In today’s age of commercialization and digitalization, a lot of niche jobs have come about. Campaign management for marketing and political candidates is becoming more and more important. With more individuals wanting to establish and build brands, this new career is growing in demand. Today, we’ll know the Campaign Manager Job Description.
What does a campaign manager do?
As the name would suggest, they primarily coordinate and work with external agencies to prepare, execute and analyze campaigns. These campaigns are of a wide variety and can range from digital content, newsletters, TV, and, finally print media.
The job entails a very in-depth understanding of every aspect of marketing. Whether it be digital, TV, print, or radio. Campaign managers should be able to analyze the quality of content, come up with effective marketing campaigns. Furthermore, they should be able to maintain and coordinate between different marketing teams on a day-to-day basis. All of this is driven toward building a brand or sending a message about a company.
The above-mentioned campaign manager is the more common one. The other type is the political campaign manager. As the name would suggest political campaign managers handle a political candidate’s image. It’s slightly different from marketing and requires the campaign manager to be adept at handling more politically oriented tasks.
Key responsibilities of a campaign manager
Most marketing campaign managers aim at:
- Coming up with marketing campaigns for either B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business) companies. Since both of these approaches vary a bit on some level, managers have to come up with different strategies for each of them. Their end goal in both cases is gaining and retaining clients or customers.
- Overseeing every aspect of the procedures, implementation, and tracking of various marketing campaigns for a company. This means working with multiple teams and ensuring a coherent brand image that sells.
- Keeping everything within a budget. Since marketing is not a cheap affair, especially for bigger companies, the job will require marketing managers to stay within a budget and still deliver optimal results.
- Maintaining a consistent and reasonable ROI (Return of Interest) on various marketing campaigns deployed by any given company.
- Analyzing new and upcoming trends in the market to gain an advantage and deploying newer and better performing campaigns.
Political Campaign managers are entrusted with:
- Having to speak on behalf of political candidates at many venues. These venues can range from big rallies to formal and informal press briefings.
- Adapting to changing trends in different political environments and changing strategy accordingly. This field is also far more competitive as political oppositions will have equal or even more skilled campaign managers helping them out.
- Managing the day-to-day of political candidates and ensuring maximum productivity in maintaining a fairly respected public image.
- Coming up with fundraising and awareness campaigns. Because running political campaigns often require sponsors.
- Reaching out to supporters and influential people and maintaining a good rapport with them.
- Employing volunteers to spread the word through flyers, social media, and knocking on doors.
- Creating and putting out public opinion polls and then studying them to make necessary changes to political campaigns.
- Acting as the face for a certain cause that the political client stands for.
- Adhering to elections laws and ensuring that no malpractices are done to ensure a fair win.
Both of these common variations of campaign managers are equally challenging. Although it is much easier for a beginner to enter the marketing industry, the political industry is far more challenging and equally rewarding as well.
Prerequisite skills
- Good managerial experience. As mentioned before, a large part of the job involves talking to people and sharing the workload. And so, it is crucial that campaign managers be managerial wizards, and be able to handle multiple teams across a company to ensure maximum productivity in the marketing division of a company.
- People skills or communication skills are the other important dimension of becoming a successful campaign manager. Communication goes both ways in terms of having good writing as well as excellent speaking skills. Speaking skills come into play considering the sheer volume of third parties a campaign manager will have to deal with over time.
- Project management proficiency. A fairly well-to-do campaign manager will often find themselves at the helm of managing multiple marketing projects all running at the same time. This is a highly stressful situation and one needs to get accustomed to performing despite unideal conditions, in order to succeed.
- Being good with numbers. Most marketing campaigns involve analyzing different statistics. It could be at the initial stages of coming up with a campaign, all the way to measuring how well people are responding to campaigns as well.
- While most campaign managers do not necessarily have a bachelor’s degree in the marketing field, it helps to have one. A bachelor’s degree in communication, media, or other similar fields will also do.
- In order to be a top dog in the industry, it is desirable to have a minimum of 5 years of experience in the industry. While such a high cutoff might make it more difficult for newcomers to enter the field, it is not necessarily a huge obstacle. Moreover, the industry is just as competitive as most others are these days. Therefore, it helps to build contacts in the industry and make the right decision in the long run to ensure a good portfolio.
- A slightly understated skill that is highly desirable in campaign managers is having an eye for talent. It helps to have keen observational skills to employ highly skilled people for your marketing team. This helps make the job easier and provides employment to highly skilled people as well.
- But for the most part, there are no specific requirements for most campaign manager jobs. Since the job itself is not a strictly defined one, it entails candidates to have a wide skillset that enables them to adapt to the changing nature of the job.
Perks of being a Campaign Manager
- Control over key marketing aspects of big companies. If you turn out to become a successful campaign manager, you will be responsible for, and in control of what content your company puts out. In essence, you are the final decision-maker in shaping your company’s brand.
- A very competitive salary. As mentioned before, the field of campaign management, in general, is highly competitive. If one proves themselves as a skilled manager, then they can expect a very good salary with various benefits. Most campaign managers earn roughly $54,810 per year.
- A chance to travel a lot. Since most companies don’t restrict marketing campaigns to specific regions, it means most marketing campaigns are intended for the global audience. What this means for most campaign managers is that they end up traveling quite a bit, attending many meetings and conferences across the world, that pertain to their marketing campaigns. Most of these trips are fully funded by the companies and managers end up with almost no additional expenses.
- If you are a political campaign manager and you are quite successful, you will most likely always be in demand across the country for many different election programs. This ensures some level of job security for most political campaign managers.
Conclusion
A campaign manager is a very engaging and interesting job that covers a wide skillset requirement. It is also a very versatile job which makes people who work on it highly skilled and future-proof themselves. So long as brands and political campaigns persist, the demand for campaign managers will always be high.
Although the job is a bit taxing, it pays reasonably well provided you have a bit of experience and have a decent position. Most top marketing managers came to the field through many different avenues. Very few campaign managers have a bachelor’s degree directly pertaining to the job. Therefore, it becomes pretty evident that most of what campaign managers do rely almost purely on dealing with people and having a basic idea of marketing.
A good way for people interested in marketing is to start off with an internship at a somewhat reputed organization. Having a bachelor’s degree helps, although it is not absolutely necessary. And even if you have a bachelor’s degree in a different field, you can make up for it by doing other smaller courses.
The requirements for each marketing job can and will vary because each organization is different and requires different campaigns. The important aspect is to recognize what role might be ideal for you and applying for that.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How hard is it to break into the industry of campaign management?
It is fairly hard. The first step one can take is an internship, as that will enable one to familiarize oneself with the job and its responsibilities without any major stakes.
You can then proceed to apply to higher posts. It helps to have contacts in the field as well as additional diplomas or online courses in marketing or brand-building.
- How long does it take to make a living off of campaign management?
It can range from 2-3 years. It really depends on what kind of campaign management one tries to break into. For instance, building a portfolio in the political campaign management industry is very difficult. However, is important to remember that hard work and perseverance pay off in the long run.
