Marketing Management Process: 5 Steps To Win Team Approval & Results

Even if you have the best product in the market, it won’t mean much if nobody — especially your target market — hears about it.

The onus is on you, the marketing manager, and the rest of your team to ensure your company’s products hit all the right spots when they launch.

Since you’re not a psychic, how can you ensure your marketing campaigns are set up in a way that increases their chances of success?

You need a marketing management process.

With a proper marketing management process, you’ll no longer be using a “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” strategy. Instead, you’d have a structure to help you consistently generate your desired results.

In this post, you’ll learn what a marketing management process is, why that process is important, and five steps you can use to create one for your team and organization as a whole.

Let’s begin.

Marketing exists to drive profitable customer action through product and market research, pricing analysis, distribution, and promotion activities.

The marketing management process is the actual execution of marketing campaigns, projects, and work.

There are five main elements involved in the marketing process. These elements are

Here’s a brief breakdown of how these elements relate to your organization’s marketing process.

Situational Analysis

Situational analysis refers to the different methods managers use to analyze internal and external factors affecting a business. This analysis is the number one building block of any marketing process.

Some methods or techniques used in a situational analysis include:

• PESTLE: PESTLE analysis is a framework that allows organizations to assess how political, economic, sociocultural, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE) factors can affect their business.
• 5C analysis: This method involves analyzing internal and external factors such as the company, its competitors, customers, collaborators, and climate — making up the 5Cs.
• SWOT analysis: Probably the most common on this list, SWOT analysis involves examining your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Porter’s five forces: This analysis method minimizes threats that could limit an organization’s competitive advantage in the market.

The point of all these different analysis methods is to help companies increase their chances of survival in the market.

Marketing Objectives

Marketing objectives are the outcomes your organization wants to achieve from its marketing efforts. Your marketing objective should be SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

Your organization’s marketing objectives would determine how you allocate resources and your team’s activities.

Marketing Strategy

After setting your objectives, you’ll need to lay out a plan or roadmap to help you achieve these objectives. This is where a marketing strategy comes into play.

A marketing strategy helps you understand your target audience better and create a plan to turn them into returning customers.

Marketing Mix

The marketing mix combines the 7 Ps of marketing (product, price, place, promotion, packaging, positioning, and people) to make an audience buy a product or service.

Marketing managers mix these different resources at their disposal to achieve desired results.

Implementation & Control

With all the other elements in place, you can now implement or execute your strategy. The implementation process takes your marketing process from theory to reality.

Your implementation plan should clearly show people responsible for tasks, clear deadline expectations for tasks, and proper documentation.

As you implement, it’s also crucial to have a control strategy — a way to measure and track the results of your implementation process. This involves monitoring KPIs related to the goals and objectives you want to achieve.

We’ve seen the elements that make up a marketing process. Let’s now consider some of the reasons why a marketing management process is crucial for every organization.

To Ensure Successful Product Launches

A thorough marketing management process helps avoid having hit-or-miss product launches.

Since one of the basic foundations of marketing management is understanding your audience, you should aim to develop and market the products they need.

Your marketing management process can help you consistently offer services and products that meet your audience’s needs at every stage of a customer’s lifecycle.

To Improve Brand Awareness & Reputation

Staying on top of your target audience’s minds is crucial if you want them to buy from you consistently. Having a marketing management process helps customers quickly tell you apart from your competitors so you can keep generating sales.

In addition, a marketing management process also helps you uncover opportunities to extend your reach and handle events that might hurt your PR.

To Generate More Sales

One of the primary goals of marketing is to get products and services in front of people so they can buy. A marketing management process will help you get in front of more people to generate more sales.

When done correctly, this process does more than help you attract new customers. Instead, it enables you to retain existing customers, so they can consistently buy from your business over their lifetime.

To Help Build Structures

When you have a marketing process, you follow a set of repeatable steps that generate a specific result. These repeatable steps or structures ensure that everyone is on the same page.

The structure also allows a streamlined workflow where tasks, delegations, deadlines, and so on can be created and monitored.

To Make Informed Decisions

Tracking and measuring results is an essential aspect of any marketing management process. As you execute campaigns and collect results, you can determine your customers’ behavior and shopping habits. As a result, you can make better decisions to drive your business forward with such information.

Let’s now examine the five steps you need to take to create a marketing management process that works.

Step 1: Establish Your Marketing Strategy

All great buildings need a solid foundation. Likewise, you need a marketing strategy to build a strong foundation for your marketing management process.

We define a marketing strategy as how businesses understand their markets and their methods for reaching their audience and turning them into customers.

To build a rock-solid marketing strategy, you must consider internal factors (the ones within your control) and external factors (the ones your market controls).

Here are some steps that’d help you establish your marketing strategy.

1. Understand your audience. You can only build a marketing strategy by researching and understanding who you want to market to. To understand your audience, you can conduct surveys, interview current customers, use social listening, and create marketing personas based on the data you collect.

2. Analyze your market & competition. It’s crucial to understand the market where you want to operate if you want to be successful. This means paying attention to industry trends and customer behavior. You should also conduct a competitive analysis to identify weaknesses your business can exploit.

3. Audit your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, & threats. A SWOT analysis will help your business identify its advantages, differentiators, and areas you can capitalize on while shedding light on areas for improvement and conditions that might limit you from reaching your marketing goals. This analysis is essential as it prevents you from flying blind into your marketing strategy.

4. Research your distribution & promotion tactics. In this stage, you decide on the best ways or channels to reach your target audience. At this point, you also choose how to price your products.

5. Know your financials. Money is one of the most critical factors that run any marketing engine. As such, you should set a budget and allocate resources to areas that’d generate the most return on investment (ROI).

6. Set marketing objectives & goals. What do you want to achieve with your marketing? For example, you could set the goal and objective of increasing your brand awareness, generating more sales, increasing website traffic, and so on. As you set these goals and objectives, don’t forget to track the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) related to them.

7. Define your brand. How people perceive your business is a factor within your control. So it is crucial to establish a tone, voice, and identity that shows how you want your business to be represented.

8. Document your marketing strategy. Top marketers who document their strategy are 414% more likely to report success than marketers who don’t document. It doesn’t take much— you can start with what you already know. For instance, you could start by writing down everything we’ve discussed. You could also use a template or CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite to document your strategy.

9. Build a content strategy that will reach prospective buyers. A content strategy helps you define how you want to reach your audience at every stage of the marketing funnel. For example, you could use blog posts, podcasts, YouTube, or other channels, depending on where you can find your audience.

10. Execute your marketing strategy. Now that everything is set on paper, it’s time to test how well your strategy would work in the real world. Measure whatever results you get from your execution and revise the strategy if needed.

Step 2: Test Marketing Activities To Understand Their Impact On Goals, Teams, & Resources

Once you implement your marketing strategy, you must ensure your process consistently generates the desired results.

When you find the marketing activities that create the best results, you should stick to them. This way, you’d be able to use the same process for campaigns in the future.

Here’s a simple workflow that shows how testing your marketing activities work.

First, you publish or execute. Then, you measure the results generated. Thirdly, you learn what worked and what didn’t. Finally, you’ll iterate or adjust your campaign to fix its shortcomings.

Then you start the publish-measure-learn-iterate process all over again.

View the iterative marketing process here.

As you test your marketing activities, it’s crucial to get specific. To define your processes better, ask yourself:

• How does this activity influence marketing objectives and key results? What modifications could improve outcomes?
• How do these results align with budgets (time, cost, and return)?
• What went well with the execution? How did the team collaborate? How did the team communicate?
• What went poorly with execution? When was the team confused? When was the team frustrated?
• What would you do differently next time around?

Step 3: Establish Execution Frameworks To Guide & Coordinate Marketing Activities

To ensure your team members do what is required of them and generate desired results, you need to establish execution frameworks.

You can think of it as how a chef follows a recipe whenever they want to prepare a meal. If they decide to skip two or three steps, the meal won’t have the taste their customers have come to love.

Similarly, frameworks are vital to guide and coordinate your marketing activities.

For instance, you could have daily agile scrum standup meetings, stakeholder update swarms (awareness, opinions, approvals), project kickoffs, project retrospectives, etc.

These help you and your team members know what’s happening with your campaign at every stage.

Process Steps & Guideposts

Here’s what a typical set of process steps and guideposts would look like for a campaign.

• Strategize. The strategist starts by writing a creative project brief that helps document important information about your target audience, KPIs, deliverables, timelines, etc.
• Write. At this stage, the writer is expected to meet the criteria set by the strategist in the project brief.
• Design/Record. This is similar to the writing stage, except, in this case, a designer is expected to fulfill the requirement of the project brief. Once the design is completed, the task heads back to the strategist.
• Edit. The strategist now presents the piece to the stakeholders to finalize their approval.
• Stage. Once the stakeholders approve the piece, it moves to the email specialist, who will begin staging.
• QA. Before sending the piece to your target audience, checking that everything is in order is essential. This means reviewing your marketing automation chart flow, entry triggers, subject lines, etc.
• Ship. If all things check out, it’s time to ship.

Stakeholders, Approvals, & Governance

Having someone check every bit of work you do can be overwhelming — and somewhat annoying.

However, you must also do checks and approvals for a marketing process to work.

So how do you find common ground?

You can do so by getting your stakeholders’ approval before you begin executing any project. That way, they know what you want to do without having to micro-manage your in-progress project.

Once you get their approval, ensure you deliver on your promise.

Step 4: Measure, Report, & Iterate

As mentioned, you cannot just ship and then abandon your project. Measuring how well the project is performing in the market is essential.

In addition to measuring, you also need to report your findings. Ask questions like, What went well? What went wrong? How can we improve on what didn’t go well?

As you answer these questions, you’d be able to identify ways you can improve your campaign and quickly generate the kind of results you want.

Step 5: Ensure Team Member Happiness & Maximize Resources

You need your team members if you want your marketing management process to work. As such, it’s vital to make them happy and provide them with the necessary resources to accomplish their work.

One way to maintain and even your team’s happiness is by having 1-on-1s and offering feedback or constructive criticism.

You should also conduct performance reviews, have wellness check-ins, celebrate individual and team wins, etc.

What Is The Strategic Marketing Process?

The strategic marketing process encompasses all the efforts involved in defining goals and objectives and developing tactics to increase the chances of a successful marketing campaign.

What Is The Marketing Research Process?

The marketing research process involves the steps taken to thoroughly understand your target audience and any challenges they might face.

Here’s what a typical market research process looks like:

What Is The Brand Management Process?

The brand management process is the series of actions to ensure your brand is appropriately perceived. This process involves defining your brand identity, measuring brand awareness, etc.

What Is The Operations Management Process?

The operations management process involves the steps followed to properly manage the different parts of a business to increase efficiency and maximize profit.