Have you ever had sleepless nights thinking about your new product launch, waiting in anticipation, and questioning yourself – Did I make the right choices? Did I do enough? What if my product fails? It is a hellish time for all people in business.
And then you find yourself wondering how other businesses just climb to the top of the ladder so effortlessly! How are they doing it?
That’s where marketing management plays its part. It ensures that no matter what happens, your product will be given the best chance to survive in the market.
Mind you, it’s not an easy process. But like they say “No pain no gain”.
So, let’s find out more about the whole deal with marketing management, so you can start implementing it in your business and reach the top just like the others.
Dive in, folks!
What is Marketing Management? (Definition)
First, let’s look at what marketing management is from the eyes of a famous marketing author and consultant, Philip Kotler. According to him, “Marketing management is the analysis, planning, implementation and control of programs designed to bring about desired exchanges with target markets for the purpose of achieving organizational objectives.”
To understand this in a simpler sense, we can say that marketing management is the process of planning and executing the formulation, pricing, promotion, and distribution of goods and services to achieve organizational goals. It’s basically the practical application of marketing techniques, strategies, and methods.
Marketing management usually starts with understanding the customers or the market and creating a product that will ultimately satisfy their needs. This process covers everything from pricing, advertising, and promotion to sales and distribution.
And today, it is the most important function in a commercial and business enterprise. Why? Let’s find out!
Importance of Marketing Management
Every single thing about marketing management screams development and improvement. Each step in the entire process is beneficial to your business. In this competitive world, your marketing management is extremely important because it will help you float to the top. Here’s how:
1. Introduces New Products
In marketing management, you start by identifying your target market and analyzing your market. This helps you understand the needs of your consumers, based on which you can introduce or launch new products with an effective marketing campaign.
In addition to that, you can study customer interactions and buying patterns to learn more about your ideal customer and how to pique their interest in your products or services. As a result, it helps you create brand awareness and increase visibility for your business.
2. Boost Sales
Good marketing management helps you match your capabilities and resources with the needs of the consumers. With this, you can plan and implement a successful marketing strategy and then reach out to customers.
It will enable you to find new customers and retain the current ones. This will boost your sales and increase revenue. Not just that, with strategic planning and implementation, good marketing management also helps reduce costs and expenses.
3. Builds Reputation
Marketing management ensures that your company’s reputation remains unharmed because, without it, your business will struggle to handle PR blunders or remain updated with the latest trends.
Good marketing management can help identify the best opportunities to pursue and threats to steer clear from. It will help you expand to different audiences based on past experience through advertising and customer engagement. This will help improve the reputation of the company!
4. Aid in Business Decisions
Having proper marketing management means that you will have an excellent marketing team that has insights into consumer behavior, buying patterns, and the latest marketing trends. This helps you make better decisions in the short run and the long run.
Each time you are faced with a dilemma or looking for ways to improve your goods and services or even considering making the next big move in your business, your marketing management plan will always have your back.
5. Helps Compete with Big Companies
If you are a small business in a competitive industry, then good marketing management is all you need to level up to bigger competitor companies.
This is because it analyzes market behaviors and competitor trends and helps your business focus on areas that are being underutilized by other companies or doing something unique and fresh. As a result, your business can stand out and emerge as a solid competitor in your industry, or even surpass them in certain cases.
In addition to all this (and more), good marketing management will guarantee an increase in revenue and expansion of your business.
Enough about why it’s important, now let’s get down to the real stuff – how does marketing management work? What are the processes involved? The answers are below! So, pay close attention, fellow marketers. You are going to need this! Let’s go!
The Process of Marketing Management
1. Conduct Market Research
The first step in the marketing management process is conducting market research and market analysis. You can do this by gathering consumer data, doing surveys, conducting interviews, assessing the economic patterns, etc.
You can also collect your current consumer data and previous marketing campaigns’ KPIs. If you want, you can even rely on the traditional SWOT analysis of identifying your company’s internal strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, threats, etc.
Based on all the research, you can get a full understanding of your target customer, their needs and pain points, the trends in consumer buying patterns, and how to offer a product or service to meet the market demands.
It also helps you identify areas where your business could succeed, highlights potential challenges that your business needs to address, and forecast the future potential.
2. Set Marketing Objectives
No process can ever continue without setting objectives and goals because they set the very foundation of your entire marketing journey. That’s why the marketing management process also involves setting achievable marketing objectives or goals and creating a benchmark to measure success.
You set your marketing objectives based on different factors that influence customers in your target market such as market demand, buying patterns, social, political, environmental factors, etc. Try to include sales goals, budgeting expectations, brand development plans, etc. while creating your goals.
Setting these marketing objectives and goals provide you with a clear path to follow, and also acts as a roadmap for your marketing plans and strategies. In the end, it also helps you compare and measure your achievements and results.
3. Develop a Marketing Strategy
Now that the market research is done and the marketing objectives are set, the next logical step in a marketing management process is to develop a marketing strategy. The decisions made in the strategy focus on which markets to target and how to position your products for existing and new customers in relation to your competitors.
A marketing strategy usually consists of:
- Segmentation – Where you segment or divide the market to identify a similar set of customers who are likely to respond to your marketing program.
- Targeting – Where the segments are further divided so that you can focus on a very specific target to produce new products and services.
- Positioning – Where your brand’s image is perceived in terms of quality or price or value and is positioned in the minds of the target market.
- Marketing mix – Utilizing the elements of the marketing mix – product, price, place (distribution), and promotion to deliver customer satisfaction and achieve organizational goals.
In addition to this, competitor’s strategies, environmental changes, financials, and production should also be analyzed to form a marketing strategy.
A well-developed marketing strategy clearly defines responsibilities, ensures the smooth functioning of the marketing process, makes profits, and helps achieves organizational objectives.
Read more: Go-To-Market Strategy Guide for Businesses
4. Make a Marketing Plan
Once a marketing strategy is developed, the next marketing management process is to make a written marketing plan. This is to analyze where the company is and where it wants to reach in a given period of time.
With a plan on paper, you can refer to it anytime and analyze whether your marketing management process is on the right path or not, and also keep track of your company’s progress.
To make a marketing plan, you have to first focus on the business environment analysis and your company’s internal analysis. Then, you have to form a strategic plan that outlines the pros and cons of your marketing strategy.
After this, you move on to the financials where you forecast sales and expenses and plan the budget for your marketing strategy. Then you plan your implementation process by focusing on product and pricing strategies. Finally, follow-up is done to ensure that your marketing strategy is on track.
5. Implement Marketing Program
The next step is one of the most important steps in the marketing management process – Implementation. You can say that it is putting your marketing strategies and plans into action and executing them in a way that you achieve all your marketing objectives and goals.
Start your implementation process by identifying how and when you will launch your planned strategy. You can do this by persuading customers about your products or services through various methods like advertising, sales promotion, public relations, etc. Then you can allocate your resources such as cash and staffing to market your product, organize people to execute your tasks, and manage all the minor details for each goal.
It is important that you follow your plan meticulously and share an understanding within the organization of your marketing vision.
6. Monitor
The final stage of the marketing management process is to monitor and track the progress of your campaigns. This step requires you to regularly measure and evaluate the results of your planning and strategize to make sure that everything is on track.
It includes looking at your revenue, sales, customer satisfaction and feedback, the number of website visitors, etc. This helps answer many questions like: Did your planning and strategy work? Do your goals and results match? What changes have to be made?
Monitoring is not just about introspection, it is also about keeping tabs on the actions of your competitors and making a comparison to get a better insight into where you are standing in the industry. It helps answer questions like: How does the success of your product affect the price of similar items on the market? Are there new products in the market that are providing a greater value?
Good marketing management also makes use of various organizational control systems, such as sales forecasts, sales force management systems, CRM tools, etc. to track the various aspects within your company to see if the marketing objectives set are being achieved.
These steps above complete the marketing management process. It might not seem like a lot, but it involves a heck of a lot of work!
But hey, what if there is a tool out there that can make your marketing management process a seamless and effortless experience? Seems too good to be true? Then wait till you hear more about it! Find out in the next section!
Read more: Marketing Brief: How to Write it? (A Step-By-Step Guide)
Bit.ai: Perfect Tool for Carrying Out Your Marketing Management Process
A marketing management process involves different teams, different departments, in fact, it almost involves the entire company.
A process as big and complex as that is bound to create chaos and confusion. Not to mention the endless number of meetings and discussions for each step involved. Truth be told, it’s going to be exhausting.
That’s why we introduce to you Bit.ai! It is a new-age cloud-based documentation and workplace collaboration tool that makes anything and everything related to workplace collaboration a fun and exciting process!
Not sure what you are getting yourself into? Take a look at some of these awesome features that Bit provides to make your marketing management process hassle-free!
1. Infinite Workspaces
Your marketing management process will involve working with multiple teams across different departments while dealing with loads of information. This can cause complete mayhem.
But, not if Bit can help you out. It lets you create infinite workspaces and folders around projects and teams to keep all your work organized. This lets you store all your information in a neat and orderly manner, making your work more efficient.
2. Real-Time Collaboration
The marketing management process is a team effort and has multiple areas that need attention. In moments like those, Bit’s real-time collaboration feature is truly a blessing. With Bit, you and your team can collaborate and work simultaneously on the same document in real-time. You can suggest edits, ask questions with real-time mentions and comments, and work together.
3. Document Templates
With Bit, your marketing management team can create umpteen number of marketing-related documents. Be it a marketing plan, product requirements plan or a performance report, Bit has templates for everything. Its extensive template gallery offers over 70+ templates for you to choose your favorite one!
It comes with an auto-formatting feature, which automatically formats your entire document uniformly! It even provides you with its own collection of themes and you can change the color of the document with just a click!
4. Interactive Documents
Bit supports over 100++ file formats in its documents, which means that you can add any kind of rich media such as videos, presentations, charts, maps, surveys and so much more to your documents and make them come to life! This will make your marketing-related documents much more interactive and engaging!
5. Live Sharing & Other Features
You can use Bit’s live sharing feature to share any of your marketing-related documents in a live state with anyone that you want. All the changes that you make to the report get updated in real-time as well. This is a great advantage when you are working with multiple teams and departments to carry out tasks that need constant updates. Bit also has features like document tracking, password protection, file access restrictions, etc. which will help you keep your documents safe.
All-in-all, Bit is the dream tool for your entire company as it makes the entire marketing management process much easier and that too in a more modern, fun, and interactive manner! So, what are you waiting for? Do yourself a favor and get Bit right now!
Our team at bit.ai has created a few awesome marketing templates to make your marketing process more efficient. Make sure to check them out before you go, your marketing team might need them!
- Content Calendar Template
- Creative Brief Template
- Product Launch Marketing Template
- Partnership Marketing Plan Template
- Marketing LaunchPad
- Customer Survey Template
- Company Fact Sheet
- Brand Style Guide Template
Conclusion
Behind every great business, there is a great marketing management team that follows the right marketing management process.
Because, with the right process, you can execute and achieve your goals effectively and efficiently.
That’s why marketing management forms the heart and soul of your business. It will forever be a living, long-term, and evolving part of it too.
Where would we be without it? We can only shudder at the thought of it.
So here’s to marketing management and business life. Cheers!
Further reads:
Reputation Management: What is it & How to Do it?
Management Report: What is it & How to Create it?
Marketing Resume: How to Write One to Impress Recruiters!
14 Guerrilla Marketing Examples & Ideas You Must Explore!
9 Best Campaign Management Tools & Software in 2022
