A digital marketer helps businesses achieve their marketing goals, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and driving sales. Our job requires us to wear many hats at Webology. My day typically starts around 6 AM Central with at least 50 Slack messages and a few dozen emails 😅
It’s not really over until my last check-in late at night.
If you’re a business owner like me, you may not have the time and energy to create and implement a digital marketing strategy for your own brand online.
I barely have time to read and edit this blog before it goes out each month but I assure you, it’s the best thought leadership content on this topic you’ll find.
I’m Blake Akers and I’ve been managing the team here at Webology since 2016. We hold certifications from brands like:
- SEMrush
- Page Optimizer Pro
One of my core responsibilities as CEO is to oversee a team of marketing managers who each have decades of experience in this very busy field…We all have diverse backgrounds, education and expertise.
Hiring an external digital marketer helps you outsource this critical aspect of your business so that you can focus on the core tasks that generate revenue. Hiring a TEAM like Webology let’s you 10X that potential 🚀
In this guide, we’ll address that burning 🔥 question on your 🧠 “What does a digital marketer do”. We’ll walk you through the key skills and services, allowing you to understand how they can help your business grow.
Let’s dive in and learn more about some specific jobs that are unique to this fast-paced, ever-changing career field I’m busy swimming in day after day.
What Does a Digital Marketer Do? How Can They Help Your Business Grow FASTER?
We don’t just sit around swapping recipes on our company Slack or take 2 hour lunches all the time like we did last week at Paramount…
We stay BUSY all day, every day! Here are the prominent skills a digital marketer uses to help you achieve your desired return on investment.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 
One of the most powerful strategies to drive high-quality traffic to any offer is search engine optimization.
It’s about making sure your website appears on search engines like Google when your target audience searches for certain keywords.
Let’s say you own a local coffee shop and people are typing the key phrase “Best coffee shop near me” into Google.
But, your website is nowhere to be found. A digital marketer, specializing in SEO, fixes that for you.
They do that by implementing an SEO strategy based on what your website needs with a little AI help mixed in. Key components of any SEO strategy include:
Keyword Research: Identify search queries people are typing into Google to find businesses like yours. Common keyword research tools are Google Keyword Planner (Free), Ahrefs (Paid), Semrush (Paid), and Ubersuggest (Freemium).
Content Creation: The next step involves creating high-quality content on those keywords. The content needs to address the searcher’s intent. It should help solve their problem, read well and should be full of rich media like images and videos.
On-Page SEO: Next, you optimize your content for search engines, aka on-page SEO. It involves adding your target keyword in all the important sections of a web page, among other things like internal linking. You can take it a step further by conducting a competitor analysis of top ranking pages to reverse engineer what’s currently working for a given search term.
Off-Page SEO: This involves building links to a website to improve its authority in Google’s eyes. Higher authority translates to higher search rankings generally. This is hands down the #1 most important part of SEO that often gets overlooked.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Digital marketers manage PPC ads for businesses, helping them get the most out of their advertising dollars. It seems to me like business owners often get tempted by the simplicity of self-serve platforms and think they can manage their ads just as well as an agency would.
This is often a missed opportunity and the perfect example of that is a painting contractor we just took over management for. They had not set these very important negative keywords in their Google search campaign:
- automobile
- automotive
- car
- vehicle
I did it for them last week. The owner said he was concerned because since I excluded them, his impressions and costs had gone down. I was so glad he brought it up because at the same time, his business partner reported an increase in LEAD QUALITY!
- No one was confusing them with the body shop at the local Chevy dealership anymore!
- That freed up budget for people who wanted residential interior painting, an ideal lead!
Key Insight: Negative keywords tell Google to avoid serving your ad and wasting your budget when someone types them into search.
While SEO is great for long-term results, PPC ads like those we run for the painter let you generate results almost instantly. With PPC, you’re paying to have your ads show up on:
- Search engines like Google
- Social media platforms like Facebook
- And other websites
In a PPC campaign, you create an ad for a specific keyword and pay the platform a fixed amount when someone clicks on your ad.
This means you only have to pay for engagement on your ads. And, since PPC ads let you target specific groups of people based on different factors like age, location, and interests, the engagement you receive is most likely to convert.
PPC digital marketers handle every aspect of your ad campaigns, from selecting the right keywords to optimizing the budget like we did for our client. After we took out those terms and several others, his costs went down by nearly 1/3 even as lead quality improved.
Social Media Marketing
With over 60% of the world’s population using it, social media is an important part of business marketing these days.
Unlike search engines, people don’t visit social media to find products or businesses. They’re there either to interact with their social circle or consume content.
Social media ads tend to be less expensive than search engine ads, but they’re not usually ideal for targeting people with a buying intent. There’s a couple of exceptions for this rule that work for a local business:
- Remarketing ads to website visitors or your CRM audience
- Programmatic ads targeting a known and well-defined existing audience
Social media marketing is perfect for increasing brand awareness, engaging with customers, and running cost-effective advertising. If you already have an existing audience you can bring into the mix, you’re good to go.
A digital marketer can help you take social strategy to the next level:
- Create a social media content calendar
- Manage social media pages
- Create and manage social media ads
- Manage and build your community
- Create and schedule organic posts
- Interact with brands in your niche
Related: Why Is Social Media Important for SEO?
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to engage and nurture a target audience. You can expect to generate a return of $36 – $40 for every dollar spent on email marketing.
Emails are personal and let you directly communicate with the other person. Plus, email marketing gives you a lot more control over your audience than most other marketing channels.
A digital marketer, specializing in email marketing, can help you in the following ways:
Create an Email Marketing Strategy
An email marketing specialist crafts a solid marketing strategy tailored to your goals. It involves creating a well-thought-out plan to engage your audience at every stage of the marketing funnel.
This includes:
- Defining your email marketing goals
- Segmenting your audience
- Creating an email content calendar
Build Your Email List
Whether you’re starting from scratch with zero subscribers or already have thousands opted in, list-building should be a permanent part of your strategy.
A marketer often uses two ways to get your prospects to hop on your email list:
- Offer something valuable for free (A lead magnet in exchange for their email addresses)
- Get people to subscribe to your newsletter so that they can get value later
Your website traffic is easily leveraged to do this for you passively. Just add an exit intent popup or some other low friction ask to get an email from your site visitors. Add value for your new subscribers, don’t spam them and then, you’ll earn new leads added to your CRM each month.
Building a decent email list takes time, so you’ll need to be patient. Plus, the strategies a digital marketer uses to convert prospects into leads matter too. We have to address
- Top
- Middle and
- Bottom
of funnel prospects with different messaging tuned to each level in your buyer’s journey.
There are generally two ways to attract traffic to a landing page or sign-up form:
- Organic (Blog posts, social media posts, emails, online forums, etc.)
- Paid ads (Facebook ads, Google Ads, etc.)
Each channel can convert for you. Just understand how to communicate with them where they are at in the process.
Nurture Leads and Drive Sales
Your digital marketer will also take care of nurturing your leads and convert them into paying customers. This often takes a consistent bombardment of high-value content through emails, ads and even offline channels.
You need to first build trust with your audience by helping them for free and presenting your paid solution later when they’re ready. Do things like visiting trade shows, hosting webinars and giving out your best insights on why your services are the very best in your industry. Don’t be afraid to brag a little!
Affiliate Marketing
Imagine having a team of digital marketers sell your products without having to pay them upfront. You only pay them when they bring results. That’s affiliate marketing.
You can hire a digital marketer who manages affiliate relationships for you, working with influencers, bloggers, and other content creators.
It’s a low-risk marketing strategy that’s scalable and lets you reach maximum prospects with minimum effort.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Getting traffic to a website is one thing; converting these visitors into leads or customers is another.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) refers to optimizing your website content so that it converts most of your visitors.
It’s all about improving the chances that visitors will take the desired action – whether it’s signing up for your newsletter or making a purchase.
A digital marketer analyzes your website’s conversion rate, identifies the missing links, improves your website’s tech stack, and makes the necessary changes to improve conversions.
This could involve making the design user-friendly, simplifying the navigation, or optimizing your calls to action.
Example: Webology’s Conversion Rate Optimization Services
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing leverages the power of trust and community. It uses the fact that people are more likely to purchase a product when it’s recommended by someone they trust.
Influencers are people with a decent following on any online platform. Their audience values their word, paving the way for lucrative business-influencer partnerships.
However, influencer marketing requires:
- Finding the right influencers on the right platforms
- Establishing connections with them
- Pitching partnership ideas
- Working with them closely to ensure smooth implementation
- And, tracking campaign progress to get the most out of every deal
Your digital marketer manages each aspect of an influencer marketing campaign, from identifying the right platforms to fostering long-term relationships.
Video Marketing
Videos are perfect for engagement and communicating a message in a short time. Whether it’s a product demo, a piece of valuable information, or a customer testimonial, video marketing engages in ways text and images can’t.
A digital marketer creates videos to educate your audience, showcase your products or services, and create engagement.
They can help you achieve your marketing goal, whether it’s getting more eyeballs on your brand or selling a product with the power of video.
Videos are generally of two types:
Short-form: They’re typically less than 60 seconds, have a vertical layout, and are designed to communicate a message quickly.
Long-form: YouTube videos are a classic example of long-form video content. Using it, marketers dive deep into different topics, which can be educational, informational, or promotional.
Here’s how a video marketer can help you achieve your goals:
Develop a Content Strategy: They pick the right video format based on your goals (Short or long) and create a content strategy.
Create Content: From script writing to editing and publishing on the right platforms, video marketers typically handle the entire process.
Platform Optimization and Video SEO: Your videos need SEO if you want to rank them on a search engine for certain keywords. A video marketer optimizes your videos with keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags to boost their visibility.
Performance Tracking: Tracking is as important as any other part of the video marketing process. A video marketer tracks metrics like views, watch time, and engagement. They use this data to inform their future strategy.
Strategy Creation
One of the first things a true pro in this field does is come up with a marketing plan that’s UNIQUE and based on your business goals, target audience, and resources. For example, if you own an HVAC business this plan we put together is a great start.
Here’s what goes into strategy creation:
Understanding Business Goals
If you don’t yet know the most appropriate goal for your marketing efforts, a digital marketer can help you identify that. 3rd party metrics can be misleading and difficult to interpret. What’s really causing an impact for you online?
It could be generating more buzz around your brand, getting more traffic to a landing page, or engaging with existing customers to build trust. You have to understand the science and data to really know what’s going on.
Audience Research
Your digital marketer will study your target audience and understand their problems, pain points, and what resonates with them.
This makes sure your content and marketing materials speak directly to potential customers.
Choosing the Right Channels
Not all digital channels are worth pursuing in marketing. Based on your business type (B2B or B2C) and where your target audience hangs out, a digital marketer will identify the most suitable ones.
For instance, LinkedIn is great for B2B (Business to Business) lead generation while Instagram can be a good source to attract B2C prospects. If you need mass reach through don’t count on either of them. Hop in a newer platform that gives away reach instead.
Content Planning
Your marketer will identify the type of content that will most likely resonate with your audience. It also depends on the platform you’re focusing on. For instance, if you want to leverage short videos, it could be Instagram Reels and TikTok.
Data Analysis and Tracking
Data should be at the center of every digital marketing campaign. Tracking helps you ensure you’re moving in the right direction. Digital marketers track data, analyze it, and make informed marketing decisions.
The Role of Digital Marketers in Business Growth: FAQs
Here are some frequently asked questions about the role of a digital marketer based on 10 years of client feedback here at Webology.
What is the Work of a Digital Marketer?
A digital marketer creates and implements marketing strategies to help businesses with their ROI goals. This includes SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, content creation, and PPC ads.
What Skills Should I Look for In a Digital Marketer?
This depends on what you want to achieve. If you’re focusing on SEO, you’ll need a digital marketer who’s good at ranking web pages on Google. If you want to attract targeted traffic with search ads, you’ll need a PPC expert.
How Much Does Hiring a Digital Marketer Cost?
The cost of hiring a marketer varies depending on their experience, the complexity of the project, and whether you’re hiring a freelancer or agency. It can range from $10 to $150 an hour or $1000 to $10,000 per month.
How Do I Measure the Success of a Digital Marketing Campaign?
Website traffic, conversion rates, lead generation, and ROI are some prominent metrics to track in a digital marketing campaign. The ones you focus on depend on your objective; for instance, if you want to generate traffic to a landing page, you’ll want to keep an eye on your traffic report in Google Analytics.
What Do Business Owners and Digital Marketers Do Next?
Effective digital marketing requires expertise and experience. Hiring a professional is the right way to go if you want to grow online.
A digital marketer helps businesses like yours achieve their desired goals through:
- Strategy creation
- Implementation
- Tracking and tweaking
They can help you with:
- Website Improvements
- Email Marketing
- PPC Ads
- Social Media Marketing
and SOOOO much more!
The right strategy depends on what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it.
If you want to leverage all those strategies, hiring a digital marketing manager won’t suffice.
You need to work with a digital marketing company that has a full team to support your goals. Things work best when you have a PRO lineup like we do at Webology.
View All Our Team Here
If you’re ready to get more customers for your business consistently, Webology can help deliver tangible results.
