Online marketing manager wanted!
In addition to classic offline marketing knowledge, today’s largely technology-driven economy requires business leaders to be comfortable in the world of digital/online marketing and/or have a colleague and a complex team in-house to help them navigate the maze of this rapidly evolving world. In this article, we briefly summarise the knowledge that an online marketing manager should have, the core areas that they need to understand and the systems that they should be comfortable with.
What does an online marketing expert need to know?
What does a digital marketing manager do and what are the key skills needed to fill the role?
From knowledge of data analytics tools, Google and Facebook ad management, to SEO and content marketing competencies (to name just the most important ones), there are many things you might try to gain general knowledge about. Strategic thinking requires a completely different set of people and skills than practical implementation, data analysis or even PPC campaign management, which cannot be successfully managed with mediocre knowledge. Let’s face it, it’s not a one-man job, it’s a team effort!
What does an online marketing expert do?
Depending on the size of the business, you can either be responsible for the bulk of the online marketing tasks yourself, or you can focus on planning and strategy, leaving the bulk of the implementation to your team or an online agency partner specialising in the area. An online marketing specialist may be responsible for overseeing the management of the company website and social media channels, analysing data, driving traffic to them, planning new marketing campaigns and coordinating the work of the marketing team.
How to choose the appropriate online marketing person?
There is no perfect answer to this question, but we’ve put together what we think are the 10 most important areas that a good online marketing manager should be skilled in:
1.Strategic thinking
For an online marketing expert, the ability to think strategically is at the top of the list of requirements. Strategic thinking is closely linked to the ability to understand your customers/customers and your knowledge of the marketing toolbox, which you need to use to develop online methods to maximise your company’s products and/or services at the best possible cost.
2.Data analysis skills
To develop a successful and reliable online marketing strategy, you need data. We often realise that our customers have a lot of data at their disposal, but they do nothing with it or, worse still, even though they could collect endless amounts of data, they don’t, so they have no way of analysing it, drawing conclusions and developing a data-driven strategy. With the help of today’s modern software and CRM systems and the online activities of our customers, we can easily and quickly obtain valuable data for our company. Our online marketing experts need to be familiar with the tools and software available, understand how to collect data, clean it, analyse it and keep it up to date to make effective decisions.
3.Content production
We can only obtain data from those who have been attracted to our website and have visited it and carried out some activity. Content production and content marketing is therefore the heart of online marketing, attracting our customers and clients to our brand. The goal is not only to create quality content and SEO-friendly content, but also to understand the process itself of how we can engage our customers. A digital marketing specialist needs to know when and where to engage copywriters and how to brief them. Online content is an important part of digital marketing – whether it’s a newsletter, landing page or social media post, it’s the way to convince prospective customers that we’re the solution to their real problems and that they’ve come to the right place.
4.SEO & SEM
Our website can appear in Google searches in two ways. Either as paid ads or organically. The latter option is based on Google’s algorithm for searches, which is constantly being modernised, making Search Engine Optimisation an important skill that every digital marketer should have. Both SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) not only help you get your content to your target audience, but also help you narrow down your customer database. Organic search engine optimization is a very cost-effective, but more skilled way to increase traffic to your business website.
5.CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
One of the cornerstones of our online marketing strategy is to know exactly what our customers want and how they behave. Tracking these helps our company to understand the growing needs of our customers, which always gives us a competitive advantage as it increases the chances of customer loyalty.
6.Social media
For our digital marketing manager, it is crucial to know how to use social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook or Tiktok to successfully connect with existing and prospective customers. Social media has now become an inescapable player, so it’s up to our online experts to create and manage engaging campaigns that reach your target audience. Knowing social media is much more than just posting content. Its quality, relevance and audience engagement are 3 other very important factors that an online marketing expert needs to take into account when developing a social media strategy.
7.Design
Visual elements are a big part of digital marketing these days. The best text content is worth nothing if it is not accompanied by a static or moving image (gif) or video. Text content with images has a higher conversion rate and better SEO rankings. It’s the job of an online marketing professional to know how to create and edit your company’s visuals. If you can put together a banner ad, email banner or social media image yourself in Photoshop or even Canva, you’ll have one less step to take to launch your digital campaign.
8.UX (user experience) and CX (customer experience)
It has been mentioned several times above, but still not enough, that an online marketing expert needs to understand their customers and understand the entire user journey. This can include things like designing the UX of a product or website and running A/B tests to test performance and improve the user experience.
9.Paid search / PPC
In addition to organic traffic generation tools, your prospective online marketer should also be familiar with paid search advertising, such as Google Ads campaigns and other Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising models. Without this knowledge, you will not be able to successfully brief your external online marketing agency and you will not be able to monitor their work and analyse the monthly reports they send you.
10.Email marketing
Email is everywhere. Almost everyone sends and reads emails, whether professional or personal. It is one of the oldest forms of marketing and is still very useful. A reliable digital marketer will be able to write different types of emails, such as:
- Company newsletters, promotional offers
- E-mail templates
- Webinar, conference and event invitations
- Confirmation, follow-up, welcome emails, etc.
Key lessons learned and next steps
As a business manager or HR professional, it’s not easy to find a truly talented and confident person who is comfortable in the online marketing field. Let’s face it, hiring a junior colleague for this job may be cheap, but it’s certainly not a cost-effective solution.
The role of an online marketing manager is varied and exciting and comes with a lot of responsibility, as the day-to-day tasks in the areas mentioned above cannot be carried out in a single person, neither in time nor with a high level of execution, therefore you will need to lead a full team dedicated to this task.
In addition to good communication and leadership skills, our online marketers need to have a user-level understanding of many different sub-areas (if working with a team), but most importantly, they need to know how and when to bring in a team of external experts if the company does not have the expertise and a dedicated team.