With the world of digital marketing evolving every day, new skills and strategies are required to keep up with the challenges. Digital Marketing, as we said, helps us reach out to potential customers, convert them into regular customers and help them succeed with using our product. For this, we divide the customer lifecycle into phases. Each phase of the funnel is equipped with strategies to attract leads towards our brand, these strategies move the needle in our overall journey towards growth. Each role specializes in helping create and execute these strategies.
Let’s take a look at some of these digital marketing roles
A word we often see associated with marketing is communication. A Content Marketer helps create a unique story, and content experience for the audience using a mix of data, research and brand requirements. The Content marketer strategizes and moderates the content marketing strategies aimed at acquisition, engagement retention and more. With the help of content creators– writers, podcasters, videographers, the content marketer plans and executes the different content pieces that will take part in each overall strategy as well as optimizes their components - title, structure, length, overall quality, for maximum performance according to the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) established in the initial strategy, he also modifies each strategy in itself according to real world lessons learned throughout it’s execution as well as works on the content for the homepage, landing pages and other website content.
So with the help of his content creators as well as the designer, the content marketer essentially enables the work of the email marketer, social media manager, media buyer and SEO manager by creating content that fits each stage of the customer lifecycle.
One of the key players in elevating our brand’s web presence is the SEO Manager who manages our website’s organic - meaning unpaid - presence on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. Their day to day responsibilities include researching keywords on which we could viably compete, creating articles targeting those keywords, organizing the website in a proper manner for search engines to index, reviewing the technical setup of the website making sure it is fit with search engine requirements, and, most importantly, collecting outside links, often called backlinks, to our articles and website. So basically, the SEO manager helps in growing the brand and helping in expanding its reach through organic search results and may also take part in elevating results on app stores (ASO) and video platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo
The SEO manager works closely with the content marketing team to create articles that fit into his SEO strategy and would benefit our position on search engines.
You’d have often noticed paid ads appearing on Google when you are looking for results on a certain keyword, or while browsing social media or playing a mobile game. These ads have been purchased by a brands from across the globe depending on your keywords, demographics, interests and more in order to publicize their service or product. The Media Buyer, who’s often referred to as an Ad-Buyer, PPC manager, or SEM manager for those who focus solely on search engines, work towards buying digital ad space with the highest possible Return-on-Investment (ROI) in regards to the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
Media buyers work closely with the designer, social media manager, SEO manager, and content manager the best campaigns in terms of conversion rate and click-through-rate (CTR).
Affiliate managers on the other hand purchase their leads from other advertisers, called affiliates, who run their own funnels while trying to achieve the same result of optimal ROI and conversion rates.
Most of us are regular social media users. Often, we come across new brands or discover an article while browsing social media. This happens, thanks to the efforts that businesses put into social media marketing.
SMM taps into the power of social media platforms and websites to promote our products and services. The Social Media Manager devises social media strategies to reach and engage the target audience. Typically the manager spearheads publishing and managing original, high quality multimedia content and campaigns on a variety of social platforms in order to help the brand or business grow. Their day-to-day activities also include responding to social comments, initiating conversations on different groups and pages, publishing content, tracking the KPIs of published content and optimizing future content to best match the engagements of the target audience throughout the customer lifecycle. The Social media manager works closely with the designer and content manager.
Though Social Media Marketing seems to be the trending channel of customer acquisition nowadays, email marketing surprisingly averages at 174% the conversion rate of SMM and has consistently kept its stand with the highest Return-on-Investment (ROI) averaging at 4400% which translates to an approximate $44 revenue for every dollar spent. An Email Marketer segments the target audience to different cohorts according to stages in the customer lifecycle and more, he creates email strategies for acquisition, retention, engagement and more. Email marketers work working closely with the designer, content marketer and sales and customer success teams.
PR specialists book spots on TV shows, Radio shows, magazines, and guest blogs in order to promote the media coverage of the brand and product. They also help place strategic advertisements o promote the brand and reach the target audience through hoardings and mediums like websites, blogs, social media platforms, digital magazines, and any other digital properties.
While all the roles we’ve reviewed answer to the company CMO, Let’s take a look at several roles which don’t necessarily exist within companies marketing departments but are adjacent and work with that department.
The roles we have discussed so far help in creating great content and disseminating it amongst our customers. In order to understand how each of our efforts translate to reaching our goals, we depend upon the power of Data Analytics. Let’s take a look at several roles engaged in analyzing data with the aim of achieving actionable insights around the business.
UX researchers, brand & product managers define, engage in conversion rate optimization, they analyze & interpret data related to their user’s engagement with the product, its funnels & landing pages in an attempt to identify and remove user-friction as well as validate or disprove new feature ideas and UX hypotheses.
They use such tools as Mixpanel, Google Analytics, KissMetrics and HotJar for UX analytics; VWO, Optimizely and Google Optimize for optimisation i.e A/B testing; and SimilarWeb, CrunchBase & AppAnnie for market research and positioning.
The collaborate closely with the product manager, content manager and designer to see what kind of changes to the user experience will drive engagement the furthest
Business Intelligence Analysts provide historical, current and predictive view of business operations in order to derive meaningful insights & conclusions to drive the company operations forward.
They mainly use SQL & excel, but may also use BI dashboards such as SiSense, SAP, PowerBI, Tableau, etc. The collaborate closely with the all company roles who create data such as the sales and customer success teams, the social media and email marketers and more.
Data Scientists are run hundreds of daily experiments on an ever diminishing scope of interactions to deliver the best possible performance to their users. An example of this would be an offline Backgammon game giving the user an online experience by varied player names such as player0213, Simon, dave, computer, etc. as well as shifting difficulty tied to those names.
These mathematical wizards use tools such as Python, R, MatLab Tableau and more. And collaborate closely with the product manager and UX researcher.
Mostly, in tech companies, it is important for one person to look at the holistic view of the brand and guide individual teams to achieve specific goals. This is where Product managers come into the picture. The product manager and product owner otherwise known as the outbound and inbound product managers (respectively), take the product through it’s entire lifecycle from ideation to initial development to maintenance and further feature development with the aspiration of delivering value to the user with ease, achieving profitability, you could say that they are guardians of the product or service that the company is delivering to its customers. They are responsible for guiding the success of a product and leading the cross-functional team that is responsible for improving it, They define the strategy, roadmap, UX and features for a product or product line.
The collaborate closely with the project manager and software developers, with the designer and of course with the data analytics teams.
project managers are the guardians of the software developers. They prioritize and sync tasks across the entire development team at times between 3 and more products and product managers. Right from planning, organizing and managing to executing the project, the project manager’s day-to-day responsibilities are structured towards getting the work done on schedule with a minimum amount of friction and setbacks. They usually act as a liaison between the development team, senior executives and other stakeholders. The usually answer to the CTO of the company.
Business developers approach strategic partners directly using either digital platforms such as LinkedIn or Email, or simply by picking up the phone and cold calling. They work to negotiate and close the terms of collaboration agreements with venture capital firms, investment banks and potential partners. They may work with the product manager and content manager to create sales content and white-papers aimed at leads and partners.
Sales specialists approach potential customers again via digital platforms such as LinkedIn or email as well as cold calling prospects in order to create an interest or follow up on an interest to purchase the product, they negotiate the terms, answer any concerns and give the prospect all the information and attention they need to purchase the product. Some sales positions, mainly in B2B and B2E product require technical knowledge in order to be able to fully discuss the product, it’s use cases, feature-set and usage.
Once a lead becomes a customer, it becomes important to engage them and help them derive the best experience while using our product or service. This is where the Customer Success team otherwise referred to as account managers or customer relations managers, comes into the picture, This team manages the relationship between the brand and its customers with the goal of making the customer as successful as possible, which in turn, maximizes customer retention and lifetime value (LTV).