Reading Time: ~4 Mins | Written By: Chris Penner
What does a Marketing Account Manager do? Want the short answer? They wear many hats! Interested in a longer, more detailed answer? Let’s chat further.
Despite our first answer being short, it wasn't incorrect. Account Managers wear multiple hats, and have a variety of responsibilities. At a high level these include:
Managing clients
Managing an internal team
Managing vendors
You are likely a people person by nature, the liaison between your team and clients, vendors and clients, and sometimes even vendors and your team.
Read on to learn more.
Where do Marketing Account Managers Work?
First, let’s establish where these folks work. Believe it or not, Account Managers in marketing can work for agencies, and the brand side. On the agency side, we are referring to marketing agencies themselves. For brands, we’re referring to any company that is not an agency - sometimes referred to as ‘in house’. The job titles may vary across organizations, but those who perform similar roles on both agency and brand side often have job titles along the lines of:
Account Manager
Marketing Project Manager
Project Manager
Account Coordinator
Project Coordinator
At the end of the day, each of these job roles will have some level of involvement in managing marketing projects, managing clients, and managing both internal teams and vendors.
Managing Clients
There is a common misconception that Account Managers’ roles are strictly sales focused. However, as a marketing Account Manager, especially on the agency side, you are managing everything that goes into the services you are providing to your set of clients. This includes managing the client themselves! Managing clients is not always easy, but is a crucial skill to have in order to be successful in your job, and ultimately make your client successful as well.
Managing clients requires you to ensure you are getting what you need from them in order to deliver the services you are contracted to provide. For example, if you are developing a new social media strategy for your client, and updating the visual assets for their channels, you’ll need them to provide all branding assets, access to their social media accounts, and references to past social media planning documents they’ve developed.
Additionally, Account Managers are required to manage client expectations. This is arguably the trickiest part of the job. Managing client expectations includes:
Ensuring they agree on, and understand, what the goals are that you and your team are working towards for them
Ensuring they agree to, and understand, your timeline for executing specific deliverables
Ensuring they fully understand the scope of work you are set out to do
Developing the skills to manage expectations takes time, but there are tools and processes out there that help you do that. You can learn all about these in our Account Management course.
Managing an Internal Team
As a past Account Manager, I always believed I worked for my team, not the other way around. By ‘my team’ I mean the individual specialists that perform specific functions, ie. a graphic designer, a digital ads coordinator, SEO coordinator, and so on.
As the Account Manager, it is your job to get your team everything they need to be successful. This might be information about target audiences to develop strategies, branding assets for new ad creative, and so much more. If your team has what they need to do their job, everyone will be more successful.
Equally as important is managing your team’s task weights and deadlines. At the end of the day, your team is less likely to get done what is required of them if they are provided with unrealistic expectations, both in terms of the timeline they are asked to complete something, and the number of tasks they are expected to tackle in a given time period. Great account managers work to understand how each team member performs, and the pace at which they work. And they manage projects with this information in mind.
Managing Vendors
Vendors. What do we mean by that? This can be any individual or company that you or the client has contracted to perform a particular service. For example, let’s say you work for Lululemonas a marketing project manager. Your internal photography team is fully booked up, but you need a photographer to shoot product photos for a new line Lulu is about to launch. In this case, you’d likely hire an outside photographer as a vendor (as long as you have the budget for it).
In terms of managing vendors, this process is essentially a blend of what you do to manage your clients and internal team. Establishing clear expectations is crucial. The photographer should know exactly what is expected of them, and in what period of time. As the Account Manager, you also need to ensure you have given the photographer everything they need to do a great job (ie. a storyboard), and have agreed on realistic expectations with them.
That is the role of account management in marketing in a nutshell! There are many more responsibilities that come with this role, including managing campaign budgets, providing thorough reporting, and more.
Interested in this line of work?
Check out our new Account Management course that is currently available for pre-sale, where you can learn how to be successful in this role, entirely online and on-demand.
