7 Must have Skills for a Digital Marketing Manager

By
Kiara Mccoll avatar
on July 01#best-practices
Blog Digital Marketing Manager

A digital marketing manager involves managing all the middle level and bottom level executives which include; marketing executives, specialists, team leaders, analysts, and content strategists.

The common responsibilities include strategizing digital presence to generate higher traffic to their website, tracking conversions and making improvements, taking care of all digital marketing-related components like SEO, SEM, SMM, content marketing, copywriting, and IT roles if involved.

The skills of a digital marketing manager require creating effective SMM strategies to spread brand awareness through different social media channels, ensuring that a company’s website delivers a better user experience through responsive design, intriguing content, and better usability.    This leads to effective management of the organization which spreads a positive word later on and attracts more consumers. Collecting and evaluating customer feedback helps a digital marketing manager to enhance the customer experience.

A digital marketing manager also keeps an eye on competitors’ strategies to create digital marketing plans for the future and identify what steps can be taken to overtake them. This is just a glimpse of a digital marketing manager’s role in an organization, but this role involves having plenty of skills that are important to run an organization effectively. 

What does a Digital Marketing Manager do?  

Digital marketing managers are responsible for developing and overseeing online marketing strategies of businesses done on both smaller and larger scales. They supervise projects and assure that all digital marketing campaigns are run smoothly from start to finish.  They are equally responsible for the operations undertaken by the leading teams as well as a key point of contact for clients in the B2B arena.   

Digital marketing managers are highly responsible for the overall functioning of a digital agency, so they need to have good people and skills for both building strategy and content. Digital marketers need a mixture of knowledge of a variety of areas such as SEO, copywriting, social media, content marketing, paid marketing, email marketing and analytics.

Skills of a digital marketing manager 

Digital marketing is a field of diverse skill set which range from hard and soft skills. If managing people is not your expertise, no problem, there are plenty of other roles you can indulge in and fulfill your responsibilities remarkably as a digital marketing manager.  Before deep-diving into this industry, know which skills make an effective marketing manager:

1. Ability to analyze data and draw insights 

In this age of Big-data, this is one of the must-have skills for a digital marketing manager, to complement the marketing goals. It is not completely about huge data, but how effectively you utilize it decides the success of your campaign. 

Digital marketing data analytics are much beyond web analytics and website performance. It is important to note how data shapes and drives customer engagement across different platforms and channels.

This involves the use of various tools like Google Analytics, Google ads, Facebook Ads, and various ad exchanges. This process might also require the use of other tools like master Excel and SQL to run queries against the data and uncover insights.   

Big data and the great velocity of digital change have happened so quickly that data experts are hard to find at present. Different data analyses include data mining, business intelligence, text analytics and data visualizations. 

2. Organization and project management skills  

Running multiple digital campaigns at once can get complicated. Building an omnichannel marketing plan includes different technologies and measurements that require a lot of multitasking.

Digital marketing managers also need to have project management skills to bring together a group of people to turn marketing ideas into success.     

Project Management for Digital Marketers

Project management involves skills of leading and directing internal and external teams to manage projects and deliverables. A good manager also has technical skills like simplifying complex projects by breaking them into actionable steps and writing a project objective. They must be able to communicate objections and then motivate executives to create a seamless experience. We love Workast for project management for digital marketers. All tasks are online and have due dates so the digital marketing manager knows exactly what the deadline is. Tasks are visible through Slack and Workast, with notifications and reminders so no marketing tasks gets missed.

A capable digital marketing manager balances user interests with the scope and interests of business. This requires a thorough understanding and best business practices, but particularly about a product or a service.   

3. Adaptability and creative problem-solving 

Digital marketing managers face something new every day, the one who deals with it professionally stands out. These could be negative customer reviews, Google updates, and many novel challenges, trends, and changing tools of the trade. No matter what, a digital marketing manager keeps pushing through challenges whether it is for their agency or serving clients.    They get into the depth of the problem, figure out the solution by applying an effective strategy and get the problems resolved. Sometimes, they feel extremely daunting, but a never-give-up approach with the ability to find a unique solution is essential.      These things make the job tedious and hard to handle, but a great manager knows to keep the work balanced so that they don’t lose their mind. In a nutshell, a great digital marketing manager knows what to manage and what to give away.

4. Having extensive knowledge of the latest digital marketing tools and techniques 

A marketing manager’s responsibility is to handle the entire functioning of the agency and comprehend the latest digital marketing tools and platforms, some of them are as follows: 

Free digital marketing tools 

Hootsuite


Tweetdeck 


Canva  


Facebook analytics 


Twitter analytics


Buffer 


For email marketing 

Mail chimp 


Aweber 


There are also various tools involved in social media marketing that enables the digital marketing manager to upscale their marketing efforts. 

5. Thorough knowledge of automation 

Marketing automation streamlines, automates and optimizes the marketing efforts. It includes targeting customers with marketing and sales messages through workflows. Online marketing efforts include sending different messages to different prospects at different points in the customer buying journey. Implying automation to their business helps the team to achieve better and create an enhancing experience for customers. 

Marketing automation makes the message more precise and is widely adopted by many marketers.

68% of marketing leaders are currently using automation in some or another way.

Marketing has a brighter future in automation and to cope up with that one needs to develop commendable marketing skills.   E-commerce automation should also be adopted along with Marketing Automation. ECommerce automation upgrades what you already have achieved in the past.. Most of the managers are not so familiar with the procedure of its application and don't know what E-commerce automation is. However in 2021 managers need to get skilled with E-commerce automation.

6. UX skills and understanding customer experience 

Gone are the days when marketing was all about pursuing customers to purchase your products and services. Nowadays marketing involves experiences that continue after-sale like onboarding, communications ,and upselling. This continuous effort retains customers and makes marketers think about designing the best user experience and customer experience.     This requires a thorough understanding of the customer, their needs, wants and pain points which will help to spread awareness about the product or the service through the full customer lifespan.

Digital marketers continue receiving feedback from old and current customers on why the product isn’t meeting their needs. This feedback can be used later in improving the digital experience offered to new customers. 

7. Communication skills 

Digital marketing managers' role involves communicating a targeted message to consumers. The message should be crafted in the most professional way that helps in brand building or a product story that engages the audience emotionally, which requires a supreme command of written, visual and non-verbal communication.

Also, they should also be able to communicate data about user experience and pain points to the rest of the marketing team and to product management in order to inform product strategy.    These are the skills of an effective digital marketing manager. As digital marketing continues to expand, one will need to be creative with their content and build skills relevant to marketing. Understanding how to make creative marketing strategies will help you achieve your business goals.

This was a guest post by Kiara Mccoll. If you would like to write for Workast, please submit your guest blog article request here.

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