A brand—what comes to mind when you hear this term? Odds are, you think of big names like Nike, Apple, or Chanel. Why? Because they’ve managed to build relationships with their audiences and set themselves apart from competitors by creating unique images for themselves.
However, the term isn’t confined to big names. Regardless of size, all businesses can become brands with proper brand management.
A brand manager can help you align a specific image with your brand, boosting instant recognizability with your target market, especially now with the increasing adoption of digital marketing and social media in the business world.
New to the concept of brand managers? Read on as we dive into their roles in everything from brand marketing to business growth.
What is a brand manager?
A brand manager is a lot like an orchestra conductor, only instead of helping an orchestra with its musical piece, they help create the best version of a business to distinguish it in the market. They’re responsible for everything related to branding, including choosing a business’ visual elements, defining its brand identity, and brand storytelling.
A brand manager also conducts market research to understand consumer behavior and determine how best to present a business to its target audience. Because of their understanding of the market, they can also be involved in product development, helping ensure products meet customer pain points effectively.
Brand manager vs. marketing manager vs. product manager
It’s easy to get these professionals confused, as their roles may seem somewhat similar to anyone new to product development and marketing. However, they’re inherently different.
A brand manager is more of a strategist who studies the market and helps cultivate suitable messaging to help a business build relationships with its target audience and stand out from the crowd.
A marketing manager takes on a more tactical role, implementing a brand manager’s strategy in the market. Their role is to drive customers to buy products by explaining what they are, who they’re developed for, what problems they can help solve, and how they can solve them.
Finally, a product manager focuses on concept development and product creation. They often work with brand managers to ensure products match desired brand ideals and with marketing managers to help them understand a product’s whats, whys, and hows.
What does a brand manager do?
Why do many small businesses fail? Many business owners assume they fail because of poor financial management. But, while this is undoubtedly one of the causes, it isn’t the only one—19% of businesses are unable to compete effectively, and 14% fail because of poor marketing.
The burden of responsibility isn’t on marketing managers alone; the truth of the matter is that marketing problems also stem from poor branding. To be successful, businesses must work with professional brand managers. Here are some of their core responsibilities:
- Conduct market research to understand a business’s target audience and its needs.
- Craft a brand strategy to enhance cohesiveness across all marketing initiatives.
- Advise various business teams, including product development and marketing, about the brand strategy to promote brand alignment.
- Craft brand messaging to promote consistency.
- Devise and manage budgets for branding efforts.
- Oversee marketing campaigns and help with product development.
- Anticipate future industry and market trends to help keep a company’s brand image up to date.
The broad scope of brand management
Now that you have a general idea of what a brand manager does, let’s take a deeper look at their roles. Here’s what brand management encompasses:
Digital marketing
With over 4.5 billion people using the internet to find solutions to their problems, digital marketing has become invaluable for modern businesses. This has expanded the brand manager’s toolkit by providing broader audiences on whom to shape business perceptions.
As such, brand management has come to encompass a wide range of marketing activities, including content marketing, social media management, and digital advertising. Good brand managers are typically deeply involved with these activities, so they can guide marketing teams to promote consistency.
Online reputation management
Brand reputation management has never been as crucial as it is today. With information spreading like wildfire in the fast-paced digital world, you must exercise greater care to maintain your business’s image. That’s where brand management comes in. A manager can help you maintain a good reputation by providing public relations guidance, managing public crises, and responding to customer feedback appropriately.
Data analysis
Data can be the difference between business success and failure—if used appropriately, it can promote success. So, it’s no wonder data analysis is vital to a brand manager’s responsibilities. They assess digital campaigns and social media to better understand consumer behavior and inform strategy development and decision-making.
Brand growth
Effective brand management is necessary for consistent business growth. Brand management involves understanding a target audience’s needs, ensuring products meet these needs, and making sure brand messaging conveys a business’ unique value proposition. This enhances brand awareness, customer loyalty, and, ultimately, business growth.
Customer engagement
Successful brand managers enhance engagement by placing customers at the center of all business interactions—this may involve something as simple as responding to feedback or spotlighting customers in marketing campaigns. This reinforces brand loyalty, helps businesses build better client relationships, and enhances customer experiences.
Managers also promote engagement by maintaining consistent brand messaging. This way, customers know what to expect from a brand and can easily recognize and connect with it.
Essential skills for modern brand managers
Most brand managers have bachelor’s degrees in communications or marketing. However, this isn’t the only requirement businesses demand—many also require years of experience in marketing roles, as this instills vital brand management skills. Here, we look at some essential skills to have regardless of whether you want to be a senior brand manager or assistant brand manager:
Strategic thinking
As mentioned earlier, a brand manager is a strategist who typically develops plans for marketing teams to implement. This makes strategic thinking a must-have skill. A professional brand manager needs to evaluate their market, determine how their business fits into it, and develop a marketing plan to help internal stakeholders effectively position their products or services in the market.
Digitally savvy
With the growing prevalence of digital platforms in business operations, digital savviness is more than just a nice skill to have—it’s a necessity. Brand managers must understand strategies like SEO to promote online business visibility and be proficient in leveraging digital marketing tools and social media platforms to undertake tasks more efficiently and facilitate effective brand promotion.
Communication skills
To ensure team alignment across all business departments, a brand manager needs to possess communication skills. This allows them to effectively convey the brand strategy to all internal business stakeholders.
Communication skills aren’t only vital for internal coordination with teams—they also promote better relationships with customers and enhance engagement, positioning businesses for success.
Creativity and innovation
How does a business stand out from the crowd? Definitely not by doing what everyone else is doing. Out-of-the-box thinking is a necessary skill for brand managers as it helps them develop unique branding strategies to help companies stand out.
Just look at Nike—the giant footwear and apparel company doesn’t stand out by simply displaying its products as high-quality in marketing campaigns. Most Nike marketing initiatives feature creative storytelling, often focusing on sparking emotional connections with customers. This level of creativity in marketing is why it remains an industry leader.
How brand managers can optimize team collaboration with Bitly
Team collaboration is necessary for brand alignment. However, facilitating cooperation can be challenging and time-consuming, especially for brand managers with large teams.
Luckily, this doesn’t have to be the case for your team. With Bitly, brand managers can forgo poring through endless spreadsheets, thanks to group permissions. In the Bitly Dashboard, you can create a group for each team’s data, giving team members valuable insights into your Bitly link performance—whether they’re short URLs, QR Codes, or Bitly Link-in-bios. Here’s how you can leverage Bitly Dashboard for team collaboration:
1. Create your groups
To manage multiple teams, you’ll want to think about how everyone is using their links and what kind of metrics are going to matter the most. There are three primary ways to organize groups for your teams:
- Region: If you’re a global or national brand, you can build a group for each region (such as Bitly U.S., Bitly Europe, Bitly Asia).
- Department: Want to see real-time reports about how the customer loyalty team is doing and then switch right over to look at acquisitions? Create groups like Product Marketing, Loyalty, Sales, Field Marketing, and Recruiting.
- Brand: If you’re an enterprise with multiple brands and marketing teams, it might make the most sense to create groups based on the brands themselves. This gives marketing managers a whole new way to view data across the organization.
2. Invite users
When you want to add new users to groups, just invite them by their personal Bitly account. This will allow team members to switch between their personal accounts and their groups effortlessly.
Remember, always make sure you’re in your group before shortening URLs. When your personal Bitly account is added to a company account, switching between the two is easy. But sometimes, it’s easy to forget where you’re creating the Bitlink!
Ultimately, by linking a personal Bitly username to one or more Bitly accounts, you’ll ensure that your team members no longer have to keep logging in and out to manage different accounts.
3. Setting user permissions
Once you’ve invited your team members, it’s time to start assigning permissions. There are three different user roles available in Bitly: Users, Group Admins, and Account Admins. Users can create links and view metrics; Group Admins can manage users and custom domains; Account Admins have universal access to all account settings and invited users.
With Bitly, user permissions can be as flexible as your campaigns! You can give users different permissions across groups. For example, you can give a team member user-level access in one group and group admin permissions in another.
Bitly can help brand managers shape brand success
A brand manager is a key business player as they help a company’s brand grow amid the ever-increasing competitiveness in the digital age. If you’re an aspiring brand manager, you need to develop a diverse skill set that addresses both traditional and digital aspects of brand management. For example, you must know how to craft a killer brand story and leverage platforms like Bitly to better understand and manage your teams.
With Bitly, you can promote seamless team collaboration, ensuring brand alignment across every department. With group permissions, every team can have access to the data they need without going through gatekeepers or learning complicated interfaces.
Sign up for Bitly today to facilitate seamless collaboration and promote cohesiveness in brand development and management.
