Become great at marketing management
How to build and run a high-performance marketing team
Online course:
Marketing management
By Kristen Craft,
GM @ Animalz
Course length: 1h 50min
Course overview
In marketing, building a team is critical to advancing your goals, as well as your career as a manager. But most marketers don’t get specific guidance on how to hire, motivate others, or resolve conflicts.
Nor are most of us marketers taught how to gather and share the proper data that leads to a promotion.
This course will teach you how to build a team, set actionable goals, and manage your career path so you can position yourself for a C-level role.
Introduction video (1 min)
Here’s what Kristen will teach you …
This course covers actionable strategies for hiring and managing a team, as well as managing one’s personal brand.
This includes specifics on how to hire and onboard people. It also includes strategies for setting objectives and key results people can get excited about. Lastly, it includes guidance on how to find a mentor, land public speaking gigs, and join a board of directors.
In just 12 short sessions, you’ll be able to …
- Set objectives and key results, so your teams can accomplish their goals
- Build airtight project plans, so everything stays on track and within budget
- Use a structured approach to resolve conflicts
- Hire and onboard people efficiently, so new team members can get up to speed quickly and start contributing
- Land speaking gigs, so you can grow your personal brand and advance your career
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Benefits of taking this course
Having these leadership strategies on hand means you’ll be able to build and manage a team effectively. You’ll gain a better sense of how to manage a marketing team day-to-day, as well as how to manage your career longterm.
You’ll walk away with frameworks for budgeting, running good one-on-ones, and applying to speak at conferences. This course supports your personal and professional growth from marketing associate to CMO.
This course is right for you if …
- enjoy hiring and leading others and need strategies to get there
- dream of becoming a CMO or building a large team and want proactive steps for getting there
- enjoy running an organized, “tight ship” and would benefit from frameworks to support you
This course is NOT for you if …
- you’re super junior in your marketing career and have never managed anyone (either directly or indirectly)
- you’re super advanced in your career and have already led dozens of people
- you prefer being an individual contributor and doing heads-down work most of the time
Skills you should have before taking this course
Because this is a course for marketers who aspire to lead a team, students should be interested in working with others, rather than being an individual contributor for the foreseeable future. If you have the skills and attributes described below, this course is a good fit for you:
- You’re a people person (or aspire to be one)
- You’ve spent at least 1-2 years on a marketing team, seeing how goals are set and campaigns are run
- You’ve managed someone else’s work at least once, either officially, or in the capacity of a project lead, helping others stay on track
Kristen Craft
GM @ Animalz
Kristen Craft is GM at Animalz a company delivering high-quality content marketing to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms. Over the past 15 years, she’s grown a number of amazing teams. One of Kristen’s favorite parts of the job is mentoring a …
Kristen Craft is GM at Animalz a company delivering high-quality content marketing to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms.
Over the past 15 years, she’s grown a number of amazing teams. One of Kristen’s favorite parts of the job is mentoring and helping to develop those around her.
Kristen has taught and spoken at over a hundred conferences and events from INBOUND to MozCon. She holds an MBA from MIT Sloan, where she specialized in organizational behavior and team management.
Your full course curriculum
How to build and manage a marketing team
1
How to know if management is right for you
This class gives a brief overview to what it means to build a team and manage your career in a proactive way. It’ll help you understand why management is a critical piece of the puzzle and identify if this is a path you truly want to take with your career.
Topics Covered:
- How to scale yourself
- Questions to ask yourself to determine if this is the right path for you
- The roles you play and the roles you’ll need others to play
2
Defining your marketing strategy
This class will help you define your larger marketing strategy. We’ll cover how to focus on high-impact areas, communicate with others in the company, and get the people and budget you need.
Topics Covered:
- Focus areas
- Communicating to other groups
- Short-term and long-term planning
- What kind of roles you need and when
3
Team building
This class covers every step of the hiring process, from how to get buy-in to make the hire, to running a good search process, to getting the person to actually join.
Topics Covered:
- Making the case to hire new people
- Interviewing best practices
- Making an offer
4
Onboarding and setting expectations
This class will help you manage the first month with your new hire. By creating a systematic process for new team members, you’ll ensure they focus on the right things and get up to speed as quickly as possible.
Topics Covered:
- Streamlining the onboarding process
- “How we work” discussion
- Readme doc (even if you don’t share)
- Giving up your legos
- Setting the stage to understand what drives people
5
Setting and reaching objectives
This class will cover the OKR system for setting objectives and measuring key results. It gives guidance on how to implement an OKR system to drive consistent, effective work.
Topics Covered:
- The OKR system
- Setting OKRs
- Checking in on OKRs
- Staying on track
- The elements of good project management
- Documentation
6
One-on-ones
Though one-on-one meetings with your direct reports might seem intuitive, many managers fail to leverage some simple best practices. By running good one-on-ones, you’ll help those on your team do their best work and navigate issues more easily.
Topics Covered:
- Timing
- Documentation
- Consistency
- Best practices like keeping it high-level, letting your report drive the agenda, and carving out time for personal goal discussions
7
Team motivation
This class explores how to build and maintain motivation. We’ll dive into what motivates an individual, as well as how to keep the team motivated, as a group.
Topics Covered:
- What kind of manager are you?
- What you need to know about each of your direct reports
- Facetime - familiarity principle
- Regular standups: daily, weekly, monthly
- Building in fun with team meals, offsites, and activities
8
Managing conflict
All teams run into conflict sometimes. And that’s ok. What’s important is that you help your team navigate conflict well, thereby fostering a sense of psychological safety and resolution.
Topics Covered:
- Psychological safety
- RAPID decision making
- DRIs
- RACI model
9
Running and tracking marketing campaigns
This class gets into the nitty gritty of project management. We’ll cover how your can make hypotheses, then use a systematic approach to determine what’s working. From there, you can double down on what works and eliminate what doesn’t.
Topics Covered:
- Growth loops
- Hypothesis and instrumentation
- Using airtable to document
- Investing in what’s working
10
Growing the people on your team
The best managers are always looking to grow and mentor those on their team. This class will help you navigate that process, from finding resources to running annual reviews.
Topics Covered:
- Letting team members take on new work or shift roles
- Helping them find professional resources
- Teaching them to give away legos
- Annual review process
- How to frame your message
11
Managing your long-term career
This class helps you identify where you’d like to be in the future and how to get there. We’ll cover how to find sponsors within your company and mentors outside of it.
Topics Covered:
- Identifying where you’d like to be 18 months from now and 5 years from now (cite sheryl sandberg’s advice on planning time horizons)
- The “Designing Your Life” approach
- Possible paths: marketing, sales, growth, BD, brand
- Finding mentors
- Finding sponsors
- Networking
- Iterating on what you’d like to learn
12
Building your personal brand
You can accelerate your path towards a C-level role by investing in your own visibility. This means writing, public speaking, and supporting others. If you develop a reputation for being hard-working, willing to help those around you, and eager to grow, those in your network will be better able to support your professional growth.
Topics Covered:
- Writing
- Public speaking
- Joining a board
- Advising others
- Investing in other companies
- Keeping LinkedIn up to date
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