You’ve decided to hire an online marketing manager, and now it’s time to explore the responsibilities and deliverables of this role, as well as what you can expect from the relationship. This article will cover everything you need to know. 

Responsibilities And Deliverables

The responsibilities of an online marketing manager are fairly broad and can include everything from creating content to increasing conversion, SEO, and social media activity. 

The deliverables of an online marketing manager are also fairly broad and can include everything from analyzing and reporting on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns to creating and maintaining online content to grow and maintain your business’ online footprint.

It’s important to note that the responsibilities and deliverables of an online marketing manager are not all the same and can vary from one project to the next. While it’s good practice to have general guidelines or a set of standards you’ll follow, you should not be afraid to explore other avenues or try new things. This is what makes your content fresh and interesting, and allows you to stay ahead of the trends.

Managing A Marketing Plan

One of the responsibilities of an online marketing manager is to manage the marketing plan for the business. This means creating goals and objectives for the coming months, as well as monitoring and reviewing the progress made toward these goals and objectives.

The first step in the process is to review the current state of affairs and take stock of how the business is performing; this involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy as well as the performance of each of your marketing channels. 

From here, you can map out improvements and take steps to correct any deficiencies. To create a more solid foundation for your marketing plan, you can also consider outsourcing parts of the process to an experienced marketing agency.

Keeping Abreast Of Trends

An online marketing manager is expected to keep up with the latest trends and technologies in marketing, as well as harness these technologies to grow and strengthen the business. This can mean doing more with less, or achieving greater results with the same effort. 

Regularly reviewing online content and analyzing metrics like click-through rates and bounce rates for each of your campaigns can help you determine the effectiveness of your content and understand what resonates with your audience.

Through consistent research, you can determine the ideal content for your target audience, as well as identify key performance indicators to help you track the success of your campaigns. This way, you can better understand what’s working and what needs to be changed. If you find that your bounce rate is high and the content is not converting well, you may decide to re-conceptualize your target audience or campaign material.

Monitoring Overall Performance

When it comes to the performance of your marketing effort, an online marketing manager is responsible for assessing the results of each campaign and analyzing these results to determine the effectiveness of each part of the plan. 

The first step in this analysis is to assess the performance of each individual channel, like SEO, social media, email marketing, and so on. Once you have this analysis in place, you can take a step back and assess the performance of your entire marketing strategy. Finally, you can review the key performance indicators you set for each channel and campaign. This way, you’ll know which ones are delivering the results you’re looking for.

To prepare for this assessment, you should define specific benchmarks for each channel and campaign, such as increasing website traffic by 50% within three months, or getting 50 unique visitors per day from a targeted Facebook ad campaign. Once these benchmarks are in place, it’s easier to track progress and determine if you’re on the right track or need to make some revisions.

If you set an objective for your social media strategy to gain 100 new followers per week and you’re currently at 20 followers, you may decide that your target audience is not yet ready for the content you’re trying to share or that your strategy needs a change. You can either choose to continue with the same strategy but increase your target audience’s readiness for the content you’re sharing or change your strategy and try a new approach, like building a community.

Measuring And Advertising

If you decide that part of your marketing strategy falls outside the scope of a single channel, like sales or content for example, you’ll need to find an alternative measurement tool. This is because measurement and advertising are two separate entities in terms of responsibility. For measurement, you need a tool that can measure the results of your marketing activity, while advertising is responsible for generating these results. 

This is why you should never measure the success of your marketing strategy with the same tool you use for advertising. The problem with this is that not all marketing activity is created equal when it comes down to measurement. For instance, creating a landing page with an exit intent pop-up, or running a paid social media campaign for the same business are both forms of marketing activity that will generate results, but they’re very different types of activities.

The main difference between measurement and advertising is that one is looking at specific results, like the number of web pages that are landing on or the number of leads that are being generated by a particular campaign, while the other is looking at the end goal of the campaign, which is to generate sales. This can make it quite the juggling act to figure out how to measure the results of your digital marketing efforts without actually advertising and creating more leads or sales. 

Thankfully, there are tools designed for this very purpose. Like the HubSpot dashboard, you can see all the leads and conversions from one place, as well as compare these results to previous periods to see if there’s any improvement. This visibility into marketing performance is invaluable and allows you to quickly identify any changes that may need to be made. 

Content Creation

Creating content to support your marketing strategy is another major responsibility of an online marketing manager. This includes everything from providing detailed guidance on how to create a content strategy to executing on this strategy. 

Creating content involves a lot of brainstorming and research beforehand, as well as proper planning and regular publishing. The latter is often overlooked, but properly implementing a content schedule can increase your blog’s productivity by up to 400%.

The most efficient and effective way to create content is to start from the end and work your way back. This means starting with a clear goal in mind — whether that’s attracting new customers, increasing engagement, raising brand awareness, or boosting website traffic — and designing your content strategy around this objective. 

For example, if you’re trying to raise brand awareness and you come up with an idea for a blog post on the ins and outs of espresso machines, you may decide to start by creating an explainer video on the subject. This type of content can then be used as a lead generation tool, a way to demonstrate industry knowledge, or as part of a content marketing strategy. 

Analyzing Data And Trends

An important responsibility of an online marketing manager is to analyze marketing data and trends. This involves using various tools to track the performance of each of your marketing strategies and planning activities, and reviewing these results carefully to see which methods are working and which ones need to be changed or replaced.

Each channel has its own data that can be extracted and stored locally, like the number of website visits from a particular country, or the amount of traffic on a specific Instagram post at a certain time of day. This local data can be used to assess the success of individual campaigns and channels, and determine if changes need to be made to bring about further growth.

This level of analysis is only beneficial if you take the time to review the results regularly. Checking in regularly and reassessing the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy can help you determine if you’re on the right track or need to change something about your approach. 

Communication

Last but not least, we have communication, or the act of ensuring that everyone on your team is on the same page and understands what’s going on. 

Your team’s internal communication should reflect your marketing strategy and make it easy for everyone to understand the goals and objectives of your campaign. Furthermore, to stay on the right track and make sure everyone is aligned, regular meetings and conference calls to review progress and set new goals are a necessity.

As an online marketing manager, you’ll need to develop a transparent relationship with your customers. This means ensuring that your customers feel like they’re part of the conversation, and that their opinion is valued. You can achieve this by listening to and acting on their feedback, as well as engaging with them on social media.

Summing up…