Who is a Marketing Manager? Salary, Skills & Career

If you are looking for a career where you can apply your creativity and people management skills to create a difference in a company, marketing management would be a good option.
Marketing managers connect a product or brand with the world. Their marketing skills help attract customers via different media channels.
Take a closer look at what the role demands, and the skills required to become a marketing manager.

Who is a Marketing Manager?

Marketing is the activity of advertising a business, products or services based on market research. Marketing managers oversee all promotional and market research activities of their company.
While there is no perfect definition of a marketing manager, they plan strategies to reach out to consumers via different channels to boost brand awareness, leading to an increase in customers and sales.
Simply put they help design an attractive and desirable perception of a brand or a product.

What Does a Marketing Manager Do?

Marketing managers have a wide range of responsibilities, including:

• Conducting market research to understand public interest and design market strategy for the products and services.
• Designing creative and unique marketing plans across numerous social media platforms.
• Creating thorough budgets and cost estimations.
• Negotiating with potential clients and partners to draft sales and advertising contracts.
• Revisiting and modifying advertising material for print and digital media.
• Conducting market research to explore new opportunities.
• Managing coordination between the marketing department employees.
• Testing innovative marketing and social media opportunities.
• Troubleshooting marketing campaigns that are not performing up to the mark.
• Familiarising employees with the latest industry and marketing trends.

Types of Marketing Managers

There are different types of marketing managers, depending on the specific areas of marketing. Some of them are as listed.

Content Marketing Managers

Those who manage the generation of quality content that drives traffic to an organisation’s website are known as content marketing managers.

Digital Marketing Managers

These marketing managers supervise and implement marketing campaigns developed to drive traffic for online platforms.

Social Media Marketing Managers

They are responsible for highlighting a company’s presence on different social media platforms.

Product Marketing Managers

They supervise the positioning and branding of products.

Brand Marketing Managers

Marketing professionals who aim to increase the brand awareness and identity of a company or its product are called brand marketing managers.

Affiliate Marketing Managers

These professionals focus on building a relationship between an organisation and their marketing affiliates. Their charges depend on traffic driven to a website.

What are the Skills Required to Become a Marketing Manager?

A marketing manager needs to have a diverse skill set to efficiently handle the responsibilities listed above. However, certain technological or specialised skills will vary as per role and organisation. Some of the most common hard and soft skills required are:

Communication Skills

The fundamental idea of marketing revolves around communication, for example:

• Communicating with the target customers through the product and services.
• Communicating with the marketing team for design, analysis, and social media campaigns.
• Communicating design campaigns to higher management.
• Communicating with clients, negotiating, and cracking deals, and many such day-to-day work.

Hence strong verbal communication along with presentation skills will help carry out these responsibilities smoothly.

Leadership Skills

A marketing manager is responsible for guiding and managing the marketing team. Good leadership skills help delegate work to the right people and encourage them to do better.

Technical Skills

Technical skills are essential aspects of a marketing manager position. These skills include:

• Marketing data analysis knowledge to estimate the success of advertising and social media campaigns.
• SEO fundamentals to make decisions to direct campaigns on digital platforms.
• Writing and designing skills for scheduling and creating presentations.
• Good knowledge of email marketing, SEO tools and presentation software to complete technical responsibilities more efficiently.

Project Management Skills

Good knowledge of project management helps prepare the set goal, track progress, fulfil deadlines, and supervise teams.

Analytical Skills

Analytical thinking skills help a marketing manager assemble and analyse relevant data to learn the market requirements and trends. This eventually helps target the right audience leading to the success of marketing campaigns.

Financial Skills

Financial skills play a significant role in evaluating a project budget, estimating expenditure, and comparing product pricing to predict potential sales and marketing results. These skills help make vital profit-loss predictions.

Salary of a Marketing Manager in India

The salary of a marketing manager in India ranges between ₹ 3-4 Lakhs and goes up to ₹ 22-23 Lakhs [Source]. The average annual salary is somewhere around ₹ 8-10 Lakhs [Source].

However, how much you earn will depend on:

• Company for which you work
• Skills and experience you hold
• Type of industry you work in and your role in the organisation

Career Scope of a Marketing Manager

For a career in marketing, having a degree in marketing, advertising, communications, or a related field is necessary. There’s great scope in marketing for those with the right skills and knowledge. To move up in the ranks, you will need to be more involved in the marketing process and, eventually, become a principal implementor of the process.

In addition to knowledge and experience, you must validate your skills to potential employers to stand out in the competition. You can learn different marketing skills at your comfort through the extensive range of online marketing management courses available nowadays.

Emeritus India, in partnership with prestigious universities like MICA and IIM, offers you a wide range of marketing management courses to help you identify, understand, and leverage the ever-evolving digital marketing technologies, opportunities, and challenges.