Digital Marketer

Digital marketers are experts at using online channels like email, social media, and search engines to promote a company's brand, products, or services. They are tech-savvy hustlers with a knack for storytelling. Any time something is bought or sold online, a digital marketer somewhere helped make that happen.

Digital marketers find the best way to promote their company’s brand and sell their products or services using the latest digital tools available. 

The best way to reach customers online depends on who they are and where they are spending their time. The right message to show them depends on your product and brand. Digital marketers figure out how to get the right message to the right person at the right time using the right channel

One of the best ways to understand what someone does is through the questions they have to answer and problems they have to solve.

Here are some questions digital marketers have to answer:

• How do I capture our company’s value proposition in three sentences?

• Where do our customers spend most of their time online?

• How do I reach them on those channels with the budget I have?

• How are we going to measure the success of this campaign?

• Why do so many people visit our website but never place an order?

Here are some examples of real projects a digital marketer would work on.

Example 1: 

You work for an e-commerce company that sells custom skincare formulas direct to consumers. The budget for digital advertising this month is $10,000. Where should you spend it—Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, or some combination of social media platforms?

How are you going to decide which channel will give you the best results for the money What should the ads say? 

Example 2: 

You work for a software company with a platform that helps online businesses manage their sales tax. So far, 90% of clients have come from salespeople cold-calling companies, setting up meetings, and doing product demos. This isn’t scalable, so the CEO wants to move toward an inbound marketing model. He wants people to start calling your salespeople, not the other way around.

Create and execute a plan to begin driving leads to the sales team.

You’ll spend a lot of time building, monitoring, and tweaking ad campaigns on platforms like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads.

You’ll do the same thing for email campaigns using platforms like MailChimp, HubSpot, Pardot, or Salesforce—testing different subject lines, copy, message cadences, and targeting strategies to see what works best.

You’ll use Google Analytics to better understand your customer behavior and profile and to get insights that help you improve your search engine ranking.

You’ll use WordPress or some other content management system to create and publish content that improves SEO, attracts visitors, and finds sales leads.

You’ll spend a lot of time in Google Docs or a similar word processor writing blog posts, video script ideas, social media posts, and copy for pay-per-click ads. 

Then you’ll make presentations of all this great work you’re doing in PowerPoint or Google Slides to present to company leaders and the rest of the marketing team.

For digital marketers, marketing is what they do and digital is how they do it. You’ll need to be good at both.

Marketing is all about knowing how to craft the right message. This means having clear written and verbal communication skills, good storytelling ability, and at least a basic understanding of human psychology. Specifically, you need to be a good copywriter, since all the content you’ll create and send into the world will start as written copy (even if it ends up as a video or something else).

Once you have a message, “digital” is how you get it out into the world, test it, and refine it. To be a digital marketer, you have to understand the tools you have available and how to use them. This means you need to be familiar with some of the platforms and tools we’ve mentioned earlier, and a whole lot more. 

Here are just some of the channels you can use to reach people online—each with its own list of platforms, tools, best practices, third-party software, and integrations:

1. Your company website

2. Affiliate websites

3. Search engines

4. Social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)

5. Pay-per-click ads

6. Email

7. Instant messages (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.)

8. Videos

9. Podcasts

When you aren’t in meetings, you’ll spend most of your day sitting at a desk working on your computer. Some cubicles are nicer than others, but that’s determined by the company you work for, not the role.

1. You’re solving interesting problems

2. You can see and measure the impact of your work

3. You are constantly learning, and the learning applies to any potential future business venture

4. You get to combine the art of writing, communication, and ad design with the science of measurement, demographics, and human psychology

1. Everyone thinks they can do your job

2. Friction between sales and marketing is common

3. There can be intense pressure to produce immediate results

4. Marketing channels are constantly changing and evolving, and it can be hard to keep up

• Bachelor’s degree is usually required

• The most common majors are Business Administration, Communication, or Marketing, or related field

• Digital advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.)

• Inbound marketing

• Search engine optimization

• Google Analytics

• Familiarity with the email, content management, and social media management platforms they use (or at least with similar platforms)

One of the best ways to demonstrate your hard skills is through your portfolio.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills

• Ability to research problems and find solutions on your own

• Ability to meet deadlines

• Receptiveness to feedback