What is Marketing Management? Definition and Guide (2025)

Effective marketing showcases your product or service to the right people: potential customers and your current customer base. The result? Brand awareness, leads, referrals, and sales. But good marketing management is often easier said than done. 

Hiring a dedicated marketing manager to own these tasks can boost your marketing efforts and free up energy and time, allowing you to focus on growing your business. As with many areas of your business, there is an established process you can follow to improve and optimize your marketing management.

In this guide, we’ll explore what marketing management is, the marketing management process, and how ultimately to run your marketing team in the most effective way possible.

What is marketing management?

Marketing management is the process of developing and implementing strategic marketing programs and activities that align with broader business objectives. It involves leveraging customer insights, tracking key metrics, and optimizing internal processes to drive success and enhance overall business performance.

What do marketing managers do? 

A marketing manager is a person responsible for executing a company’s marketing plan via delegation and planning.

Relevant marketing manager activities often include:

• Implementing a standard operating procedure (SOP), which outlines how specific, routine tasks should be performed.
• Researching the business’s target market and customer base.
• Planning, creating, and executing campaigns.
• Creating and sharing branded content on social media platforms (e.g., Instagram or TikTok).
• Leading the creation and scheduling of email newsletters and campaigns. 
• Tracking key metrics like page views, social media engagement, and email open rates. 
• Creating digital and/or print content to generate brand awareness. 
• Any additional marketing-related tasks and needs.

Given the wide range of duties a marketing manager may handle, the position requires a working knowledge of the standard marketing mix, including various platforms (e.g., Google Analytics), social media channels (e.g., Facebook), and marketing best practices (e.g., best times to send email blasts). 

Depending on the type of business and its marketing goals, marketing professionals may also need to have expertise in search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, or content creation. 

For example, an ecommerce business may require SEO specialization to help long-form content rank on Google, whereas an events business may need a social media specialist to create buzz and attract attendees. A marketing generalist may do a little bit of everything in order to help the business drive revenue, then develop expertise in certain areas over time. 

A marketing manager’s scope of duties can also vary based on the company’s size or industry. At a larger company, for instance, a marketing manager may oversee a team of specialists. At a smaller company, a marketing manager may perform many of the tasks themselves.

5 things marketing managers do 

1. Evaluate product and market fit
2. Craft a marketing strategy
3. Create brand messaging
4. Track marketing metrics
5. Build a great team

The specifics of marketing managers’ jobs vary by business or industry. But, in general, you can expect a marketing manager to lead or assist with general marketing management processes and help keep the marketing department on track.

Here’s an example of how a marketing manager’s job might look when mapped out to the marketing process. 

1. Evaluate product and market fit 

In a discussion with Shopify president Harley Finkelstein, Martha Stewart offered this product-development advice to entrepreneurs: “Does the customer need it? Does the customer want it? If the business or product idea answers yes to either of those two questions, you’re probably on to something that will be successful.” 

It’s a marketing manager’s responsibility to make sure customers understand how your products meet their needs and wants. To do this, the marketing manager might survey your customer base about product features, while gathering feedback on customer satisfaction and product-market fit. For example, a marketing manager can send out a survey to the company’s email list and ask them to rate their satisfaction with the product, how frequently they use the product, what would make it better, and how they would feel if it were no longer offered in the marketplace. 

This process outlines the things your customers adore while providing insight regarding areas of improvement. Positive feedback can show up in marketing collateral because it communicates what your existing customer base loves about your product. Areas of improvement can go straight to the product development team or business owner, so they can make adjustments. 

At a large company, this work may fall to a product marketing manager. But on a small team, a generalist marketing manager will lead these efforts.

2. Craft a marketing strategy 

The cornerstone of marketing management is creating and executing a marketing strategy—a roadmap designed to take your revenue from point A to point B. This is a concrete plan that utilizes different channels and mediums to market the company’s product or service. This is done through market research, customer interviews, and analyzing feedback from customers.

While the end goal of all marketing management is to increase sales, a marketing strategy includes much more than creating an incentive to press the Buy button. It creates a customer journey, which takes a potential customer from the very first time they hear of your brand to the moment when they purchase—and beyond. 

This customer journey is divided into three stages:

1. Awareness stage. A customer realizes that they have a problem to solve and that your brand may offer a solution (e.g., someone is planning a hiking trip and realizes they need better hiking boots). 
2. Consideration stage. The customer reviews potential solutions (e.g., they read the specifications of your hiking boots to determine if they might fit the bill).
3. Decision stage. The customer makes an informed decision to buy (e.g., they determine that your boots are of better quality for a reasonable price, and they buy them).

A marketing strategy will specify how to reach customers at every stage and what type of content to show them. Strategic marketing management is about getting the most out of your marketing efforts and team.

3. Create brand messaging

Brand messaging communicates a brand’s mission, personality, and products’ value propositions to its customers. It communicates what your company stands for, who it’s for, why it exists, and what makes it unique. 

Marketing managers will contribute creative ideas and strategic insight to guide the development of marketing messaging. Specifically, they’ll create:

• Brand voice guidelines
• Mission statement
• Positioning statements
• Ad taglines 
• Website copy
• Channel-specific copy for social media, email, and more

On a small team, they’ll own this process completely.

4. Track marketing metrics 

Marketing managers may set goals and track key metrics to measure the performance of a campaign, including: 

• Website traffic. Website metrics include page views, bounce rates, and the time spent on each page. 
• Social media. A marketing manager or social media team tracks the number of followers, comments, and shares, and calculates engagement rate across platforms. 
• Email. For email campaigns, key metrics include email subscribers, open rate, click-through rate, and conversions.
• SEO. Success for an SEO strategy is measured through search rankings, organic sessions, click-through rate, new users, and top keywords.
• Advertising. Advertisers track cost per lead, cost per click, return on investment, and conversion rate to measure the success of their campaigns. 
• Customer relationship management. Are customers happy? Is there a high churn rate? Are there patterns in customer habits or feedback? 

Tracking these metrics provides valuable data on the status of your marketing campaigns and marketing programs as well as helps demonstrate the impact they’re having on your small business. 

For example, tracking open rates on emails can let you know how successful your email newsletters are at getting customers to engage with your brand. Not getting enough opens? You may tweak subject lines or add images and emojis. 

Reviewing page views each month or every quarter can also provide relevant feedback on a company’s SEO strategy and how content is landing (or not). Marketing managers can translate that data into informed action, such as where to allocate additional resources, where to pause marketing efforts, or where to take a different action plan altogether.

5. Build a great team 

As your business grows, a marketing manager may need to hire a team or contractors to keep up with a growing marketing mix and get much-needed support. It’s their job to:

• Set expectations. A marketing manager establishes measurable goals and communicates expectations for the team’s marketing efforts.
• Review output. A marketing manager may periodically review the team’s output and performance and make adjustments. For example, if engagement is down on social media, what new tactics could help generate more likes, shares, and follows? 
• Act as a leader. When a marketing manager builds a team, they become a manager of people and marketing work. They will mentor budding channel specialists and secure resources to support the group. They’ll also liaise with leadership to set goals and share results. 
• Oversee marketing tools and resources. A marketing manager can help procure the right tools for the job, which can include social media scheduler, email marketing platform, design program, project management tool, SEO keyword research tool, analytics tools, and marketing automation tools.
• Create processes and workflows. A marketing manager can create specific processes and workflows for the team. Having a workflow in place can eliminate questions about what should be done and when it should be done and by whom, so everyone stays on task with their defined marketing efforts.
• Manage the marketing budget. A marketing manager may also manage the marketing budget, which can include software and tools, staff salaries, events, and advertising costs. 

Making that first marketing hire can help small business owners transition marketing responsibilities to a pro. The result should be sales growth—and more time for the business owner to focus on the big picture.

Effective marketing management is often the key to success for your marketing, and when done right can be a significant competitive advantage. From digital marketing to everything in between, make sure you’re taking marketing management seriously.

Trends in marketing management

Increase in AI adoption and investment

A recent HubSpot report concluded that marketers are no longer afraid of AI—they’re embracing it. Some 89% of marketers say that AI saves them at least one hour a day by streamlining creative tasks. It’s no surprise that almost half of marketing leaders have already invested in AI tools for their team.

Generative AI tools

Generative AI can produce new content based on a prompt. It saves managers time and money—they don’t have to create new content themselves, nor outsource it to a professional. AI can do it for you, often for free.

For example, Shopify Magic can handle marketing tasks like:

• Writing copy (emails, social media captions, product descriptions, etc.)
• Editing photos—including removing and/or replacing the background

“I use Shopify Magic to write product descriptions by inputting desirable keywords for SEO,” says Kwame Chambers, the CEO, co-founder and managing/creative director at Glitch Anomaly. “It gives me the ability to work more efficiently and save costs. It’s a game changer.”

Personalized marketing at scale

Modern shoppers expect an experience that’s tailored to them. Instead of expanding your team and employing more people to offer these personalized experiences, marketing managers can lean on customer segmentation and automation.

Shopify assists here by creating a unified customer profile whenever a lead shares their email address or phone number. Any first-party data you collect on leads will feed back to the same profile—whether that’s emails they’ve opened, loyalty points they’ve earned, or discounts they’ve redeemed. You can use this data to segment your audience and send automated marketing campaigns to personalize the customer experience at scale.

Investment in influencer management tools

Marketers are tasked with overseeing influencer campaigns. However, the back-and-forth that comes with managing those campaigns can be time consuming. You have to manually track creator’s influence, which free products you’ve issued, and any sales generated off the back of your campaign.

Shopify Collabs exists to solve those problems. You can manage the end-to-end process from your Shopify admin—even sending free samples and paying influencers’ commission through the Shopify billing system you already know and trust. 

Employee-generated content

It’s not just influencers that you can leverage to spread the word about your brand. Managers can turn their employees into influencers—whether that’s sharing the work culture or the product development process behind consumers’ favorite products.

For example, Shopify staff use the hashtag #LifeatShopify when they’re posting about their job on social media. This helps not only attract new customers by sharing behind the scenes of a business, but also can help you attract top talent who want to work for you.