Companies looking to promote their products or services online need thoughtful marketing strategies and an understanding of how users use the web. It’s not enough to just create a website, wait for clients and hope for the best. That’s why today we turn to subject matter experts.
A modern Internet marketer is one of the most sought-after specialists in the Digital field.
Features of work
In a global sense, the main task of such a specialist is to build a dialogue with the target audience (TA), to correctly influence their social and physiological needs in order to sell a product or service.
Because internet marketing is a broad professional field, marketers can earn vastly different salaries. Entry-level candidates earn from 500 USD, while more senior specialists earn monthly from 1000 USD or more.
In addition to solid pay, the benefits of the profession include:
- possibility of remote work;
- demand in the market;
- excellent prospects;
- continuous development, as advertising technologies are constantly being modernized;
- flexible work schedule.
Due to multitasking, experts must have a wide range of skills. So, one day they can spend several days creating a company blog, and another day they can develop a system for promoting a brand on social networks. Creating websites, working with design, increasing online sales – all this requires developing a clear strategy and the willingness to work effectively in a team.
Working day of an Internet marketer
The specifics of production tasks will depend on the organization of the business, the scale of the project and the characteristics of the specialist’s activities.
What can be said for sure: an expert’s workday is always unpredictable and entertaining, involving an alternation of routine and creative tasks.
It is better to devote time to this strategically important task in the first half of the day, when the specialist is able to work most productively.
We said above that, in a global sense, the main task of an Internet marketer is to build trusting relationships with the target audience in order to ultimately motivate potential customers to purchase. In most cases, it is impossible to act head-on – many of us have already developed immunity to the constant “buy”.
Therefore, the lion’s share of professional Internet marketers’ time is spent developing brand promotion strategies. You’ve probably heard about the famous theory of 7 touches: on average, a client needs to be reminded about himself seven times in order for him to finally take the target action. What these touches will be is determined in the promotion strategy.
This also includes performance assessment based on KPIs and strategy adjustments.
How to convey the value of your offer to your target audience? How is it better than competitors’ offers? What is the USP of the proposed product? These and other questions can be answered with the help of content that is distributed through those sources where representatives of the target audience are accustomed to receiving information.
Tasks that are performed during the day:
- Team management: assigning new tasks to performers, checking completed tasks, selecting contractors, holding meetings and briefings, etc.;
- Business meetings with clients and contractors, communication with bloggers, etc.;
Soft skills
A modern internet marketer must have universal socio-psychological skills. The expert’s TOP soft skills include:
Readiness for continuous learning
Marketing tools are constantly evolving and improving. A specialist must have a thirst for learning new trends. He is always among the first to know the latest marketing news. A specialist asks questions when he does not understand new ideas, and does not hesitate to ask questions online to more experienced experts in the field.
The power of persuasion
Internet marketing is not only about motivation to place an order. In reality, marketers often have to convince clients and management to increase the budget in order to implement certain promotional strategy measures. The ability to select arguments and defend one’s position will definitely be useful to every Internet marketer.
Creative skills
Competition is fierce online, so to stand out from the crowd, advertising campaigns must be unique and memorable. Despite the fact that the profession of an Internet marketer in itself is interesting and unusual, it is important to avoid creative burnout and switch to a field of activity that allows you to reboot and stimulate creativity.
Ability to multitask + organizational skills
The digital sphere often involves working to achieve several KPIs at once, and an internet marketer is not just a creator, but often also the leader of an entire brand promotion project. This means that a specialist has to take on many different functions and, if necessary, quickly switch from one task to another.
It is important to set priorities while working. Don’t get carried away with things that distract you and don’t bring positive results to your business. By the way, the Eisenhower Matrix can help you prioritize your work.
Following your intuition
Even with solid experience and knowledge, taking into account intuition can greatly benefit the work of an Internet marketer.
Hard skills
The most important hard skills of modern Internet marketers include:
Knowledge of advertising channels
Promoting a business in the digital environment is impossible without knowledge of the specifics of how advertising channels work. The most popular include:
- contextual advertising;
- search engine promotion (SEO);
- promotion in social networks (SMM);
- banner and teaser advertising;
- content marketing;
- promotion of goods and services in aggregators;
- E-mail marketing, etc.
Knowledge of CRO (conversion rate optimization)
Whether the site brings huge traffic or not is not important. It doesn’t matter if prospects don’t buy. The ultimate goal of marketing is to get users to take a specific action. It is better to attract one or two potential buyers than to attract several thousand people with zero potential. An Internet marketer must be able to work with conversion and constantly improve performance indicators.
Ability to write selling texts
Whether these are posts on social networks, blog articles or texts describing services on the website does not matter. It is important that each material contributes to achieving the set KPIs.
Ability to work with analytical information
It may seem that the profession of an Internet marketer is exclusively creative. However, the activities of such a specialist are primarily aimed at achieving business goals, as a rule, the main one is increasing profits. In order to understand whether you are achieving your goals, you need to work with analytics systems, the most popular of which are Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics.
Who is this profession suitable for?
Despite the fact that the profession of an Internet marketer is highly paid and interesting, there are aspects that will not suit every applicant for the position: for example, you need to be able to multitask, make non-trivial decisions and be resistant to stress.
Before devoting yourself to studying a specialty and working in this field, we advise you to follow a few simple steps:
- Take a sheet of paper, divide it into 2 parts – on the right write down your strengths related to the profession, on the left – weaknesses that will become an obstacle to development.
- Determine which hard and soft skills you have developed sufficiently, and which ones need to be improved.
- Make a list of books in the area of interest, select suitable courses for studying at trusted online universities.
Instead of a resume
Today it is already quite difficult to find companies that do not have representatives on the Internet. Each of them needs effective PR campaigns, which means the profession of Internet marketer will not lose its popularity for a long time.
