Digital Marketing Manager: 5 Essential Skills

From social media to search engine optimization, a digital marketing manager needs to manage the various aspects of a company’s online marketing strategy. In this blog post, we’ll look at the five essential skills for digital marketing management success. Are you interested in becoming a digital marketing manager? Learn more about how to develop a marketing strategy, manage ad campaigns, and track KPIs by enrolling in our course, Digital Marketing Management.

What does a digital marketing manager do?

Over the last 20 years, marketing has grown significantly more complicated. There’s now print marketing, network marketing, direct marketing, branding, and hundreds of other ways to market and sell products and services. A digital marketing manager plans and manages the digital elements of a company’s marketing plan. As a manager, they’re responsible for keeping the digital marketing team focused on achieving the company’s short-term and long-term goals. In large companies with multiple marketing divisions, a digital marketing manager also needs to coordinate with print marketing and public relations teams to make sure the company’s marketing objectives are focused and consistent.

What are the key skills a digital marketing manager needs?

As the manager of a technical team, a successful digital marketing manager needs a blend of hands-on technical knowledge and management experience. The five skills listed below should give you the knowledge to excel at managing a marketing team.

Design a digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing is an extremely complicated discipline, requiring multiple skillsets for success. Big companies often have separate SEO, media buying, social media, and online PR departments, making digital marketing a mix of tactics and strategies. In order to be a good digital marketing manager, you’ll need to know how each type of online marketing – from social media to SEO – plays its own role in achieving the company’s short-term and long-term marketing goals. Sound complicated? It is, but with an understanding of how a digital marketing plan is created, managing the different aspects of digital marketing is simple. In fact, most of the elements overlap – social media and PR, for example, contribute to SEO. To be a successful digital marketing manager, you’ll need to be able to develop an in-depth, effective digital marketing strategy that identifies which tactics are important in achieving your company’s goals, and which aren’t. Learn how to develop a great digital marketing strategy with our Marketing Strategy course. From market segmentation to accountability, you’ll learn the essentials for a digital marketing plan to be a profitable, measurable success.

Understand KPIs and conversions

Gone are the days when traffic was the ultimate goal of digital marketing teams. As analytics software like Google Analytics makes tracking conversions simple, a good digital marketing manager needs to understand how to track and achieve KPIs. KPIs are key performance indicators – measures of performance that your company can use to assess the success of its digital marketing. A common KPI is conversions – the more conversions a campaign achieves, the more successful it’s been. Understanding your company’s KPIs is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing management. Does your company want to increase its brand awareness and attract more fans on social media? Does it want to generate more sales leads? Every company has different goals, and understanding how these goals are being achieved by your marketing strategy is essential for success. By using conversion tracking, it’s easy to see how your strategy is achieving your company’s goals. Do you want to learn how to track leads, sales, and other conversions to make sure your marketing plan is a success? Check out our Conversion Crash Course and learn how to produce measurable marketing campaigns that achieve company goals.

Keep up with the basics of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of any online marketing strategy. It’s also one of the most turbulent, with a constantly updated set of guidelines from Google making it tough to know what works, and what doesn’t. From guest blogging to blog commenting, some of the SEO tactics that were effective in 2012 could do serious harm to your rankings – not to mention your brand – right now. Every online marketing manager should keep up with the basics of good SEO. Knowing how SEO works, from the importance of on-page SEO to building links that Google likes, gives you a deeper understanding of how public relations, social media, and other forms of marketing play a role in your digital marketing strategy. It also plays a role in determining the focus of your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns. With a knowledge of SEO, you can target keywords using Adwords that will eventually form the basis of your company’s SEO campaigns. Are you new to SEO? Learn the fundamentals of SEO by enrolling in our ClickMinded SEO Training course. Freshly updated for 2014, it covers the latest algorithm update – Google Hummingbird – and shows you how to succeed with SEO in 2014.

Know the value of social media

As the manager of a digital marketing team, you’ll be responsible for updating your company’s social media presence. Social media is a powerful tool for reaching out to your audience, but many digital marketing manager undervalue its importance. From crisis management to lead generation, social media can be used for hundreds of purposes. Understanding its importance, and the gap it bridges between digital marketing and public relations, is essential for any digital marketing manager. One of the most important things you can do is learn the fundamentals of Social Media Management. From Facebook to LinkedIn, learn how your business can connect with its audience and increase sales by using social media to its advantage.

Manage a digital marketing team

Great digital marketing managers bridge the gap between the business goals of the upper management and the technical demands of SEOs, media buyers, social media managers, and more. Because of this, great digital marketing managers need more than just knowledge of digital marketing; they need to understand how to set goals, schedule deadlines, and organize a team of anywhere from two to 100 different people. If you’re moving into a management role after spending years working hands-on in SEO or media buying, the chance of skillsets can be difficult. Luckily, management is something you can learn through the knowledge and experience of others. Enroll in our Ultimate Management course to learn how to become an effective and inspirational manager for your team. If you manage a remote team, you’ll also want to enroll in our in-depth course on Managing and Influencing Virtual Teams.

Do you want to become a digital marketing manager?

The digital marketing industry is growing, with companies spending a total of $100 million on digital marketing in 2012 alone. As it grows, the demand for experienced digital marketing managers is becoming greater than ever before. Do you want to become a digital marketing manager? Read our blog post on careers in marketing to understand the different pathways to digital marketing success, and start developing your career today.