6 Traits You Need in an Effective Ecommerce Marketing Manager Role
If you’re looking to grow your ecommerce business, an effective ecommerce marketing manager is not just a nice to have — it’s mission critical. Whether you’ve been in business for years and are looking to scale your company, or you are just launching your ecommerce brand, you will need a marketing manager to take you where you want to go.
So, how do you find and hire a manager who will actually produce results? In this article, we’ll discuss the role of an ecommerce marketing manager in depth, including who they are, what their role should entail, and how they produce results.
The Importance of a Marketing Team for Growth
Growing your business comes down to two important decisions: identifying what your goals are, and then mapping out the path to that end result. That path will always require marketing. Whether you’re aiming for a revenue goal, successfully launching a new product, or acquiring more customers, marketing will be the required tactics to get you where you want to go. In this way, marketing is the lifeblood of an ecommerce business.
Effective marketing comes down to strategy and tactics, and one of the best practical ways to make that happen is through a strategic marketing calendar that coordinates all channels and activities as one cohesive effort. This calendar is a central hub that maps out product launches, promotions, content marketing, ad campaigns, email marketing, site updates and more, all in one place.
Now, in order to grow, marketing needs to be happening on a consistent basis and it will need regular attention. Someone has to lead the charge for the strategy and tactics in that marketing calendar— and that’s where an ecommerce marketing manager, or maybe even an outside team comes in.
You might be wondering, “When is the right time to add this role to your team? Should a marketing manager be an internal role, or external?” Let’s get into it!
When to Hire an Ecommerce Manager for Your Marketing Strategy
Because of the importance of effective marketing for growth, we recommend hiring an ecommerce marketing manager as early as possible—even if you’re just starting out. It’s not uncommon for founders of ecommerce brands in the early stages to be managing their own marketing. However, your marketing efforts will need dedicated attention if you want the business to scale, so adding a designated expert to manage it is ideal.
A marketing manager does not have to be an internal team member. In fact, the most cost-efficient way to handle this (with the best results) is oftentimes outsourcing the strategic management of your marketing. This could look like working with a growth partner like our team at Metacake, or a consultant. With this route, you get the benefit of deep expertise and experience, without the added overhead of an employee.
Whether you hire an internal team member or a growth team like ours, your marketing will need dedicated focus from the beginning in order to succeed.
6 Traits of an Effective Ecommerce Marketing Manager
To get the most value added to your business, there are several things to look for when hiring for a marketing manager position. Here are the top 6 skills this person or team will need to have:
1. Organization
An ecommerce marketing manager needs to be very organized. They will be overseeing a number of activities, including promotions and product launches, content being published, ad and email campaigns being developed, and more. Organization needs to be a strong suit of this team member so they can coordinate it all without chaos.
2. Leadership
This manager will be a leader coordinating many different people and initiatives. They’ll need to know how to communicate with team members effectively, motivate them, and orient everyone around the main goals at hand.
3. Strong Experience in Many Aspects of Marketing
The marketing manager does not need to know the details of how to run every marketing channel and initiative, but they need to have enough of an understanding to know how each contributes to the overall strategy. Look for someone who has deep strategic experience and who knows how to utilize all the different channels to accomplish your goals.
4. Clear Understanding of the Desired Result
This team member will also need to have a clear picture of the result your brand’s leadership wants to achieve. This is typically a revenue or profit goal, but could involve other goals underneath that. The marketing manager will need to understand what success means to the company, and how marketing activities will contribute to it.
5. Deep Knowledge of Your Brand and Customers
An ecommerce marketing manager should understand what you sell, but even more importantly, who you are as a brand and who your customers are. Developing your unique brand and identifying customer avatars are critical to the success of your business. Your marketing manager will need to understand those things at a deep level in order for marketing to be on target, speaking to the right customers with the right message.
6. Effective Analyst and Communicator
This team member will also need to be able to clearly communicate results of marketing efforts to leadership. The brand’s leaders might not have an understanding or visibility of the details of all marketing efforts, so the marketing manager will need to be able to distill results down into core KPIs with takeaways about what worked, what didn’t, and what to do next.
The Responsibilities of an Ecommerce Marketing Manager
Now that we’ve outlined a skillset to look for, let’s walk through the primary responsibilities in a typical ecommerce marketing manager role.
1. Translate Marketing Strategy into Marketing Activities
First and foremost, your ecommerce marketing manager will work with leadership to establish an overall marketing strategy. It is then the manager’s job to translate that plan into tactics and activities to achieve results.
If this manager is an internal resource, there might be various roles involved here, such as a social media manager, email marketer, PPC specialist, content marketer and more. The benefit of hiring an outside growth team like Metacake is that some or all of those additional roles could be covered for you within the hired team.
2. Manage the Marketing Calendar (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly)
The marketing manager will also be responsible for managing the marketing calendar we discussed above, which acts as a central hub for coordinating all marketing efforts across channels. From daily social posts to weekly email campaigns to monthly promotions and more, the manager will lead the charge for planning these initiatives out in advance, getting them scheduled, and coordinating across other team members for execution.
3. Quarterback All Campaigns Across All Channels
Taking this a step further from strategy and planning, the ecommerce marketing manager will also take the lead for executing campaigns across the different marketing channels. They’ll need to make sure various roles such as ad platform specialists, designers and web developers have everything they need to actually produce the campaign and make it successful.
4. Analyze Results of Campaigns
This team member should also be responsible for analyzing and reporting on the results of marketing initiatives. Sometimes an additional team member is helpful for deeper analysis, but the marketing manager should have the ability to look at data and understand what happened. Marketing is all about learning, so your manager will be in charge of assessing the success of campaigns and drawing conclusions for next steps.
5. Brainstorm Ways to Optimize Marketing
Lastly, your ecommerce marketing manager will lead the brainstorming and decision making for optimization. They’ll answer key questions about what was learned in this campaign and what can be adjusted for better results.
Salary Range for an Ecommerce Marketing Manager
You might be wondering what you will need to invest to add this role to your team. An ecommerce marketing manager typically makes between $80,000 to $150,000 per year, depending on their skillset.
This is a wide range, and that is because it really depends on their experience and how much value they are able to bring to your business. The more skills and experience someone can offer over a wide variety of marketing activities, the better they will be able to accomplish a coordinated marketing effort that is successful for your brand.
If you were to outsource this role to an external team, you would likely have a similar level of investment but you would save when it comes to some of the overhead and management that comes from an internal employee. Plus, as we mentioned earlier, you’ll get the added benefit of multiple team members experienced in multiple disciplines being included in that cost.
Investing in Your Ecommerce Growth & Marketing Strategy
An ecommerce business lives and dies on the success of their marketing, so investing in a consistent, successful marketing strategy is critical. No matter what stage of business you’re currently in, hiring a marketing manager for your ecommerce brand will be a key factor for your growth.
If your business currently sits under $16M, you might want to look to an outside team rather than hire in-house. In that stage, your in-house team should be focused on product development, and your investment for a marketing manager could be better spent on an outside team with deep experience who can really help you unlock those next stages of growth.
If your company is a bit larger, you might have the bandwidth to build those teams in house. Either way, the ecommerce marketing manager is an important role to have in your business with dedicated attention from the beginning, and to continue to scale over time.
