Is a Digital Marketer in your 2019 budget?

Are you a department head or business owner who’s spent countless hours trying to recruit, interview and hire marketing talent in this economy? It’s hard. On top of that, you have your day job and a million other things to do.

The current unemployment rate in the U.S. is hovering right around 4% and the surge in the U.S. economy has seen a lot of companies investing in their workforce. In the digital marketing space, we’d wager it’s an even tighter market.

Let’s look at a few of the roles a digital marketer might handle in a small department or company.

Digital Strategy

A really good digital marketer should be proficient, not necessarily an expert, at a lot of different marketing technologies (web, SEO, social media, email marketing, online advertising, graphic design, video, CRM, automation, PR, etc.)  and knows how to knit campaigns together across them all. This is really important.

Administer the Company Website

Keeping content fresh and current on your website is key. Blogging, page updates, pricing and service line changes, leadership and press releases all require someone to administer on your website. If you’re a small business with little to no web presence, you’re already way behind the rest of the pack and that person might spend the bulk of their time just trying to build something current. 

Demand Generation

Creating compelling content that helps your buyers all the way through the buying cycle is critical and knowing how to build marketing automation workflows that can connect your buyers with the right content at the right time is critical. In order to support demand generation, many companies use marketing automation (like HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, etc.). It isn’t rocket science, but in the hands of an untrained person or once-in-a-while user, it can quickly be a very expensive email marketing tool. 

Email Marketer

Sales teams and leadership are driven by leads and there’s no easier way to reach a lot of people than through email. The challenge: everyone else is doing this too. You need to really excel in this realm to be effective. Writing effective marketing (or even internal) emails that people want to read is also challenging. And time-consuming. On top of all of that, is there a schedule for all of this as some part of a cohesive content strategy? Will they know how to measure a campaign’s success metrics using your CRM to track engagement and route leads accordingly?

Social Media Management

Often outsourced. Why? Because to do it right is actually time-consuming and requires that you have someone who not only publishes content from your brand, products and services, but also listens to the feedback from consumers, seeks out influencers to help amplify the signal and promotes your clients and customers on top of it all. 

These are just five segments of digital and more could certainly be added to the list above. You could include SEO, online advertising, graphic design, video production and even project management in there. The point is, finding a digital marketer that excels in all of the above is difficult and chances are if a company has that person already, they’re well-compensated because they’re adding huge value to the company. 

However, if you don’t have that person or enough of those people, what do you do? 

Three-Step Evaluation

1. Maybe you already have a grand plan. You just need the resources to implement (or help the team you already have get more done). We’d recommend you re-analyze your marketing plan​ and identify at least one element that you can outsource.​
2. Talk to your team.​ The fact that you’re seeking their input on solving problems will help earn their buy-in when/if outside help is brought in.
3. Analyze the costs carefully. How badly do you need a full-time employee? They’re expensive to hire, train, keep happy and retain. If you can strategically outsource some (or all) of your digital, you can free your team up to focus on the strategic and creative versus the operational and tactical. If you’re a small business owner, you can free yourself up to focus on revenue generation and product or service delivery, without attempting all the marketing work as well. 

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