A Digital Marketer uses digital channels to reach customers, build brand awareness, and promote products and services. Because of the unique combination of planning, creativity, and strategy their role requires, Digital Marketers wear many caps. They have to master a wide range of skills and tools in order to stay on top of the ever-growing digital media channels they use to create, deploy, manage, and track campaigns.
Moreover, Digital Marketers are responsible for all the following functions.
Social Media Marketing
The strategic creation and placement of native content that promotes your product or brand across your company’s own Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn platforms (to name only a few)—as well as the posts you pay to have appear on other people’s channels.
Inbound Marketing
This is anything to do that involves your company website’s ability to attract, engage, and convert users. Typically, this involves filling your site with the kind of interesting and useful content—thought leadership articles, helpful blog posts, and so on—that appeals to the audience you’re trying to attract. These should be thoughtfully conceived and written to either rank highly for commonly searched queries or have a catchy enough hook that your audience will share them through other channels.
Email Marketing
This is the most direct way to nurture relationships with your existing customers, keep them informed with updates, and boost their level of engagement with your brand, as well as to reach prospective clients with a highly targeted and low-cost campaign.
Public Relations
Digital Marketers are frequently involved in their company’s efforts to obtain coverage from other publications—setting your team members up to write expert articles or think pieces for popular blogs or online magazines, or to grant interviews to digital newspapers, podcasts, and so on. This in turn helps raise awareness of the company and establish its leadership as experts in their field.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads
The direct approach, simply paying for ads, ensures you’ll get more potential customer eyeballs on your brand or website. Simple in concept, complicated in execution: given the investment of real dollars, PPC advertising demands a carefully thought-out strategy to ensure your ads are only being placed where they’ll be most effective.
Analytics and Reporting
Finally, all of the above strategies require post-mortem analysis to find out what worked and what was misspent time and money. It’s now possible to get highly detailed breakdowns of where your digital traffic comes from and where it goes, which keywords or images are the most effective at attracting clicks, and so on. Sorting through this mountain of information ensures that each digital marketing campaign learns from the shortcomings of the one before, to better target the correct audience moving forward.
None of these strategies exists in isolation from the others. Effective Digital Marketers assess the success of each of these channels to ensure they’re working cohesively with one another—and with any traditional marketing channels the company is also investing in, including print ads, PR campaigns, loyalty programs, and more—to advance the company’s goals.
Digital Marketers may also help to manage customer relationships across the digital channels named above, communicating with customers to anticipate their needs and expectations. This process of getting to know target customers, their wants, and their priorities provides priceless information to help a company ensure consistent and high-quality interactions and experiences, which in turn build brand loyalty.
To do all this, Digital Marketers rely on a multitude of skills and tools. Depending on their company and its goals, they may need to work with such tools as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Facebook Ads Manager, Zapier, Mailchimp, and Salesforce—which together represent just a small fraction of the wide array of tools developed to help make the work of a digital marketer more efficient.