Who is a CMO and what does he do?

A marketing director is a senior manager who is responsible for the development and implementation of a company's marketing policy and manages a team of marketers. It helps the company achieve business goals: find growth points, increase sales and profits, increase awareness and improve brand reputation.

Let's tell you in more detail what exactly this top manager does:

• Analyzes the market and distribution channels, product niche, competitors and consumer preferences.
• Draws up portraits of the target audience.
• Develops an advertising strategy, loyalty program and promotional campaigns.
• Organizes online and offline promotion.
• He deals with pricing issues, manages the budget, and calculates marketing costs.
• Monitors key metrics and evaluates the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

What are the responsibilities

What are the responsibilities
The head of the marketing department solves all issues related to the promotion of the business: from developing a strategy to evaluating the conversion of the website. To perform duties, you need knowledge and skills from different industries.

What a marketing director should know and be able to do:

Have a general understanding of business processes.
Conduct market research and competitive analysis.
Know the methods of studying the market, consumer demand and motivation.
Develop a pricing policy.
Understand key financial metrics: profit from sales, return on investment, asset turnover, etc.
Use promotion tools: outdoor, contextual, targeted advertising, SMM, SEO, cooperation with bloggers and the media, community management, etc.
Have experience in planning and budgeting.
Understand legislation in the field of advertising, marketing and finance.
Manage a team, choose strong marketers, and resolve conflict situations.

Place of work
A marketing manager is required by any large organization. He can work in different areas:

Marketing agencies offering services to corporate clients.
Retail - both federal chains and regional trading companies.
Information technology, web studios, software developers.
Production of food products and consumer goods.
Online sales, online services, booking aggregators.
Industry.
Sale of real estate.
Automotive business.
Private educational institutions.
Services – chains of hotels, restaurants, beauty salons, medical clinics, etc.

Demand and prospects
Any company that has a marketing department needs its director. A leading marketing executive solves several important tasks for business:

Search for growth points after a thorough analysis of the market, customers and competitors.
Introduction of innovations after conducting marketing research.
Improvement of existing products after studying consumer preferences.

Who can become a marketing director
To become a marketing director and work effectively in your specialty, you need certain skills and personal qualities:

Strategic thinking, foresight, readiness to critically evaluate one's own actions.
Stress resistance, the ability to make decisions in difficult situations and be responsible for them.
Developed communication and negotiation skills, the ability to organize team work.
Knowledge of time management techniques, understanding how to distribute tasks according to importance.
A broad outlook, knowledge of trends and different online and offline marketing tools.

How to Learn to Lead Marketing from Scratch
To master the profession, you need to undergo training, for example, in the specialty "Director of Internet Marketing". There are different forms of education:

Self-education is a long and difficult path. You can learn marketing tools from books, tutorials, and video lectures from Youtube. You won't be able to work as a marketer without experience, but you can start with a simpler direction, for example, with an SMM manager or contextologist. If you are highly motivated and have a lot of free time, you can train on your own and train on cheap orders from freelance exchanges. But you should not expect that you will be hired for a good position without education.
Studying at a university - specialized faculties are suitable for you: "Marketing", "Advertising", "Economics of Enterprise", etc. But you should also take into account the disadvantages. Full-time studies last at least 4 years, i.e. you will not be able to study and work at the same time. Universities often give outdated information that is not useful in work, but do not study modern promotion tools in practice, for example, contextual advertising, SEO, SMM, etc.
Online courses - you will master the profession from scratch, remotely, in 3-24 months, receive a certificate or diploma, as well as free assistance with employment. At the courses, you will have a lot of practice on real cases together with industry experts - by the end of the training, you will have a portfolio ready. You will be able to learn in a flexible schedule, since webinars are not only held online, but also recorded. All video lectures will remain with you forever. Studying at an online school is cheaper than studying at a university.

TOP 5 tips for beginners
We have prepared five recommendations for those who want to become a marketing director:

Get to know the product you plan to promote from all sides, carefully study the preferences of your audience.
Coordinate the promotion strategy not only with the management, but also with subordinates - this will help you find insights.
Develop leadership skills, emotional intelligence, and intangible ways to motivate your team.
Try to move up the career ladder within a company or industry, become an expert on a product or service.
Take additional training and advanced training courses. For example, online schools have programs for Internet promotion, MBA and soft skills.