Campaign managers will oversee the entire advertising project. They will head the planning, the execution and the tracking of a particular campaign and will work with their team to ensure everything runs smoothly.
It’s a great career to get involved with, but how exactly would you become a campaign manager?
Well, in short – you’d have to have the right qualifications, normally in marketing or journalism and gain experience in advertising.
But of course, there’s much more to it than that. This guide will examine how you might become a campaign manager.
Read on to learn more.
What Is A Campaign Manager?
Campaign management is essential. It can mean the difference between a successful advertising campaign and a failure. This in turn can have serious implications for the business that you’re working for.
If your advertising campaign is poorly executed and poorly planned, the product or service you’re hoping to advertise will ultimately fail, meaning the business is likely to lose money.
As a result, businesses will develop an advertising and marketing team. Within the advertising team, there will be a campaign manager who will literally manage advertising campaigns.
But what does this mean exactly? Let’s examine campaigns.
What Is An Advertising Campaign?
To fully understand what a campaign manager does, we must first understand what a campaign is.
An advertising campaign is a strategy that is highly planned and carefully thought out which aims to improve communication of a specific brand, product or service.
Primarily, this will be done by advertising. Generally, advertising will be carried out on a multitude of different platforms including digitally, via social media, via billboards, via newspapers/magazines and physical advertising.
However, some organizations will focus on one specific advertising strategy. Either way, there’s a lot of things to do and think about when it comes to an advertising campaign – and this is where the campaign manager will come into play.
What Do Campaign Managers Do?
Campaign managers are responsible for ensuring the planning, execution and smooth running of a campaign. They also schedule anything that is customer facing, such as copy and design.
Along with this, they must keep track of how the campaign is going. They will do this by measuring the metrics and generating reports to their superiors.
This plays a critical role for businesses, as they will determine the comparisons between their KPIs and campaign successes. If the campaign is failing badly, they’ll likely pull the plug and try something else.
How Can I Be A Campaign Manager?
Becoming a campaign manager involves lots of steps, but the general consensus is qualifications, skills, experience, employability and an element of luck too.
Let’s examine these in more detail.
Qualifications
Almost all career decisions will start with the right qualifications. Nearly 80% of campaign managers have a Bachelor’s degree and just over 9% have a Master’s degree.
However, don’t be put off if you do not have a college degree. It’s entirely possible to become a campaign manager with a GED or high school diploma, but it might be much more difficult to break onto the ladder.
The right major will be critical though if you’re in college. The best options are marketing, communications or journalism. However, some other majors can be useful for this career.
Skills
If you have the right skills, you will always be able to sell yourself, regardless of qualifications. However, the right qualifications will advertise you much better than if you don’t have them, meaning you can showcase your skills.
Skills a campaign manager will need are organization, communication, sales, digital skills and some design skills. Critically, campaign managers will need to be able to organize their time and plan things effectively.
Experience
Experience will play a large role when it comes to getting a job as a campaign manager. Generally, an internship with a marketing team, communications team or of course with an advertising team will be extremely useful.
You could try to get some experience as a volunteer for a local news organization or speak with an agency that deals with advertising (some work with Google ad specialists for example).
The more experience you have in the fields of marketing, advertising, communications and media will be very beneficial if you’re trying to become a campaign manager.
Employability
Along with all of these points, you’ll also want to make yourself as employable as possible. This means getting involved with hobbies and other activities which may improve your skills.
For example, if you were involved with a sports team, you could improve your communication skills.
Other than this, you may decide to learn a foreign language, gain extra qualifications or skills etc. Some of these can be massive for employability, so ensure you try to stand above the rest!
Luck
Of course, even with the right stuff – you still might not be able to find an available role, or even get the job anyway.
This is where the element of luck comes into play. While you cannot change the probability of luck, you can increase your chances of getting more lucky.
You can do this by creating multiple job profiles via websites like Indeed and LinkedIn and set yourself as “open to work” with specific careers in mind.
Again, while this isn’t a guarantee, it will increase your chances of being found by agencies and employers – especially if you have the right skills, qualifications and experience.
Not only this, you will be able to find more available roles on these types of websites. Remember, you can’t force things to happen, but you can increase their likelihood.
The Bottom Line
Campaign management is a good career to get involved with. If you follow some of these steps and fully understand the role, you’ll be fine going forward!
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Hello, my name is Jack O’Neil and I have been in the marketing industry for almost 10 years. I focus on online marketing, SEO, advertising, and more.
