Marketing Manager Checklist: An 8-Point Marketing Task List

Managing your company’s marketing can be an overwhelming task when you aren’t sure where to start or how to proceed. What do you prioritize? What do you need to do to ensure your company’s marketing operations are effective?

If you find yourself asking those questions, you’re not alone ­­–– and you’ve come to the right place. We’ve created this easy 8-point marketing manager checklist to ensure you have everything in place to be successful with your company’s marketing. Keep reading to get your marketing task list!

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1. Verify your marketing budget

Before you dive into digital marketing, the first item you must check off your marketing to-do list is verifying your marketing budget. You can’t invest in marketing strategies without knowing what you can afford.

If your company determines your marketing budget, you’ll want to ensure you get your budget amount as soon as possible to start planning. On the other hand, if your company asks for a budget proposal, you can ask for an amount that equates to 7-8% of your company’s revenue.

Once you know your budget, you can move on to the next item on your marketing manager checklist.

2. Verify your target audience

Next on this marketing to-do list, you’ll want to verify your target audience. You need to know who you’re targeting with your marketing. Targeting the wrong people will negatively impact your marketing strategy and make it ineffective.

To determine who’s in your target audience, you must look at who buys your products or uses your services. Identify information like:

• Age
• Gender
• Occupation
• Income
• Hobbies
• Interests
• Buying habits
• Shopping habits

When you have this information, you can form buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional representations of real customers that help you target people most interested in your products or services. You can have multiple buyer personas in your audience.

Once you know who you’re targeting, you can choose the marketing strategies that will help you reach your target audience.

3. Set your marketing goals

Next on our checklist for marketing managers is setting your marketing goals. You need to know what you want to achieve with your marketing to choose strategies that help you achieve your goals. Not to mention, setting marketing goals will help guide your strategies so you can achieve your goals.

There are numerous marketing goals you can set for your campaign, including:

• Build brand awareness
• Increase website traffic
• Generate leads
• Increase sales

If you want to set practical goals, create SMART goals. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

SMART goals are best for your campaigns because they help you set goals that you can prove you achieved. Just look at the difference:

Simple goal: Earn more traffic

SMART goal: Increase organic traffic by 15% by the end of the third quarter

 As you can see, the first goal is challenging to know if you achieve it. What constitutes “more” traffic?

How long do you have to earn “more” traffic? This goal is not specific or measurable. With the SMART goal, though, you have a clear objective to achieve.

In addition, you know what to achieve and when to achieve it, so it’s easier to know if you reached that goal.

Learn more about setting SMART goals in the video below.

4. Establish your competition

Once you establish your goals, the next item to check off your checklist for marketing managers is to establish your competition. You’re not the only business looking to reach its target audience online. There are dozens of other companies vying for your audience’s attention.

And if you want to get ahead of this competition, you need to know who they are first. So, how do you find your competition? First, if you have a physical business location where you sell goods or services, you’ll want to include any businesses in your area that offer something similar.

Look at their online presence and see what strategies they’re using to reach people in your area. Second, search key terms related to your business and see who’s ranking for those terms. Look for companies that continually rank in those searches related to your business –– they’re your online competitors.

Once you establish your competition, you’ll want to investigate what strategies they use for marketing to leads online. It can give you an idea of what methods you should use to reach the same audience. You can also use a tool like CompetitorSpyFX to see how you stack up against these competitors.

CompetitorSpyFX enables you to see what keywords your competition ranks for and compare how much content you’re creating compared to your competition. This tool also enables you to do projections with metrics to figure out what you need to do to outperform your competition’s metrics.

5. Determine what strategies you want to use

Now that you’ve established basic information to help you market your business, the next item to check off your checklist for marketing managers is determining your strategies. Your marketing strategies are what you’ll use to reach people interested in your business. There are dozens of strategies you can use to reach people interested in your business, including:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Local SEO
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
• Social media advertising
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• Video marketing
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Reputation management

You can use any combination of these strategies to help you reach people interested in your products or services. You’ll want to consider your budget, goals, and competition when determining which strategies to use for your business.

6. Determine the tools you need to run your campaigns

Once you establish which strategies you want to use, the next item to check off your marketing manager checklist is determining your tools. When you invest in multiple marketing campaigns, it’s overwhelming to try and manage each strategy without technological help. That’s where marketing tools can help.

There are multiple marketing tools you can use to help you manage different strategies. Here are just a few tools you can use to help manage your marketing:

• Google Analytics: Helps you track performance data from SEO and PPC campaigns.

• EmailMarketingFX: Helps you create, send, and monitor your email campaigns.
• MarketingCloudFX: Helps you automate marketing tasks to make your life easier.
• Buffer: Helps you schedule social media posts in advance and manage your social strategy.
• Google Search Console: Helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence on Google’s search engine.
• Evernote: Helps you organize your content pieces to create content seamlessly.

• Nutshell: Helps you manage your customer base and maintain critical information about them to market to leads better.

These are just a few of the many tools you can use to help streamline your marketing strategies and if you’re after a tool that can help you turn your marketing team into a smoothly operating powerhouse, look at our top marketing work management platforms.

At WebFX, we also offer one of the best marketing manager software options with our revenue acceleration platform, MarketingCloudFX. MarketingCloudFX helps you track the results of your campaigns, implement data-driven strategies that earn a higher ROI, and much more.

7. Make sure your website delivers a great experience

Another item to check off your marketing to-do list is to make sure your website delivers a great experience. Your website is at the heart of your marketing plan. Most people will get information about your business from your website.

Without a well-designed, functional website, you’ll deter people from interacting with your website and learning about your business. Here’s how you can create a killer website experience:

• Create a branded design: Creating a branded design will create a memorable experience for your audience. Choose a design that reflects your business’s unique style, from the color to the stylistic elements.
• Integrate responsive design: Responsive design enables you to deliver a mobile-friendly experience for your audience. Your site will adapt to whatever device a user uses to ensure you provide the best experience for their device.
• Improve your site’s load time: A fast-loading website is key to keeping your audience engaged. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to see your site’s current load time and get tips for improving site load time!
• Easy-to-use navigation: Your navigation is the core of your site that helps people find what they need from your business. Make your navigation simple and easy to use, with broad headings and organized subcategories.

  When you put the time and attention to detail into your website, you’ll have a website that delivers a better user experience and ultimately helps you earn more customers for your business.

8. Determine what metrics you want to track

The last item to check off your marketing task checklist is determining what metrics you want to track. When you run your marketing campaigns, you want to ensure you’re achieving success and driving your desired results. To do that, you must set the metrics that will help you determine if you’re reaching your goals.

The metrics you set will depend upon the strategies you use. Some common metrics companies track include:

• Clicks
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Conversions
• Leads generated
• Cost per click (CPC)

You’ll want to determine what metrics you’re tracking for each campaign. Keep in mind that the metrics you track should focus on helping you reach your business’s goals!

Need someone to help you check items off your marketing manager checklist?

Managing all marketing aspects for your company is a big undertaking and can become quickly overwhelming, especially if you have a small team or few resources. But with WebFX, that’s not the case ­­­­–– you get all the staff and resources you need to manage your marketing.

Our team of over 500+ marketing experts has 28+ years of digital marketing experience. We know how to craft campaigns that drive results –– we’ve driven over $6 billion in revenue and over 24 million leads for our clients in the past five years. Ready to get more checked off your marketing to-do list?

Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our digital marketing services!