Business owners and executives are now realizing that they can’t really manage marketing their business effectively on the internet by themselves, so they need to hire a Digital Marketing Manager (DMM), but what is this new role and what are they expected to do, and what will be the return on Investment from this now role?
On the first day at your office the DMM will have a meeting to really get to feel the brand from within, what everyone feels is the corporate culture, and why they all work for the company. This brand feeling will be expressed through all outbound communications that is done from this day forward.
He or she will take over your website, as this will be the place all your digital marketing should end up at, it is the focus of all the work carried out by marketing.
He will start to optimize your website to make sure the keywords and key phrases used in your website and offline are reflective of the brand, this could be days or weeks depending on how big your website is. He will also make sure the top team members are highlighted and people looking at the website know who runs the business and that they are approachable.
He will seek out joint ventures with other businesses who have websites that have a good connection for linking back to one another, this he knows will be vital to get better ranking on search engines for your business.
He will then go over all your social media accounts that you have and create any you need, keeping intact the brand you have built up. He will invite as many targeted people to the groups and pages because he will start the content soon.
He will start a press room where he can add online press releases, news items about your business.
He will take over or start your Video accounts with YouTube Vimeo etc. and go through any videos you have posted previously and edit to get the best Search engine optimisation that again reflects your brand message.
When the ground work is complete he will start your content. This involves blogs, news releases, videos, short blogs, tweets and sharing to book marking sites like Reddit and Mix
Your DMM should be an experienced person, as he will have to write about business in general, and have a feel for many walks of life, sure the kid just out of university will know about Tik Tok and who the top Korean Pop bands are, but what does he know about Recruitment, logistics or Plumbing business? In my chats with business owners a B2B influencer is more effective than a basic social media influencer as he will be a bit older and be able to write about experiences than a younger graduate.
That being said if you are a K.Pop band or a fashion business, then the younger influencers will be more your cup of tea or skinny Latte or what evvers!
He will start interviewing the top management for Online press releases and be hungry for news in the industry, any new products and or services you are developing to post about and share how cutting edge your business is.
Your DMM will be a creative story teller, as he knows internet users don’t really want boring business blogs that they will be told to scan through and digest the basics at pain of death from their bosses, they want to be entertained. If your business is really humdrum then he will find peripheral avenues to write and make videos about that will, above all, entertain educate and then magically ‘crowbar’ your brand at the end of the ‘story’.
He will manage your ‘Digital budget’ spending business cash to boost and create adverts on all the social media sites to make sales or sales leads for the sales team to go at. The amount of your budget will be a major factor in him coming to work for you as he knows all too well that business today cannot possibly survive the internet with little or to no budget to boost the reach of his content.
Your DMM will have researched your company thoroughly before committing to become a member of your team and he will expect the bosses to be acutely responsive to marketing, because there is nothing worse than waiting for content to be approved for longer than necessary to be able to post and share, or to be at odds with the brand message.
All the work he does is to drive traffic back to your website and convert leads to sales or in the case of large ticket items like Real Estate or major business expenditure like factories or vehicles; to make appointments to meet new potential clients for the sales team.
He must be given at least 6 months to find his feet in your organisation, any business starting an online marketing strategy from scratch or from a basic reach, needs this time at least to see the effectiveness. And good management will also have a deep understanding about brand engagement and how it is as important as pure sales when it comes to the longevity of any business.
A decent DMM should earn around 150,000 Baht a month according to Adecco (ask me if you want the full guide free) and the top ones yield 6-10 times this in returns for investors over years, that is when they can easily go on their own, so if he comes back ten minutes later from dinner break go easy on them!
