This article is helpful in understanding the Brand Marketing Manager job description its duties and salaries in detail.
Brand Marketing Manager
Being a brand marketing manager is as hard as it is fun. It has all the perks of working in a dynamic role with all the responsibilities of a manager. The job requires intuition, data-driven strategies, and a lot of creativity.
As a brand marketing manager, you will be responsible for how the brand is seen and understood. Building and maintaining the brand’s identity is much harder than it seems, there will be numerous changes to marketing strategies, trends to keep up with and audiences to satisfy, all while being true to the values of the brand and company.
What is brand marketing?
Brand marketing is the type of marketing that focuses on marketing products in such a way that promotes the overall brand. It employs practices, methods, and techniques that voice a brand’s purpose and style in all that the brand or the company does.
The brand isn’t just the company’s logo and name anymore; a brand is so much more. Like the tone of voice that it uses in all its communication, the company colors, and how they interact with their customers and audiences.
Branding has come a long way from just putting labels on a product to having a social relationship with customers. A brand now encompasses a company’s identity, what they do, their products, and their reputation.
What do brand marketing managers do?
There are a lot of things that go into branding and building a brand that resonates with its audiences. Things like SEO, SEM, organic search results, social media marketing, consistency, type of voice and communication, personality, and providing value, all play a role in how well a brand performs.
Long gone are the days for magazine adverts every month. Since the boom of social media, many businesses have flocked to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. to promote their products and expand their audiences.
People have come to expect businesses and companies to be present on social media, which leads to better social relations between audiences and the business and provides a more personal touch to connections and communications. This holds true for NGOs and small businesses and big businesses alike. However, there is not just one formula that works, what helps one brand cannot help another band. The branding strategy of every brand or product is unique to it. Replication of such strategies will not work in the long term.
A brand marketing manager is responsible for building a company’s image, persona, and reputation. Social media help foster customer relations as well as provide higher value to products due to exposure. Strategies used to brand will differ with respect to the project, the target demographic, the business persona, and what platforms the business uses.
Many marketing roles have a great overlap and require many lateral skills. Like basic knowledge of SEO, foundational marketing strategies, how to research audience demographics, and how to create target demographics and choose platforms to market to those demographics.
At its core, brand marketing involves:
- Awareness
- Loyalty
- Advocacy
- Engagement
- Identity
- Image
Works of Brand Marketing Manager
Strategize:
Every target demographic and media platform will have a different strategy that is tailored for them. A branding strategy is not a one size fits all kind of citation. Each platform will have a different tone of communication and method of connecting with people. As well as different campaigns will be made that target different demographics. The content that is used to attract people in their 20’s will not be used to attract people in their 40’s. Strategy is important to plan how campaigns are run and how future marketing plans are developed.
Manage:
While there may be a few marketing campaigns run at the same time, each marketing campaign may have multiple ad sets and sub-levels that are run simultaneously, with different content, visuals, and goals for different demographics. A marketing manager will have to keep track of all media, content, and posts and create the same with certain things like dates, schedules, goals, and metrics in mind. The manager will have to manage different posting schedules, several teams, and projects while being able to bring the best talent to the job.
Budget:
Small businesses have marketing budgets running from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands. Such large amounts of capital are spent in marketing to get the business and product in front of the right people at the right time. There is more to the job than just knowing the right platform and the right mix of content.
As a manager, the capital or budget assigned will have to be optimally used for several campaigns and through various platforms. One just can’t keep spending money on things that may or may not pan out. The manager cannot spend more on the marketing campaign than they can for the same campaign. The best way to spend capital is to prioritize what the goal is and what can help achieve that goal in the least amount possible. This requires an understanding of capital management, profit and loss concepts, and how to optimize the result of marketing money.
Collaboration:
Businesses often collaborate with celebrities, other businesses, influencers, etc. to help widen their audience base and reach new customers. Like collaborations between artists help merge their separate audiences into one big audience, or introduce one artist to another artist-audience; businesses can use the same tactic and collaborate with others in the same line of values that the business follows.
Promotion of newer products becomes easier and the net is cast wider with the combined efforts of the collaboration. Collaboration can assist in creating inspiration, growing the business’ network, and providing opportunities for education for the business and its employees in terms of trends, newer techniques that can be employed and can help save money in the collaborated campaigns.
Analyze:
Marketing is run on instinct on what will work and what may not as well as a certain amount of number crunching that will be detrimental to whether the current technique is working or not. Each campaign or marketing effort, or lack thereof, will generate data. This data needs to be processed, filtered and analyzed to understand what the campaign was either a success or a failure, certain components of the campaign will perform better than others and certain content will work better than others. Such increases in management or decreases can be observed with the data that is degenerated. As a manager, you will have to have good analytical skills to determine what will work and what will not for each campaign, ad set, and project.
Data generated will have to be seen in the context of when that particular post was posted, what content it has, the visuals included and at what time it was posted, and on what platform. For example, working adults are more likely to check Twitter throughout the day but teenagers will check Instagram after classes or in free periods. Young adults are more likely to spend time on Instagram and Twitter whereas professionals are more likely to spend time on Facebook and Linked In. Such analysis and knowledge will help in making and planning the marketing campaign better and what more chances of success.
Optimize:
Once the numbers are crunched and the data is understood, one of the most important tasks of the manager comes into play: optimization. Due to the data generated from previous campaigns or ad sets, the manager now has information and numbers on what works, when it works, and how it works. With this new data in mind, the manager will have to improve the strategies used in the running campaign and alter futures posts in the campaign to increase chances of exposure and increased engagement.
A great example would be how posts have shown to have a greater engagement when they have visuals and short videos attached to the content on the post. A CTA (call to action) button increases the chances of a viewer going to the link provided that may be the landing page of the business website or a ‘for sale page that provides discounts. Every campaign will need a few alterations to include statistics of the last success of the last campaign. If campaigns are not optimized then the marketing campaign will not do well and will lose customers, which would be an immense waste of the marketing budget. The goal is to maximize the value of each unit of capital spent.
Skills needed to be a brand marketing manager
- Research skills
- Copywriting knowledge
- Platform selection – how and why
- Evaluating impact
- Analyzing key metrics
- Optimizing strategies
- Communications skills
- Relationship management
How to become a brand marketing manager?
Having a degree in marketing, business, or journalism and mass communication can be helpful to land an entry-level job and increase your chances of selection in an interview. However, it is not strictly required. Most people interested in brand marketing can intern at companies even if they have no relevant degree and then apply for an entry-level position.
There are various masters that one can apply to, like digital marketing, media, and communications, etc, that will help them climb up the ladder much faster. But one should remember that experiences are much more weighted than educational qualifications.
How much do brand managers get paid?
As an associate in the brand marketing department, you can earn anywhere from $27,000 at the entry-level to about $50,000 after a few years. A manager is paid $41,700 as a base and it can go up to $110,000 with about 10 years or so under your belt. The higher the experience in years or projects and campaigns handled, the higher the salary is.
FAQ’s
- What degree should I do to become a brand marketing manager?
Most of the time the minimum is a bachelor’s degree at entry-level jobs. You can study in relevant degrees like business, marketing or advertising, communication. To become a manager, one would either need an MBA and/or 6-8 years of experience in marketing.
- How do I become a brand marketing manager without relevant education?
If you don’t have any degree in any relevant subject or field, then you can intern at companies. Internships provide practical experience and give you room to grow and learn. After the internship, you can apply for an entry-level job and climb up the ladder by doing an MBA later.
- Are there any online courses that I can take?
There are several marketing courses offered by universities and companies like Facebook and Google that you can take to help you build the foundations of marketing and serve as an introduction to the role.
- I am not creative, can I still apply for the job?
Marketing is a lot more than just being creative, a few skills needed to be a successful brand marketing manager are:
- Communication skills
- People skills
- Analytical and research skills
- Budgeting skills
- Time management and ability to schedule
- Is there a lot of traveling included?
For the most part, the job can be done from an office, however depending on the project and what it requires there may be some traveling needed. It all depends on the project and how you decide to manage it.
- What does the job entail?
You will have to keep up with all the latest trends and tools. Various lateral skills like SEO, SEM, copywriting, and content marketing would be needed, even if it is basic knowledge. Keep a track of new social media features, new trends, and budding artists and influences for collaboration. You should be able to create campaigns and run them successfully and filter the data generated for analysis and future use.
Conclusion
Brand marketing is an up-and-coming job that has immense room for growth in the coming years and pays on par with other important departments. A brand marketing manager is responsible for all that has to do with the brand, its image and identity, and how people perceive it.
