What Does a Digital Marketer Do?

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 hats. 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. The question “What does a Digital Marketer do?” would then have a very different question depending on the details of the role or company, as well as where you are in your digital marketing career.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Even with the wide degree of variance in different duties and digital marketing skills required by different positions, you will find most of the following responsibilities in a typical digital marketing job description:

• Outline, strategize and carry out digital marketing campaigns, including search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and PPC efforts
• Manage and shape social media marketing efforts, including determining the optimal social media platforms and channels
• Analyze campaigns to determine the right metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) before measuring performance and creating reports
• Identify new opportunities to generate leads and boost conversion
• Collaborate across disciplines to maximize the efficacy of digital marketing campaigns, including with designers, developers, and communications professionals

The digital marketing industry is a broad field that spans a diverse array of different job roles. Here are just a few of the top jobs in digital marketing:

In a Digital Marketing Specialist position — or a Digital Marketing Manager job title if you have more experience — you would oversee developing the overall content strategy as well as all online marketing campaigns. As a Digital Marketing Specialist, you’ll be responsible for enhancing brand awareness and brand recognition while driving traffic with the goal of acquiring new customers. You will often be responsible for keeping up with new technology to optimize your digital marketing efforts. Analysis of your marketing efforts will also be required.

In these digital marketing positions, you will use your skills as an SEO expert to help drive traffic and improve content. An SEO Specialist or SEO Manager would develop content and content projects specifically aimed to help a company gain momentum in search results. This type of SEO professional would also provide input that would be used to keep content creators on target with valuable insight into the content strategy required to enhance performance on Google as well as social media.

A Content Marketing Specialist will be the creator of content as well as the owner of a content strategy plan to ensure you increase traffic as well as Google rankings. You would create a plan for what material to use from print to video to blogging and social media. You might report to an SEO Manager or work in the marketing department using the SEO team’s keywords to improve your content’s effectiveness.

A Social Media Manager would be focused on creating effective social media content across all platforms, scheduling that content strategically so that your target market will interact with it, and drive website traffic to your company website. In this role, you would likely also be responsible for handling all interactions from consumers with your brand.

A Marketing Automation Coordinator focuses on the effects and results of a marketing campaign. It is also a more technical position in which you would be finding the best software to help discover important customer behaviors. You would be also involved in measurement, web analytics, and statistics while tracking campaign performance.

User Experience (UX) Designers are responsible for the end-to-end development of websites and digital marketing applications. Whether working on a web development or digital marketing team, UX Designers must understand the website from a whole marketing experience, and to that end, they need to understand audiences as well as have an in-depth knowledge of the product or service a given client offers.

Email continues to be one of the strongest methods of reaching a committed target audience. A specialized area of content development and marketing, this is primarily a lead-generating activity and thus Email Marketing Specialists would likely be working in tandem with Digital Marketing Managers and/or Content Managers on targeted campaigns.

Digital Marketing refers to all marketing efforts that use digital media (or “electronic devices” and “digital channels”) to reach customers and promote brands, products, and services, including websites, social media, search engines, mobile apps, email, text messages, and more.

The goals of digital marketing can be just as varied: establishing brand or corporate identity, customer outreach, information campaigns, boosting user engagement, converting browsers into shoppers, increasing revenue, and so on.

Some examples of digital marketing include:

Websites are ground zero for digital marketing—both your own corporate site and the sites of others – offering an endless array of places to advertise. These include sponsored posts on Facebook and Instagram, Google ads, banner ads, and any other social channel that accepts paid advertising.

Email marketing is used by companies to reach out to current customers to encourage higher engagement, as well as reach out to potential customers to entice them to join your community. Creating a comprehensive email marketing strategy is an excellent low-cost way to keep an audience engaged and your brand top of mind.

Engaging users across all social platforms is now a key way for users to interact directly with brands. This refers not to the paid placement of ads, but to native original content as it appears on the brand’s own Twitter feed, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Quora, LinkedIn, or TikTok—all places that a brand can connect to an audience, showcase its products, and encourage word of mouth.

This type of search marketing represents the first line of offense in getting your content in front of potential viewers, specifically those conducting online searches. Together, they represent the process of leveraging search engines like Google to increase the probability that your content ranks on the first few pages of someone’s search results. This final, crucial component of content marketing ensures your blog posts and other written assets effectively improve your rank on Google, so they can draw in and educate new customers.