With the ever-growing popularity of online shopping, more and more companies are realizing the importance of online marketing. While some companies choose to go the traditional route and hire marketing managers to oversee the department, many now seek to take a more specialized approach and hire marketing professionals with experience in the field.
So What Is An Online Marketing Manager?
An online marketing manager is responsible for the promotion of a company’s products and services online. This role often involves working with various business units and teams to come up with content that will attract and retain customers to the company’s website.
Since its inception, the field of online marketing has evolved alongside the industry. Today, with more and more businesses shifting to a digital sphere, understanding how to market online is more important than ever. To better understand this responsibility, let’s take a quick look at how marketing and advertising evolved as the digital sphere evolved.
Early Days Of Marketing
While the field of digital marketing is relatively young, the roots of modern-day marketing can be traced back to the late 1800s, when magazines like Campaign began to publish research on marketing and advertising. Companies like J. Walter Thompson, Lowe’s, and Ogilvy & Mather followed soon afterward and established in-house marketing departments.
Then, as businesses began to shift to the digital sphere in the early 2000s, marketing departments focused on getting the word out about their products via offline channels like magazine and newspaper articles, radio ads, and television commercials. Many marketers still consider TV ads to be the most effective way to reach an audience, and the industry still thrives.’
The Rise Of Online Marketing
In the late 1990s, as the Internet began to take off, marketers looked for new ways to spread the word about their products. While many turned to offline channels to capture potential customers, some chose to go the opposite direction and begin marketing online. The first to do so was E-Bay in 1995, which at the time was the main provider of online marketplaces and auction websites. With its focus on online retail, E-Bay figured that the best way to generate revenue was to drive traffic to its website and encourage online shopping.
Then, in 2014, Pinterest launched ‘Buyable Pins’, which allow businesses to pay to have their products pinned to Pinterest’s huge audience, encouraging online marketing and retail on the platform. In the years since, companies like Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix have embraced the potential of online marketing and built their businesses around attracting and engaging customers online.
Key Responsibilities Of An Online Marketing Manager
As the role of an online marketing manager has evolved, so has the job description. While the responsibilities of a traditional marketing manager are fairly similar across industries, some roles demand more specialized knowledge.
Depending on the size of a company, an online marketing manager may be responsible for a wide range of responsibilities, including content creation, driving traffic to websites, boosting social media accounts, and analyzing marketing performance. In larger organizations, there may be more than one person coordinating all online marketing efforts. Additionally, some organizations choose to outsource or freelance specific tasks to experts in the field.
Create And Compile Product Research
As part of an online marketing manager’s job description, he or she will often be expected to come up with interesting and creative ideas for content that will be published to various platforms. This role often requires significant research, as the manager must be able to ensure that each piece of content is as effective as possible and meet the highest possible standards of quality.
Product research can vary from developing an in-house knowledge of a specific industry to taking on contract work, such as detailed competitive analysis or event research. While some businesses choose to outsource this responsibility to an external company, in-house research helps to establish credibility, minimize outsourcing costs, and provide a greater degree of control over the process.
Understand And Measure The Marketing Channels
Unlike traditional advertising, which provides an easy way to measure the results of an ad campaign, the field of digital marketing is somewhat more difficult to analyze. This is due to the fact that there are so many different platforms and methods for marketing online. For example, it is not uncommon for someone responsible for digital marketing to work with SEO analysts, content management systems, and social media managers from different departments to ensure that all aspects of a digital marketing campaign are working together smoothly.
However, with the right software and a little bit of research, it is possible to get a decent idea of the success of a digital marketing campaign. Analytics tools like Google Analytics can be used to track the traffic coming to a website from different sources, such as social media or paid ads. By comparing this traffic to the total number of visits from the same time period the previous year, it is possible to get a rough idea of the campaign’s performance. This will help guide any necessary adjustments and improve the campaign’s chances of success.
Marketing managers will also typically be expected to keep up with the latest practices and technologies in their industry, particularly as they relate to online marketing. Keeping up with the constantly evolving field means that a good manager should be able to easily pick up new skills and be able to continually find new ways to improve their marketing effectiveness.
Develop And Implement Marketing Plans
In addition to creating content, generating traffic, and conducting research, marketing managers are also responsible for coming up with a plan for their department. In the early days of marketing, this might have involved getting the word out about a new product via newspaper ads or magazine spreads. However, with the rise of the Internet, planning and strategy became more important.
Marketing plans should take into consideration everything from market research and competitive analysis to strategy and budgeting. Additionally, since digital marketing is so broad and can involve so many different platforms, it is essential that the plan incorporates all of these elements into a cohesive, digital marketing strategy.
Identify And Analyze Key Performance Indicators
The various responsibilities of an online marketing manager can sometimes be a bit overwhelming, particularly if you are new to the role or to the industry. To help you get a better idea of how all of this fits together, it is important to break down the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to gauge your success.
The most basic of these KPIs is traffic. Just like marketing campaigns, websites can be analyzed through the use of analysis tools like Google Analytics. This tool will track the number of people who have visited a website and recorded some basic information about what they did while there. This includes things like the number of pages they viewed, the length of their visit, and the search words they used to find the site.
Some businesses choose to use different metrics, like the amount of leads generated or the number of sales made through a website. While these might not seem like traditional benchmarks for measuring marketing success, they can provide valuable information about the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign. For example, the more leads a website generates, the more effective the website’s SEO must be.
Understanding the basics of SEO, along with the metrics that can be tracked through SEO, will greatly benefit any business or individual who wants to get the most out of their online marketing. This includes knowing how to find the right keywords and how to optimize a page for these keywords so that it ranks high in the search results.
As a new business or an existing business in need of a digital marketing boost, you can choose from a variety of offers to educate yourself on the power of digital marketing.