8 Skills That Make You a Powerful Digital Marketing Manager

Whether you’re looking to land a new job or simply want to enhance your abilities, here are 8 areas that any digital marketing manager should master moving forward.

Digital marketing is a highly dynamic career, there’s much more to digital marketing than being social media savvy. Certainly, as you launch your digital marketing career, it’s wise to think about how to boost your skills.

Digital Marketing Manager Responsibilities

Essentially, a digital marketing manager must plan and manage digital marketing campaigns in order to boost a company’s brand and products. Marketing managers are in charge of key responsibilities such as:

• Creating digital marketing campaigns through social media, blog/web, and email. To reach potential customers with their business’s message – in a way that will encourage them into action.
• Collaborating to optimize UX across digital channels and landing pages, including SEO. 
• Running digital advertising across multiple channels and touchpoints-from social media pages on Facebook or Twitter to websites.
• Analyzing metrics and identifying trends for continual iteration and improvement.
• Managing digital content creation, including copy, image, video, and audio. Visual content is a powerful way to keep customer attention. And creating captivating images or stock videos is now easier than ever. No need to spend hours fussing over designs. You can jump right into creating them in this easy-to-use template based editors like Invideo and others. Using these tools, you can quickly create visuals that capture your brand and add a unique flair to your website. And if you want to take things a step further, there are also tools like fancy text generators that can help you create interesting typography, infusing them in your website for a truly unique look.

In addition, a typical job description for a digital marketing manager will include a company’s specific marketing KPIs, such as boosting conversion rates for blog posts. As part of the role, a digital marketing manager will strategize how best to meet these company-wide goals. 

8 Must-Have Skills to Succeed as a Digital Marketing Manager

1. Know the Building Blocks of Great Storytelling

Every marketing manager should know how to tell a story to elicit emotion in potential customers. The building blocks of brand storytelling involve not just top writing skills and an eye for design. But also a deep understanding of the target audience. Certainly, you can take your marketing campaigns to the next level by focusing on how to connect with your audience through storytelling values. 

2. Focus on UX and the Customer Journey

Marketing teams should also have a constant pulse on the customer journey. While content must be expertly tailored, it’s important to achieve a flawless end-to-end experience. 

Digital marketing managers must ensure quality standards, such as correctly working links and CTAs that are easy to carry out. The overall experience should also be appealing, with great designs and visuals. 

In addition, UX should be optimized on a regular basis by the marketing team. This may involve making updates to web pages, such as new images, buttons, or forms. Often choosing the right webpage builder from the start can facilitate these types of ongoing changes.

3. Stay on Top of New Trends

Digital marketing can change overnight. The best digital marketing managers will keep up with new trends and tools. Including popular social media platforms, mobile marketing trends, digital marketing campaigns, and more. 

Jumping on social trends – such as the wildly successful “Ice Bucket Challenge” in 2014 – can boost your brand to new potential customers. Marketing managers should stay connected with industry leaders and conferences in order to discover these on-the-ground trends. 

4. Strategically Analyze Results

Marketing managers should have the tools in place to find out what’s working and not. Taking a deep dive into analytics can guide efforts to optimize digital campaigns, perform A/B testing and get better results with each iteration. 

Whether you use a social media analytics dashboard, a website rank tracking tool, or other types of software, your marketing agency should leverage analytics tools on a regular basis.

5. Take Advantage of Paid Social Ads

Today, paid social ads can be highly cost-effective and successfully convert customers. Every digital marketing agency should have a strategy that goes beyond organic traffic and takes advantage of paid opportunities. Marketing managers should regularly set up ads and optimize them according to company initiatives. 

6. Prioritize SEO across All Copy

Marketing teams must implement SEO across all channels of communication, including social media, blog/web, and email. This also goes for less visible copy, such as hashtags or meta descriptions. Digital marketing managers should research potential keywords using top SEO software. And strategize on how to place them in company materials for maximal results. 

7. Manage Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Digital marketing managers not only have to manage their own internal teams. But also collaborate across a variety of different departments, such as design, IT, sales, and more. In addition, some digital marketing agencies hire outside talent, such as influencer marketers, to boost their marketing team’s efforts. 

The best digital marketing managers will seamlessly coordinate with departments and freelancers. To strategize, get approvals and receive feedback on integrated digital campaigns. 

8. Select Top Tools for Managing and Automating Work

Marketing agencies will get the best outcomes when they leverage the right tools and automate processes as needed.

To manage an onslaught of running deliverables, digital marketing managers can make use of project management tools, marketing dashboards, productivity tools, and more. For example, you can make processes more efficient by keeping track of hours invested in each marketing campaign on TrackingTime. 

Another fundamental tool is creating an electronic signature for everyone in your team. Incorporating these into your workflow will avoid potential delays or waiting periods when signing time-sensitive documents.

Hone Your Digital Marketing Manager Skills

Digital marketing is an ever-changing field that requires a range of abilities. As you build your marketing manager career, you should work on boosting these 8 key skills to get more powerful results for your company.

If you don’t yet have these abilities, try taking a marketing course, attending a conference, or connecting with a mentor to get more insights. By honing your skills over time, you’ll open new possibilities to your marketing team and empower your career in the long run.

About the author:

Nick Huss is a digital entrepreneur and business enthusiast who is constantly seeking and testing new ways of doing business better. When not doing business Nick plays soccer, travels the World, and writes books.

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