The Crucial Role Of A Digital Marketing Manager
How do you become a digital marketing manager, and what skills do you need to succeed in this role? A head of marketing is someone who oversees all marketing channels and initiatives of a company's team, including emails, social media, SEO, etc. Their responsibilities include delegating tasks, setting deadlines, ensuring everyone is on the same page, holding meetings, and handling campaigns and their execution. To do all that, they must possess a plethora of digital marketing manager skills. These skills aren't just a checklist you tick off once you complete a course from an online platform. They are hard-earned qualifications that require years of training and refinement.
You may already be a digital marketing manager. However, you should never stop looking for growth opportunities that allow you to evolve and help your team overcome challenges more efficiently. It's not only about how to be a good marketer but also about how to inspire your teams to be the best versions of themselves.
Let's see which skills you should work on evolving and challenges you should overcome in this highly technological era of marketing.
In This Guide, You Will Find...
- 5 Challenges Digital Marketing Managers Face
- Essential Digital Marketing Manager Skills To Polish
- How Can You Manage Your Team Effectively?
5 Challenges Digital Marketing Managers Face
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Budget Management
Managing your marketing budget is challenging for two main reasons. For starters, you have to decide which channel deserves a higher investment. You may have historical data that shows you the ROI potential, but things change all the time, and you can't always be sure that your investment will pay off. Secondly, a limited budget makes prioritization even more essential. Eventually, you will have to elevate one channel over others. That's why digital marketing manager skills involve a clear understanding of your goals and target audience to make the right choices.
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Data Privacy And Compliance
Have you ever wondered how many of your audience understand how their personal information is used? It's your job to know privacy and data-sharing regulations so you can communicate them effectively with your page visitors. This is getting particularly challenging as companies enter global markets, where each country has unique laws and regulations. If you don't follow them, you may end up with a hefty fine in your hands.
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Omnichannel Marketing
Research shows that 74% of customers visit multiple channels before making a purchase. This means that a single email isn't enough. You also need to grow your social media channels, produce great original content, publish on content syndication platforms, and invest in paid ads across various platforms. Therefore, a marketing manager should possess elevated communication skills to organize cross-functional teams.
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Personalization
The digital marketing landscape has changed tremendously in the past decade. Among the top marketing manager skills needed is the necessity to personalize your approach depending on each customer. In fact, 66% of consumers want companies to understand their unique needs. However, they are still being treated like numbers. This proves that your online marketing strategies should be as personalized as possible. How? Specify your buyer personas and be uber-particular when it comes to messaging.
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Using Technologies
Many tools and pieces of software are necessary to streamline processes and complete daily tasks. A digital marketing manager should stay updated regarding new arrivals and make informed decisions about the best options. For example, they should know which is the best social media scheduling platform and which tools are best to optimize your website in order to get indexed on AI search engines.
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Essential Digital Marketing Manager Skills To Polish
1. Project Management
Managing a campaign or a larger marketing project is demanding. It requires many key digital marketing skills. You should set common and individual goals so everyone knows what to do. Also, you must set realistic timelines and deadlines for every task. Ensure that cross-functional team members are communicating effectively and are aligned toward a united goal. If everything goes according to plan, deadlines should be met. However, if someone faces issues meeting deadlines, be open to extending them and offering guidance. It's important to know why someone had trouble staying on schedule. Maybe your deadlines were too demanding for a team member's workload. To achieve your objectives, it's best to use project management software to keep everyone organized and aligned.
2. Strategic Thinking
Which is a hard skill that a marketing manager might use on a regular basis? We believe it's strategic thinking, among others. What does it mean, though? Marketing leaders should be able to be one step ahead and anticipate customers' behavior. You should know how your audience feels and thinks. If you don't know those things, you can't create any effective strategy. From content marketing strategies to SEO strategies, you should be aware of your audience's needs, challenges, and preferences.
But that's not all. Strategic thinking is powered by metrics and hard data. Knowing what worked in the past and what works for your key competitors helps you strategize your next moves. Based on these facts, you can innovate and think outside the box. Sometimes, choosing the unconventional pathway is exactly what you need to grow.
3. Leadership
Leadership is undoubtedly one of the most important digital marketing manager skills. Being a leader is like an umbrella hiding other skills underneath, including motivation, inspiration, problem solving, coaching, and team building. It's not about giving out orders and expecting good outcomes—it's about being a mentor and inspiring people to be the best version of themselves. And in cases where things get tough, a digital marketing expert should be right by their team's side to offer solutions. But none of this matters when a team isn't united, so it's your responsibility to create deep bonds with your team members and ensure they collaborate smoothly.
4. Communication
Whether you want to evolve your digital marketing manager or product marketing manager skills, communication should always be at the top of your priorities list. You should have excellent verbal and written communication skills to keep all team members aligned on a common goal. You could be amazing at creating campaigns, but this skill means nothing if you can't organize your team and explain each person's tasks clearly. In fact, bad communication can throw off your entire project. That's why you should also know how to unite your team and make them feel like important pieces of the same puzzle.
5. Paid Advertising
Is there a social media strategy that doesn't include paid advertising? We doubt it. In today's ultra-competitive landscape, companies have a hard time standing out from the crowd. That's why they invest in paid ads on social media platforms and search engines like Google and Bing. Social media platforms allow you to personalize your targeting and messaging to appeal to your ideal buyers. Long gone are the days when businesses tried to catch fish in the ocean. Now, you can lure them through a small, uber-specific pool. However, don't throw all your money on paid ads without first optimizing your organic posts. They should also engage and captivate audiences. Don't forget that clients check your profiles before making a purchase.
Moreover, you should invest in PPC ads. PPC directory listing ads are particularly important if you want to generate qualified leads. If you don't think you can manage your PPC ads successfully, you can hire PPC campaign management services that have the expertise to boost your ad performance.
6. Search Engine Optimization
Most companies have a Search Engine Optimization specialist, either in-house or externally. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't add this tool to your digital marketing manager skills arsenal. Paid ads may be effective, but they will run your budget empty. That's why you should know the basics of SEO and increase your organic reach. This way, your campaign and high-quality content can drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into buyers. To create competitive content, you should use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Search Console for keyword research and popular topics.
Additionally, in the AI-dominated era we live in, AI search optimization is essential. Organic traffic has decreased for many websites. That's why everyone tries to optimize their content for AI Overviews and AI search engines. But to get featured in them, you should still invest in traditional SEO practices, including link building strategies.
7. Understanding The Customer Journey
A well-defined B2B marketing strategy starts by identifying who your target audience is and their journey from awareness to conversion. Understanding who you're talking to and what their needs are is one of the top 10 digital marketing skills, as it allows you to craft personalized campaigns. To achieve this, you should send surveys and conduct interviews with your best clients. The feedback you will receive will help you understand areas for improvement and realize what truly matters for your prospects. Essentially, buyer personas are your guide to creating content that resonates with each segment.
You should also understand how your clients behave from the moment they discover you online until they finally purchase your product. Depending on the industry, you may need to enforce more social proof, like case studies, to showcase the value of your product. If your software's pricing is feature-based or tier-based, it's important you keep engaging with buyers post-purchase so you can upsell them at a later stage.
8. AI Tools
There are many AI benefits in marketing, and it's up to you to leverage as many of them as possible to boost productivity and streamline processes. Many tools are already integrated with AI for automation and personalization. Apart from them, there are other tools you can use for specific tasks, such as content brainstorming, keyword research, customer journey mapping, and trend analysis. Yet, doing all that can feel challenging. That's why you should look out for the best AI courses and invest your time wisely. You can also ask your team members to participate in such courses, too, so they can simplify their daily tasks. For instance, a content marketer may find more use in prompt engineering courses, while an email marketer may take advantage of an email automation learning opportunity.
9. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing. There's no doubt it should be among your digital marketing manager skills. Maybe your company has a dedicated email marketing manager who already knows how to implement the best email marketing practices. Still, this doesn't mean that you should not enrich your knowledge in this field. In other cases, you may also be responsible for crafting personalized campaigns and segmenting your audience into personas. This means that you must know the best ways to engage your audience, what makes them click on your email, and the best timing to send messages.
Additionally, by tracking data, you identify which types of content increase click-through rates and decrease bounce rates. The more personal you get, the higher your open rates will be. Tools like HubSpot and MailChimp are wonderful at streamlining and automating your email sends.
10. Data Analysis
Being able to track and analyze data is one of the main skills required for digital marketing. Why? Let's say you want to increase conversions, and after analyzing your customer journey data, you find one major issue. One particular landing page is underperforming compared to others. Why? Maybe the social media ad doesn't match the messaging on the landing page, increasing bounce rates. It's the data that shows you this issue and prompts you to optimize a landing page for lead generation. This is usually the pathway digital marketing managers follow to identify issues and craft strategies to overcome them.
How Can You Manage Your Team Effectively?
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Set Clear Goals
To build high-performing marketing teams, marketing managers should ensure everyone understands the goal of a project, the timeline, and each member's role. You would think that managers already know that. However, we often see managers being vague or not explaining things thoroughly, mistakenly thinking that everyone understands. If you want to learn how to become a digital marketing manager, you should know how to set clear goals and expectations by staying organized and communicating at a high level.
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Encourage Autonomy
If you read some of the most famous, powerful leadership quotes, you will see that a lot of them are about autonomy. Yes, you should always be available and ready to step in. However, you shouldn't intervene all the time, micromanaging every aspect of a project. Let your team members perform their duties in the way they know best and show them trust. This approach creates ownership and pride and lets people evolve. However, you should also ensure they have the necessary training and knowledge to perform their assigned tasks—don't just throw them in deep waters without offering assistance and guidance.
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Provide Feedback
Offering timely and detailed feedback is one of the most crucial digital marketing manager skills and a great tip on how to be a good manager. During the execution of a campaign or a project, you should contact your team members periodically to ask about their progress, answer questions, and offer guidance. Above all, your people should feel like you are there for them. Feedback shouldn't only be critical but also positive and celebratory, so applaud people's work when they complete a project successfully.
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Motivate People To Evolve
Just like you should keep enrolling in marketing training courses, you should encourage your team members to evolve. In fact, companies that enable career development are 67% confident that they can retain top talent. This is proof that, as a marketing manager, you need to offer space for team members to learn new skills. You should also allow them to work on new projects and develop new skills while working. It's not only about online courses and training material, it is also about on-the-job training.
Key Takeaway
Generating high-quality business leads is no easy feat. It requires united efforts from all company departments, including marketing. A good marketing manager isn't only someone who knows how to create campaigns and imagine powerful content. They must possess certain digital marketing manager skills that evolve over time. For example, AI has become a priority for many marketers, as it is taking every aspect of business life by storm. This is where a prompt engineering guide can help you and your team members thrive. Being able to manage complex projects and lead your team to success is demanding. And all that while staying within your budget and meeting strict deadlines.
To achieve that, you should motivate and inspire people to perform to the top of their abilities and dive deep into your audience's needs and challenges. The more you personalize your paid ads and email marketing, the more success you'll see in your data. Don't forget about SEO, though. Some people keep saying that it is dying; we say no to that. SEO is still alive and important if you want to see your website featured in AI search engine results.
