How to become a great marketing manager

Updated 28 October 2026

In my experience, there are five traits which make a great marketing manager: independence, responsibility, commerciality, curiosity and productivity. Here’s what each one looks like in practice, and how to develop them.

What is a marketing manager?

Marketing roles can be broadly divided into three levels:

• Junior – assistant, executive, officer
• Mid-level – manager, team leader
• Senior – head of, director, CMO

There are levels within these, such as senior executive and assistant manager, but most marketers start their career in a junior role with a view to becoming a marketing manager.

It’s an arbitrary job title. I’ve seen marketing managers on modest salaries with no autonomy, and marketing managers leading a team and a six-figure budget. But generally, becoming a marketing manager is your early-career goal. It brings a bump in salary, your own area of marketing to look after, and sometimes a team to manage.

My route to marketing manager

I wanted to become a marketing manager before I was 30. It ended up being one of the hardest and longest steps in my career.

Like many elder millennials, I graduated into the credit crunch. I temped for a few months before talking myself into an entry-level job by turning up at a recruitment agency with my CV in hand (it was 2007 – this would never fly today!) As the recession dragged on through my 20s, getting a promotion or a pay rise was hard work.

Once I became a marketing manager and began to manage people and mentor junior team members, I could look back on my journey with clarity. Career progression is hard in a poor economy, just as it is in workplaces which aren’t inclusive. But for all the times I felt held back by the economy, my comprehensive school background or my lack of business acumen, I could also see the traits I needed to level up.

So here’s how to become a great marketing manager, from somebody who grew into one and went on to help others do the same.

1. Independence: take ownership of your work

A marketing manager is independent and decisive. This doesn’t mean skipping the approval process; it means taking ownership of your work.

In a junior role, your workload is set for you and you run decisions past your manager for approval. As a manager, you’re more likely to have a weekly catch-up with your line manager, where you tell them what you’re working on and only need their approval on major decisions. Think of it this way: you go from your manager telling you what to do, to you telling your manager what you’re going to do (with some discussion). You’ll also handle meetings with colleagues, run campaigns and organise customer events without too much hand-holding.

An important step towards independence is going to your manager with solutions, and the reasoning behind them, rather than problems and questions. For example:

• Instead of: “When do you think we should schedule our posts for the next campaign?”
• Try: “For the next campaign, I want to schedule our LinkedIn posts in the morning, as that performed best last time.”

This can feel scary, because it’s natural to fear being wrong. You will get overruled at times – that happens as a manager too – but it’s how you learn to make better, faster decisions.

Other than yourself, the main barrier to independence is an overbearing manager. If you feel you’re outgrowing your role, ask for a conversation about taking on more responsibility. If they won’t relinquish control, it may be time to move on. And if you get disappointing feedback about your performance, it may be time for some tough love.

2. Responsibility: care about the outcome

Being responsible means you care about what you do and the outcome of your work. This comes naturally to some people, but not to everyone. If it doesn’t develop over time, you’ll need to make a conscious effort.

That said, some people wear caring too much as a badge of honour, and it’s not necessarily a good thing. It can lead to poor decision-making, bottlenecks and a glacial approval process. There’s a very thin line between caring too much and overworking, which you should avoid.

Signs that you need to care more at work include:

• Your manager has spoken to you about mistakes or not following through on tasks. This is a big one, so take notice and act on it.
• Campaigns, content and collateral have to be amended or recalled once they’re live because they weren’t checked properly. You need to learn to check and proofread.
• You don’t have a documented approval process. This is a ticking time bomb.
• When there’s a crisis, your manager always handles it. Yes, it’s their job, but you should get stuck in and offer your support.
• You plan and spend without checking the budget. Where do you think this money comes from?

If responsibility doesn’t come naturally to you, it will be hard to progress without it, so pinpoint the exact issue. Do you need a refresher on spelling and grammar to improve your proofreading? If you’re disorganised, what systems and processes could help? If you don’t know how to cope with a marketing emergency, could you get some coaching?

Being responsible shows that you can be trusted. Once your manager and colleagues start to trust you and value your work, you’re on a good path to becoming a marketing manager.

3. Commerciality: understand how your business makes money

Commercial knowledge and a commercial mindset are essential to step up to marketing manager, and to any role beyond that. In your workplace, you need to know:

• How products or services are priced
• What the cost base and profit margins are
• Your company’s revenue and profit, and what makes them go up and down
• How all of this fits with the marketing budget

This means that rather than being told what to do – or worse, doing something because you feel like it – you choose to do something because it brings money in. That is what you are paid to do.

At 25, I thought an English degree, fantastic copywriting skills and a mastery of social media were enough to make me a great marketing manager. Absolutely not. I had a giant gap in my knowledge about business, finance and all the acronyms that go with them.

Here’s what helped me close that gap:

• Studying for a CIM diploma
• Spending time with the finance team and learning about their roles
• Asking for responsibility for small areas of the marketing budget, and gradually taking on more
• Tracking the analytics on my campaigns and reporting on them

Years later, when I attended board meetings, if I didn’t understand something I’d look it up afterwards and ask our management accountant to talk me through it. The lesson here is to start small and build your understanding. It’s never too late to ask for help.

Don’t let commerciality kill your creativity. Just remember that your job is to help your employer make money. Apply that mindset to your work and you’ll get results and get noticed. Understand the commercials, and you’ll be a great marketing manager and an even better head of marketing.

4. Curiosity: keep asking why

Being curious is the sign of a great marketer – I’d even say it’s what separates good from great. It’s the part of marketing that has you poring over campaign concepts and analytics, excited to share your ideas with the team.

Employers value curious marketers because they keep asking why. Why did that campaign work so well? Why do our customers love this product but not that one? Why are we doing it this way?

Don’t confuse curiosity with creativity. You can be curious about stats and analytics just as much as consumer behaviour and language. Some of the most curious people I know work in IT. Ideally, a team has a balance of different curiosities.

Some people are naturally curious; for others it comes from developing a passion. If you have a question mark over your curiosity, dig into it a bit more:

• What do you like about marketing?
• What excites you, and what do you want to learn more about?
• How does it feel when a campaign really hits the mark? And when it doesn’t?

If you’re drawing blanks, this will limit your potential, and I’d question whether marketing is really what you want to do. You might be in the wrong role or the wrong company – and a mentor could help you find your passion.

If you’re fascinated by marketing, go and do your thing. Just remember it needs to lead somewhere, and you’ll need to learn to focus if your curiosity becomes a distraction.

5. Productivity: work on the right things

Productivity is the ability to get stuff done. If you’re working across multiple brands, clients, campaigns or products, you’ll know how hard that can be.

Becoming more productive isn’t about better lists, dozens of notebooks or fancy tech. It’s about understanding yourself, how you work and how you respond to stress. You probably know how you like to work – you might need structure, or you might prefer organised chaos. We each have an optimum workload for getting things done, with enough time to plan, deliver, follow up and keep a grip on what’s coming up.

Employers often take that level and multiply it, and this is where it all goes wrong. You lose track, you rush or you freeze. If you’re like me, you’ll spend a day doing 5% of 20 different tasks when you could have done 100% of one, or 50% of two.

Peaks and troughs in workload are perfectly normal, and you might even thrive in the occasional crisis. But when it’s always a peak or always a crisis, you will burn out. When you’re responsible for your own workload, being productive doesn’t mean getting through as much work as possible. It means working on the things which will make the biggest difference – not easy when your colleagues have their own ideas about what those are.

My cycle for becoming more productive

1. Understand yourself better. Personality tools such as DISC or MBTI can help you find out how you prefer to work and what triggers you. One of my favourite exercises is to track what I’m doing for a week or so. It shows me what I’m actually getting done, where my time goes and what distracts me.
2. Apply what you’ve learnt and create a better environment. If you’re a vivacious creative who gets scatty under pressure, you need to learn to say no – and I suspect you need to make better notes. If you’re a structured introvert who freezes in a crisis, explain to your colleagues that you need time to adjust to new situations. Every personality type brings something to a team; you just need the right environment to perform.
3. Accept that productivity is a cycle. You will slip again at some point. Recognise when it’s happening and what triggered it, and respond accordingly. Your reset might be tracking your week again, blocking out time to focus or consciously scheduling downtime. This is a good time to talk to your manager, a senior colleague or a mentor who can coach you through it.

We all have a tipping point at which pressure stops us being productive. While I’d urge you to understand yourself better, sometimes the problem is your employer. I once resigned from a job because the workload was completely unacceptable. It was impossible to be productive, and it made me very protective of my mental health at work.

In an ideal world, your optimum level of productivity would match your employer’s expectations, with firm boundaries in place. When you become a marketing manager, your workload and responsibilities increase, and you may have the added pressure of delegating to and managing a team. Becoming more productive will help you be a better marketer and a better manager, and it will help to safeguard your mental health.

The five traits of a great marketing manager

Trait	What it looks like
Independence	Taking ownership of your work and going to your manager with solutions, not just problems
Responsibility	Caring about the outcome, checking your work and staying on top of budgets
Commerciality	Understanding how your business makes money and how marketing contributes
Curiosity	Asking why, digging into results and wanting to learn more
Productivity	Knowing how you work best and focusing on what makes the biggest difference

Do you need a marketing mentor?