Hiring a digital marketer + 4 tips on building your digital strategy
Published on April 15, 2021
Last modified on May 06, 2024
Published on April 15, 2021
Last modified on May 06, 2024
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Being digitally savvy is not just a mere competitive edge anymore — in this day and age, keeping up with digital trends and understanding how these can impact your business is key to staying relevant in the market.
But unlike large companies with dedicated teams just for this purpose, small businesses don’t have the same resources to spare — with digital-related functions such as web design and development, marketing, SEO, Adwords, and other advertising commonly outsourced to agencies and freelancers instead.
Outsourcing is definitely a cost-effective way to address small businesses’ digital needs, but there is also a certain advantage to actually having in-house staff who knows the ins and outs of the business better.
Throughout working with different types of businesses over the years, we’ve observed that a balance can be achieved between these two things — while you don’t necessarily need to hire an entire team of marketers and developers or form your own in-house IT department, it’s still probably a good idea to have a dedicated digital marketer in your company.
(Throughout this blog, we’ll use the term “digital marketer” to refer to a role that serves as a digital go-to person for your business — someone who can help you execute your digital-related activities, and is also technical enough to be a bridge between your business and third-party vendors, like software developers.)
In this two-part blog series, we’ll talk about the advantages of having such a role in your company and the ideal qualities that you should look for when hiring. We’ll also share a list of things that you can do once this role is filled to help you get started on your digital strategy.
But first, let’s consider why your business needs an in-house digital go-to person:
Small, and even up to medium-sized businesses usually don’t have a dedicated marketing team. In fact, it’s typically the business owner who takes on this role, juggling it along with sales, HR, administrative and other management duties.
The bulkier part of the tasks may then be outsourced to agencies or freelancers — like programming tasks, writing ad copies, designing ad banners and brochures, setting up accounts and campaigns, doing SEO, posting on social media, and similar activities.
This setup typically doesn’t work for a number of reasons:
All of which can be very time-consuming.
When issues arise in the organization needing the owner’s attention, digital marketing is usually the first one to fall by the wayside—and it often stays there, forgotten for a long time.
Many people start their buying journey online — whether it’s researching a product or a service, or simply being exposed to options available to them through targeted advertising.
An established digital presence helps your company be visible to potential customers on the web, and having an in-house dedicated digital go-to person for your business will greatly help with that. But you might be wondering — isn’t it enough to delegate digital-related tasks to expert third-parties?
Even if you use an external supplier or a freelancer for marketing and web development, there are still many advantages with having your own in-house employee with a dedicated digital role:
Ideally, you should look for someone that can do both IT and online marketing — an individual with enough knowledge and experience in both fronts that, again, can act as your company’s bridge to third-party partners like developers and marketing agencies.
Experience beats everything. It would be a plus if they have (or have had) their own websites (e.g., affiliate sites or webshops). That way, they would have had exposure not only to marketing but also to the technical side of things, and this with the perspective of a business owner.
They could also be someone who has worked in an agency before—meaning they have the know-how and can apply it to your company, as well as relevant resources and connections who can help you (for example, with Adwords, Facebook advertisement, SEO, etc.).
Ideally, your new digital marketer should have both a technical and marketing background. You’re not exactly looking for a software developer here, but just someone who understands enough to be able to act as a sort of liaison between you and your developers or the IT agency that you use.
At the same time, they should also be well familiar with marketing concepts—understanding the metrics that measure a successful campaign and being able to coordinate with marketing agencies in both the creative and data analytics aspects of advertising.
Having a digitally savvy person on your team can serve as a valuable asset as digital acceleration continues. Once you have successfully filled this role, it’s time for you to get started on building or improving your digital strategy.
Now that you have a dedicated personnel to help with marketing and other digital functions, the first thing you should lay down is a plan for what needs to be done.
Here are some tips for planning and building your digital strategy:
To get you started, here’s a sample list of tasks that you can incorporate into your marketing plan. You can check out the links to where we talk about them in more detail in our blogs:
Task | Description |
Keyword research | Check what terms or keywords customers are using to search for your products / services |
Optimize page titles and descriptions | Edit your content to make sure they use the right keywords |
Utilize Google products (Analytics, Search Console, Tag Manager) | Set up and monitor these accounts for data on website traffic, conversions and user behavior |
Internal link-building | Add links throughout your pages to ease user navigation and make your content more interconnected with each other |
Implement schema markup | Add schema or structured data to your content to get a chance for your pages to have rich snippets in search results |
Set up social media pages (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business) | Establish your digital presence by setting up your accounts on these sites and regularly posting content |
Start a monthly newsletter | Share relevant news, tips, and resources in a monthly newsletter. |
Install user behavior analytics tools | Aside from Google Analytics, you can also consider using Crazy Egg and Hotjar to gain more insight about your user behavior. |
As we said, these are only basic marketing things that you can try. Depending on your business and current processes / setup, there are a lot of other ideas that may work for you.
1902 Software offers a comprehensive site review where our team of certified UX QA testers looks at your site and identifies issues and areas for improvement. We also provide tailored marketing suggestions based on your goals and nature of business.
If you want to learn more about this, or our development and design services, contact us and we’ll get back to you with a no-commitment meeting in less than 24 hours.
AUTHOR
Peter Skouhus
A Danish entrepreneur who owns 1902 Software Development, an IT company in the Philippines where he has lived since 1998. Peter has extensive experience in the business side of IT development, strategic IT management, and sales.