What Do Digital Marketers Do?
A Digital Marketer’s job is to drive brand awareness and lead generation through digital channels, and that means that Digital Marketers spend their days creating, posting, or updating content, monitoring or handling social interactions and campaigns, or performing other work in an attempt to bolster a company’s digital channels.
Depending on the company, industry, and seniority of a role, a day in the life of a Digital Marketer would often include managing social media marketing campaigns, working on search engine optimization or search engine marketing efforts, overseeing email campaigns, and creating content for a company blog.
Typically, Digital Marketers have some or all of the following digital marketing responsibilities:
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is all about reaching the vast audiences of people using social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and LinkedIn — and that requires masterminding smart and relevant content campaigns. A Social Media Manager also has to be mindful of their interactions with the public (in a way, there’s a customer service aspect to the role) as well as opportunities to court prominent influencers.
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing describes 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. Inbound marketing has become a crucial part of any strong digital marketing strategy, but pulling it off effectively is tricky in part because any content that is too overtly promotional won’t be shared as much.
Email marketing
If you want to become a Digital Marketer, you will have to learn how to effectively engage with customers over email. Generally, your email marketing efforts will be 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. Of course, a highly targeted and low-cost email marketing campaign is also an effective way to potentially reach new target customers or clients as well.
Content marketing
A part of inbound marketing, content marketing refers to high quality content creation and developing a comprehensive content strategy. A content marketing specialist would specialize in creating compelling content across any number of different forms and channels, including articles, videos, podcasts, social-media posts, and much more.
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.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the art of boosting the ranking of a website on Google and other search engines to ultimately result in heightened traffic to that website. In the simplest terms, Digital Marketers who specialize in SEO research the words and phrases that might be used by customers looking for info online, and then they reshape their content around those queries while also keeping in mind things like content indexing and link structure.
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
Search engine marketing often refers to simply paying for ads, which 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.
Marketing analytics
Marketing analytics refers to the various tools that allow you to conduct post-mortem analysis on the success of your digital marketing efforts. In fact, that’s a crucial strength of digital marketing — that it is much easier to prove the ROI of campaigns. 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.