketing initiatives.
Interface with multiple departments responsible for the product - engineering,
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operations, nance, sales etc.
Proactively assess and spot new marketing opportunities.
Manage long-term strategic goals.

In large companies, you might be sol 1 ely responsible for multi-million dollar
products. In agencies, a single marketing manager might handle the marketing for
dozens of high-value brands.

You’ll usually report to the marketing director, VP of marketing or the CMO,

depending on the size of the company.

This is a complicated, senior-level role that requires years of experience. You’ll need
domain-speci c knowledge, strong communication skills, and the ability to interface
with multiple stakeholders effectively.

The pay for marketing managers is commensurate with the responsibilities. On

average, marketing managers get paid $131,180, according to BLS.

Marketing Competencies Framework

In business parlance, competency describes a cluster of related skills and activities
that allow someone to excel at their job.

Given the complex nature of their work, marketing managers are expected to have a
number of complementary competencies.
 These are usually described using a marketing competencies framework.

The UK-based Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) represents this framework

visually as follows:
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The three parts of this framework are:

Core: The fundamental traits every marketer should have, regardless of their
position or industry. Being able to think strategically, champion the cause of the
customer and have marketing insight are vital for all marketers.
Technical: This describes the domain-speci c know-how marketers should have.
Marketing managers in senior roles are expected to have technical capabilities
across multiple domains such as digital marketing, brand positioning, product
management, etc.
Behavior: This describes the attitude and approach marketers should have.
Effective marketers are entrepreneurial, innovative, responsible and like challenges.

The core and behavioral aspects of the framework are hard to de ne because of
their subjective nature. However, these qualities would be visible in your work
 experience and accomplishments.

The technical capabilities are easier to understand. If you’re working in a domain-

speci c managerial role (such as “brand manager”), you will be expected to have in-
depth knowledge of the domain.
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For general-purpose marketing roles, you’ll be expected to have expertise in multiple

marketing domains.

Competencies vs. Skills

Before we look at key marketing manager competencies, we need to address this oft-
asked question rst:

What’s the difference between competencies and skills?

We often use the two terms interchangeably. However, there are a few differences
between them:

Competencies are a cluster of abilities, knowledge and skills that enable someone
to be better at their work.
Skills are abilities that come from someone’s knowledge, practice and education.

Creating a marketing plan or writing a computer program in Java are skills. The
analytical and logical know-how that enable someone to write a program or create a
marketing plan, however, are competencies.

You might hear HR managers refer to competencies instead of skills (or vice-versa).
However, you should know that skills are learned abilities while competencies are
the abilities that allow you to learn a skill in the rst place.

In the next section, we’ll take a look at some of the key skills and competencies you
need to be a marketing manager.
  

Key Marketing Manager Skills and

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Competencies
A marketing manager has to have a mix of qualitative and quantitative skills. He
should be able to see the big picture without missing the minute details. The complex
nature of a marketing manager’s work demands that he be able to think laterally and
broadly.

Regardless of your industry or focus, you should have the following skills and
competencies to be a marketing manager:

1. Marketing managers need analytical skills

Writing in HBR, Adele Sweetwood notes:

“The most signi cant culture shift today for marketing teams is adopting an
analytical marketing approach”

This shift from a qualitative to a quantitative approach to marketing has made

analytical skills a must-have requirement for any marketing manager.

In fact, if you look through any marketing manager job description and you’ll see
words like “analyze”, “measure” and “metrics” everywhere.
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In our increasingly data-driven world, successful marketing managers usually have

analytical minds. They know the value of the vast amount of data available today, and
are highly interested in what that data can reveal about consumer behavior, ef cacy
of various marketing approaches and more.

The best managers also know how to look beyond the data and pick up on trends and
patterns that can lead to better, more successful marketing efforts.

2. Marketing managers should be critical thinkers

Critical thinking, or the ability to analyze situations or statements and determine
their validity, is the foundation on which management professionals build their
careers.

Most executives these days see a real need to stock their organizations with
employees who possess solid critical thinking skills.  A 2010 survey of managers by
 the AMA even found that 72.4% of managers analyzed employee performance on
critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking breeds creative thinking, which in turn solves problems. As Matt
Umbro notes in MarketingLand:
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“At its core, critical thinking comes down to questioning the source”

In a marketing context, this means questioning your assumptions and digging deeper
to understand your ndings at a fundamental level.

This is exactly what employers need from managers. If you’re in the creative industry,
it is particularly important for the marketing manager or director (or even Chief
Marketing Of cer – CMO – if applicable to the organization) to have this vital skill.

3. Marketing managers as project managers

In business today, you don’t have to hold the title of Project Manager to essentially
be one. Projects can be simple or complex; they can be short or long term. In the
creative industry, such as with marketing, ad campaigns, design work etc., they are
increasingly created in response to social media opportunities and client
engagement.

There is signi cant overlap between the core competencies of marketing managers
and project managers. Project managers are increasingly required to juggle
managerial and leadership tasks, to in uence team members, and of course, be
strong communicators.

All of these skills are also applicable in a marketing manager role.

 Future creative marketing managers will need to sharpen their project management
skills in order to properly lead their teams and accomplish their objectives.

 
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4. Marketing managers must be able to see the big

picture
An organization’s marketing manager should always be thinking in terms of
integrated, interconnected systems, and how they interact with and affect each
other. From trade show displays to Twitter feeds, it is vitally important to see how
the relationships between all parts of the marketing plan work together, and to
manage them effectively - as a whole.

This “big picture” thinking becomes even more important in creative industries. It’s
not unusual for a marketing manager at an advertising or marketing agency to juggle
multiple projects at once. Being able to think laterally across projects and sectors is a
vital skill in such situations.

Moreover, big picture thinking makes it possible to spot new trends and disruptions
before they hit the mainstream. Given the pace of change in marketing
methodologies today, it is particularly important to spot these opportunities.
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5. Marketing managers need to have some technical

savvy
Because technology will continue to advance and closely in uence how marketing is
accomplished, I feel that it will always be important for marketing managers to be
technologically savvy.

Client engagement will occur more and more online. Competing for their attention
will mean delivering the services and information they want, using user-friendly apps
and relationship-building tools.
 So while marketing managers will depend on technology innovators to create the
tools, they must be familiar with what clients want and how best to deliver it.

Further, technical competency comes in handy when you’re trying to understand and
SHARE : analyze data. Being rooted in technology will also help you better interface with
product/engineering divisions.

Finally, tech savvy will help you spot technological disruptions, especially as they
relate to marketing. A prime example of this is Snapchat, a marketing powerhouse
many marketers used too late because of its “deliberately confusing” design.

6. Marketing managers need to be detail-oriented

Marketing managers need to see the big picture, but the obverse is also true: they
need to be resolutely, obsessively detail-oriented.

As the marketing manager, your job is to capture the project’s vision and relate it to
your team. Being able to capture the vision in detail can make the difference between
a mediocre and a top performing project.

This skill will also come in handy when you’re analyzing data or approving creatives
before they go live. A detail-oriented marketing manager can spot errors others
might have missed. They can also nd elusive data points not visible at rst glance.

Little wonder that most marketing manager job descriptions have “detail-oriented”
as a key requirement, such as this one from Whole Foods:
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7. Marketing managers need to have sales skills

One of the casualties of the shift to digital marketing has been the once clear divide
between sales and marketing. More and more customers are making their purchase
decisions entirely online. The rise of SaaS means that it is possible to go from
awareness to decision without ever talking to a sales person.

With the gradual expansion of the marketing funnel, it is vital for future marketing
managers to have some sales skills as well. This will help in creating marketing
funnels and priming quali ed leads for eventual sales takeover.

Beyond converting MQLs to wins, sales skills also help in persuading and in uencing
others. In a role where you have to interface with your reports as well as
stakeholders across departments, interpersonal sales skills becoming even more
important.

Over to You
The manager of today who doesn’t possess all of these skills is not always doomed to
fail. He will, however, nd it increasingly hard to sustain performance and spot
marketing opportunities.