How Involved Should You Be in Your Business’ Marketing Campaign?

Many companies outsource their marketing campaign to expert teams. Every business owner or manager needs to know when it’s more practical to outsource than to hire in-house, and marketing is often in this category. But as a leader of your business, you also need to know what’s going on with your marketing campaign and make sure it is true to the brand and the message you want to send.

This leads to a common question of how personally involved a business leader should be in the campaign. Should you be guiding every article and affiliation, providing your industry expertise, or letting a well-built campaign take care of itself? The answer is different for each company, brand, and partnership. Today, we’re here to help you decide how involved you should be in your business’ marketing campaign.

A Business Leader’s Role in Marketing

Whether you are a business owner or a decision-making manager, you have a defined role when it comes to marketing. You can choose to contribute your in-depth knowledge of the business, brand, or industry. Any involvement of this type could help the marketing team create a more nuanced and finely tuned campaign. But ultimately, your goal is to ensure that your business has the best marketing campaign that can be produced. Whatever it takes to produce it.

Initially, your role is to convey the brand and goals to the marketing team so they know what to do. From there, they will craft a campaign and it becomes your duty to oversee the campaign and ensure nothing is amiss. Finally, you decide if the marketing campaign is meeting your ROI needs or conversion results.

However, it’s important to understand that an expert marketing team can handle everything on their own. Once you complete the initial campaign design, your team can move forward to create assets and run a campaign in line with the initial design principles. But you may also have a lot to contribute to a campaign if you have the desire or talents to do so.

How involved you get in the creation of the campaign will vary. It all depends on you, your marketing team, and the campaign you want to see.

The 5 Types of Marketing Managers:

Marketing managers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are small-to-medium business owners trying to cover all their bases. Some are VPs assigned to take care of marketing, some are marketing managers who realize their budget will go further outsourcing than hiring an entire in-house team. And so, understandably, the management styles vary pretty widely as well. There’s no one management style that will make a great campaign. There are about five general style categories of marketing manager working with an outsourced team.

• 1) The Kick-Back Auto Pilot

The Autopilot marketing manager is either too busy or too laid-back to stress about the day-to-day of the marketing campaign. This type of manager kicks it into high gear during the first few meetings. They passionately explain the brand, style, imagery, and message of the campaign, look at a few campaign prototypes. Then they relax and let things run.

The kick-back autopilot manager primarily uses content approval and the occasional casual exchange of live chat messages to steer the campaign and otherwise allows the marketing team to do what they do best.

• 2) The Silent-but-Interested Supervisor

The Silent-but-Interested marketing manager is someone who may not be an expert at marketing, but they know good copy when they see it. This type of manager doesn’t feel the need to step in or make comments for every piece of content. They know that micro-managing is not always helpful and they can see when the marketing team is doing things right.

The Silent-but-Interested likes to be kept in the loop and to be CC’d on most of the marketing business, but they don’t interfere and the marketing team seldom receives messages back. Except to correct the occasional typo or informational misunderstanding in the copy, which is when the team realizes their supervisor is still paying very close attention.

• 3) The Meticulous Industry Approver

The Meticulous Approver is someone who is an expert in the business and may also have marketing or copy-editing experience. They like to comb over every marketing asset before it hits the print. Unlike the Silent-but-Interested, the Meticulous Approver sends their written approval (or disapproval) for nearly every piece of content. They often like to red-pencil written work and the content is often better for their close attention to detail.

Meticulous Approvers are avid and involved in the marketing campaign and are often most passionate about avoiding errors and maintaining a pristine professional brand reputation.

• 4) The Thought-Leadership Industry Expert

The Thought-Leadership Expert is a manager type that enjoys contributing their in-depth knowledge of the business and industry. These managers are often friendly and conversational. They may not have a marketing background, but they know their industry skills and know their customers well and are full of stories about past experiences on the job.

The thought-leadership expert is indispensable as part of the marketing team, often contributing their own expert content rather than providing detailed oversight to the campaign. They trust the marketers to do what they do and will only offer correction to keep the brand on-track. Which is seldom a problem, because thought-leadership experts take care of the campaign design phase with practical efficiency.

• 5) The Results-Oriented Director

Last but not least is the Results-Oriented managerial style. From all types of experience backgrounds, the results-oriented marketing manager is usually someone who cares about the numbers. They understand what marketing is supposed to accomplish and don’t get lost in the feels.

A results-oriented director is excellent at measuring the ROI of campaign efforts and often wants to be kept most in the loop on spend and analytics. Those who have an eye for numerical detail may even provide their marketing teams some valuable insight into where to focus marketing efforts to refine the campaign for the best possible numerical results.

The Differences in Approach When Managing a Marketing Team

• Brand Crafting and Campaign Design

There is a difference between shaping the brand and designing a campaign. Working with a marketing team gives you the opportunity to craft your brand. In fact, it may even be your responsibility to spearhead the brand crafting or a rebranding project. As the campaign progresses, a brand style and personality is created. You can trust your marketing team to carry one a well-crafted brand or you can take the helm and guide the marketing team to alter or refine your brand in positive ways. This often depends on whether you have a vision of brand development or need to see a good brand represented well.

Campaign design, on the other hand, is often about front-loading the collaboration. When you’re working with a team of professional marketers, your projects will usually start with an in-depth interview or collaborative consultation so the team can learn your brand and design an incredible campaign outline. For many execs who hire the marketers, your primary involvement will be at the beginning. Once a quality campaign design has been created, you can trust your marketers to execute it with style. And if any changes are desired, a quick follow-up consultation is all that is necessary to adapt the campaign design.

• Approval Vs Involvement

Another look at the involvement approach is approval vs involvement. Many business leaders don’t have time to oversee every detail of the marketing campaign. Heck, that’s a big part of the reason to hire a marketing team. Instead of getting involved, these exects use the approval approach instead. For approval-based marketing management, a manager simply asks to see assets before they go live. Every photo, video, or blog post about to be posted will need to get your stamp of approval. Just to make sure your team is still clearly on-track with your brand and message. The approval method is excellent for execs who are not marketing experts but know good and bad marketing for the brand when they see it. 

Involvement, on the other hand, is the hands-on approach. For experienced marketing managers or business leaders with a vision for the brand, it can be more rewarding and inspiring to get directly involved with the marketing team. Just let them know that’s what you expect ahead of time. Maybe you want to see your ideas come to life when you have a vision of good marketing. Maybe you want to understand your marketing efforts and get the play-by-play each week. If your name is expected to be on campaign assets (this is very common) then, of course, you want your hands in the projects and your inspiration as part of the process.

• Providing Industry Insights and Thought Leadership

One of the best possible ways for a business leader to get involved in the company marketing campaign is by providing industry insights and thought leadership. What we mean by this is to share your knowledge of the industry, how the business works, and where things are headed with your marketing team. Maybe even write a few articles or thoughts of your own. Don’t worry about typos, the team can polish up the punctuation.

Your knowledge in the industry is worth its weight in gold. Marketers are great writers, illustrators, and amateur group-psychologists but that can’t replace years of knowing how your business works inside and out. When writing inbound marketing, your knowledge is both useful and fascinating to the readers. When authority positioning, your knowledge proves that the company has depth and substance.

Shoot web videos of yourself demonstrating industry skills or talking about how stuff works. Give interviews to the marketing team, or just tell a few stories of the most interesting work experiences you’ve had. Trust us, it will add incredible depth and credibility to the marketing campaign to benefit from the knowledge of you and other professionals working in non-marketing positions in the company.

Standing at the Helm of Your Campaign “Ship”

Some marketing managers step back and let the campaign speak for themselves. Some thrive as involved members and leaders of the hired marketing team. But no matter what management style you adopt, it’s important to be confident in the campaign that’s going out. If you communicated clearly during the campaign design phase and trust your team to do the rest, that’s great. And if you are inspired with ideas and contributions, that’s great too. If you’re too darn busy to get involved but sometimes email some industry thoughts to the marketing team, that’s another potentially profitable approach. As long as stand at the helm of your campaign “ship” and the campaign reaches its goals, then you’re as involved as you need to be.

Contact us today for a consultation with our marketing team to conceptualize the campaign you want to see, the way you want to manage it.