A Day in the Life of an Associate Marketing Director at NAMM

You would think that there would be a ton of advertising plans, marketing plans, and the execution of those plans. But a lot of what it ends up being is pitching internally what your ideas are.

Marketing is an interesting department to work in because everybody thinks they are a marketer, and in some ways, they are. But in the best companies, marketing is a leadership aspect rather than a service effect. Good marketers are involved in product discussions.

I think you see that across successful versus unsuccessful companies. Those that have more marketing involvement on the front end, those that know their customer and are doing adequate data and research methods to forecast what the consumer actually wants, rather than producing, creating, and then turning it over to marketing and saying, "Now sell it. Now make that big."

So, that's one of the biggest difficulties and one of the things you end up spending a good chunk of your time doing as a marketing manager: advocating for a product and customer-focused mindset across the entire revenue plan, and from there, actually being able to implement your plans. A lot of it is selling internally.

"Hey, we need digital marketing and XYZ." And then, I personally think that marketing isn't marketing unless you're tracking the data and seeing how it's actually being implemented. This is very, very difficult, especially in a holistic strategy that involves print, email campaigns, and all these different kinds of things.

Being able to unify all that data is a big thing that I think marketing managers do. Rather than coordinators or copywriters, when I was working as a coordinator or a copywriter, I was very focused on just making the manual make sense or selling the product or initiative to the customer.

But now, as a marketing manager, it's trying to pull all the strings so that the copywriter is doing what they need to do, and the data people are doing what they need to do to see if that copy is working. I'm bringing a lot of A/B testing and different data methods to this department to try to modernize it.

We're not just giving the impression of what we think feels good, because ultimately, it's just in the realm of opinion. Everybody has an opinion, including the CEO. CEOs are very interesting in terms of how they interface with marketing.

One of my professors, when I was getting my MBA, was talking about how marketing is one of the best ways to move up the food chain in terms of corporate hierarchy because you get a lot of face time with the CEO. That's a double-edged sword because the CEO definitely wants to be involved in the corporate tone and sales strategy.

So, a lot of times, you need to push back against the CEO or challenge their preconceived notions. That's why you need data and other methods to fund those strategic decisions. It's difficult, but that's ultimately rewarding about being in the marketing manager role rather than a marketing coordinator role.

It's very dynamic, and there's a lot of convincing. It's convincing the customer, but more importantly, your CEO, your director of marketing, and everybody else who is a stakeholder on the board.