If you’ve wanted support in making a digital marketing campaign for your business or company, you’ve probably heard suggestions that you hire a digital marketing strategist to guide you through it. Since many people are familiar with digital marketing agencies and firms, having a singular digital strategist be in charge of your internet marketing might seem intimidating or short-sighted.
In reality, you want a digital strategist on your side, as they can help you organize a digital marketing strategy that’s specialized for your business and services. If you wish to hire one, or search for one to work alongside, these are just a few of the things they can do for you, as well as what makes the best digital marketing strategists so worthwhile.
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategist?
A digital marketing strategist is essentially a leader for internet marketing projects to help fulfill the goals and needs of a client or employer. Companies can hire their own to lead an in-house team of digital marketing staff members, but they can also work with multiple strategists through making plans with digital marketing agencies like Canopy Media to help improve a business’s online presence.
This can take all kinds of forms, but the goal is always to improve how well a business can show up in people’s internet searches and social media experience. This is so that those seeking your business are able to find you again easily, and so that prospective clients can find your business among or ahead of your competitors and peers.
What Can Digital Marketing Strategists Do for You?
There are all kinds of things that digital marketing strategists can do, but as mentioned already, their main goal is always going to be to provide online advertising for your company. They can recommend things like improving your website, getting more visible in search engines like Google, experimenting with paid advertising, social media management, reputation enhancement, web design support, and even preparing blogs and video content for your website to attract new viewers, but there are a few specific tasks that they often will do to ensure your business’s digital marketing plan succeeds.
This is not a comprehensive list of everything a digital marketing strategist can do, but it is a great set of typical tasks they’ll want to accomplish for you. These are some of the services they can provide, as well as what sorts of things they’ll be doing regularly while working with you to improve your online presence.
Build Digital Marketing Plans
As obvious as it seems, the first and most important thing that a digital marketing strategist will do is help you strategize your marketing plan. This includes not only figuring out what efforts will give you the most success, but also estimating how fast your business will grow online and what other costs you might need to make for other team members.
Without a plan, it’s impossible to get further in digital spaces. It’s a rapidly changing area of advertising that involves countless algorithms, and while there are some things that can be rapidly put into place, there needs to be a more cohesive plan and schedule to make sure your company is able to keep up with peers and competitors through high-quality digital marketing efforts.
Analyze and Measure Data
Digital marketing strategists don’t just do marketing, they also do a large amount of measuring to ensure what you’re doing is working. It’s not enough to just be sure what can succeed, as you need to figure out whether your plan is working or not. Thankfully, one of the other main goals of strong digital marketing strategists is to check any data they can about how much your site is being visited and engaged with, as well as checking what sites or locations they find it through.
This can often include keeping track of web traffic to know how many people are visiting, which they can compare to how many people are making purchases or contacting you through your site. This will help them figure out where your site might be having issues, as well as identify areas of your website and online presence that are strong to begin with.
They’ll help you understand how your efforts are improving your bottom line. They’ll help you understand what is working is what is not.
Prepare Digital Marketing Budgets
Unless you’re working with a given payment plan and budget already, many digital marketing strategists will also be able to collaborate with you when it comes to the costs of digital marketing. Running a paid advertising campaign, like Google or Facebook Ads – and promoting posts isn’t often free, and it can be part of a strategist’s job to ensure those funds are going to a worthwhile place.
Beyond this, digital marketing budgets can also include any additional staff or time that might be needed to complete a project. If a digital marketing strategist thinks your website could succeed through blog posts with search engine optimization keywords, they might budget some of their time to write content themselves, or instead use a portion of the budget to hire a writer or editor to add content for the site.
Manage Social Media Accounts
Digital marketing strategists can have a lot of overlap with social media managers, but they are certainly not the same job. Social media managers and social media strategists are much more focused, trying to improve the number of followers and regular interactions with your social media posts, which can potentially lead viewers to your business’s website and services.
Digital marketing strategists will handle your social media account in the context of your business, mainly through measurement and making sure to see how social media efforts influence the site itself by seeing how many people visit your site from the account. They will also likely be able to compare different profiles to see which is most popular with your consumers and clients, letting you build a strategy that capitalizes on the strongest accounts and posting styles.
Lead Digital Marketing Teams
As mentioned in the budgeting, it’s common for digital marketing strategists to work with other employees, but they often will report to a strategist in many circumstances. Even if they don’t hire or come with additional staff themselves, they usually will work with a wide variety of workers from content writers to graphic designers to help improve your website and social media pages.
Strong digital marketing strategists will often be the main person you work and interact with, and the members of their team are meant to help that strategist fulfill your goals and vision. As a result, they’ll often have more specific and distinct tasks, while the digital marketing strategist has to keep an eye on every aspect of your digital marketing plan as it’s being built and implemented. They’ll save you the hassle of figuring out what to do and who is going to tactically implement their recommendations.
Keep Track of Digital Marketing Trends
While this is not entirely part of the job in many instances, something extremely helpful when it comes to digital marketing strategists is that they’ll often have a better understanding of popular digital marketing trends. These can change drastically based on how certain websites like Google work behind-the-scenes, how people are using certain social media platforms, and even just what’s popular with other businesses similar to yours. It can be exhausting trying to keep up with these things yourself.
Your digital marketing strategist should be aware of these when they change and will often be keeping an eye out for when something changes. This can help you compare with other businesses that you might be competing or appearing alongside in online searches, and it also ensures that your digital marketing efforts won’t become outdated before they start attracting more viewers and clients.
How Much Do Digital Marketing Strategists Cost?
There’s no clear answer to how much a digital marketing strategist will cost a business since it very much depends on how much you’re willing to pay and what type of work you want them to do for you. If you’re more familiar with digital marketing terms and strategies, you might want to contact one and discuss rates with them, and you can come to a price that suits the work they’ll be doing for you and how closely you want to work with them.
One of the easier ways to work with digital marketing strategists is through digital marketing agencies and firms, such as Canopy Media. These offer both strategists and full teams to help build your digital marketing plans to help implement them efficiently and effectively, and you can often get a more certain rate and level of quality by working with their fuller teams and experienced digital marketing strategists. Strategy plus tactics often yields exceptional returns.
If you want to learn more about Canopy Media, or what a digital marketing strategist or company can do for you, you can book a free discovery session to help us understand your business – and ask them more about what their digital marketing strategists can do for you.
Do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategist?
Digital marketing is quickly becoming something that’s vital to any business since more users than ever are using the internet as their primary resource for any type of service. As a result, you need some form of digital marketing specialist on your side. They will help you get more guaranteed results than trying to navigate this challenging field by yourself.
How you go about finding one is up to you, though. You can get similar benefits from working with one directly as you can when collaborating with a digital marketing agency. As long as your digital marketing strategist is able to get results and address your internet marketing needs, you’ll know that your strategist is exactly the type that you need. Good luck (or give us a call)!
Leave a Reply