Beyond basic marketing strategies and creative skills. If you are considering entering the field of digital marketing, understanding the skills required and what digital marketers do is a good place to start.
What does a digital marketer do?
Digital marketers are responsible for increasing brand awareness and generating customers through all the digital channels - free and paid - at the company's disposal. These channels include:
- Social media
- The company's own website
- Search engine rankings
- Image ads
- Company blog
A digital marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so that they can properly measure the company's performance across each channel.
For example, a digital marketer responsible for SEO measures their website's "organic traffic" - from those visits from website visitors who find a page from a business's website via a Google search.
Digital marketing is performed across many marketing roles today. In a small business, one specialist may have many of the digital marketing tactics described above at the same time.
In large companies, these tactics involve multiple specialists who each focus on only one or two of the brand's digital channels.
See: Effective Ways to Choose Your Online Presence
Some examples of digital marketing professionals
1. SEO Manager
Key performance indicators: basic traffic
In short, SEO managers get a business ranking on Google. Using a variety of search engine optimization techniques, this person may work directly with content creators to ensure that the content they produce performs well on Google - even if the company also posts that content on social media.
2. Content Marketing Specialist
KPIs: time on page, total blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers
Content marketing professionals are digital content creators. They frequently keep track of the company's blogging calendar, and come up with a content strategy that includes video as well.
These professionals often work with people in other departments to ensure that the products and campaigns launched are supported with promotional content on every digital channel.
3. Social media manager
KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares
The role of a social media manager is easy to infer from the title, but the social networks he manages for the company depends on the industry. Above all, social media managers establish a publishing schedule for the company's written and visual content.
This employee may also work with a content marketing specialist to develop a strategy for posting content on any social network.
(Note: According to the KPIs above, "impressions" refers to the number of times a business's posts appear in a user's newsfeed.)
4. Marketing Automated Coordinator
KPIs: email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead generation (conversion) rate
The Marketing Robot Coordinator helps select and administer software that allows the entire marketing team to understand their customers' behavior and measure their business growth.
Since many of the marketing processes described above may be performed separately from one another, it is important to have someone who can group these digital activities into individual campaigns and track the performance of each campaign.