5 Skills Brand Managers Need to be Successful
In the highly interconnected world that we live in, brand managers are vital for the proper running of any successful business. Not only does a brand manager affect consumer relationships, but it also impacts company culture. Brand managers work extensively with colleagues across departments to ensure that the brand is upheld and improved upon in all its communication and marketing endeavours. Brand Managers are responsible for coming up with out-of-the-box yet effective strategies that influence a brand’s target audience.
Typically, a brand manager is tasked with activities such as implementing branding strategies, scheduling media communications, managing product launches, budgeting different branding project and reviewing customer data.
To perform all these tasks and more, with utmost efficiency, brand managers must possess a developed, diverse set of skills. Here are five of the most important skills that a brand manager must bring to a team.
1. Advanced Communication Skills
Successful brand managers communicate across multiple departments and advocate company-wide cooperation on different projects. Brand managers work on maintaining brand consistency, both internally and externally. This core responsibility can be fulfilled through advanced communications skills, where a brand manager makes it clear that they’ll help out with all necessary tasks and ideas concerning keeping branding up to standards.
Prior to any big project, its crucial they build solid relationships through good communication. Brand managers can go about improving upon their communication skills by being available and visible at all possible times. This includes attending creative meetings, fielding questions from various departments and learning team workflows. They most importantly should show themselves as available for all types of brand questions as they arise.
2. Analytical Skills and a Knack for Creativity
Excellent storytelling and strategic creative thinking are sought-after brand manager skills. Successful brand managers are able to glean insights from data and use it to tell a story in a way that makes their brand irresistible to customers.
Excellent writing and design skills are great to have, but great brand managers are the ones that have the skill to find the right balance between structure and innovation within their creative strategy. It is fair to say that too much structuring of these creative strategies can hamper their innovation. Because of this, successful brand managers know to think analytically and implement strategies that encourage creativity across entire customer journey instead of restricting it.
3. The Ability to Read Trends
Brand managers need to be able to immerse into key markets in order to better grasp the presence of their brand has in them. Being able to conduct and understand market research gives managers insight into the different types of media their customers and potential customers consume, as well as the different conversations they’re engaged in.
This skill is dictated by how well a brand manager is able to gauge how compelling a brand’s messaging is from a customer’s perspective. Successful brand managers are able to obtain first-hand insight in the market, which is much more valuable than something like a customer survey.
4. Quantitative Reasoning
Building a successful brand isn’t just about design aesthetics and world-class copywriting. One of the most important skills that a brand manager must possess is quantitative reasoning: the ability to measure, justify, and apply reasoning to different forms of data relating to branding efforts.
It is important to note that even though branding outcomes are understood qualitatively, it is expressing them with analytics and numbers that makes brand managers effective. This means knowing how to create an in-depth brand review, understand analytics, measure campaign performance, and continuously gather competitive analysis. If there are changes in the market, a good brand manager will adapt and implement new strategies while maintaining brand consistency. The final skill a brand manager needs in this regard is the ability to present gathered data in a dynamic way that makes it engaging.
5. Tech and Social Media Savvy
A good brand manager is not only social media savvy, but also has the ability to leverage technology and digital marketing tools.
Brand managers know that social media is intrinsically enmeshed in the buyer journey and use it to define what the brand stands for and let it resonate in every picture and post shared in media. Whether they are using social media tools to listen to conversations crafting memorable and click-worthy Instagram posts or interpreting analytics and data to understand social media performance, the most successful brand managers understand what it takes to stand out on digital and social media channels.
Businesses continue to look to excellent brand managers for direction, and those who know how to achieve exceptional results continue to remain in demand. So, whether you’re currently work as a brand manager or are delving into the career, these essential brand management skills will help you to build a brand that is sought out by customers, well represented by the employees and uniquely different in the market to produce exceptional work and drive brand growth.
