Digital marketing is evolving, and at a crazy pace. The last 2 years have seen a mammoth shift in digital advertising spends. Given more people stayed indoors, they spent more time online. Surveys indicated a 50–70% increase in online time spent by users. Not only this, many OTT and streaming platforms registered the highest user growth upto 50% within a timespan of one year.
Covid has forced many traditional and small businesses to shift their marketing budgets from offline to online. Even the bigger and established Forbes 500 companies have acknowledged a 15–30% increased share of digital budgets.
Hence, digital marketing roles are in much more demand than ever before. This is a highly dynamic field which requires contant upgradation of skillsets to stay relevant.
1. BRAND MANAGER
Till few years ago, this was the most coveted marketing role. A brand manager is also the brand owner. He/she is responsible for revenue, life-cycle and go to market strategy for the brand. Understanding of P&L, inventory, supply chain, product launch and marketing are essential skillsets for a Brand Manager. While most brand managers are also quite adept in digital marketing, owning to online share of business, this role demands a comprehensive multiple channel GTM knowledge. However, in the recent times, this role has given way for the newer roles we will discuss about.
2. DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER
The new age role. This role expects an all around generalist understanding of the digital ecosystem. Strategy, GTM, Analytics, CRM, Influencer and Content marketing and SEO — the role expects you to understand each and every aspect. A Digital marketing manager can work across a single product or portfolio of products, depending on the priority and size of the firm.
3. PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER
The most coveted of it all. Product manager and Product Marketing Manager roles are sought by most graduates in this space. Driven by big tech firms, the pay brackets are the highest. The PMM role entails working with Product Manager and Tech to develop product as per the needs of target audience and take it to market by the GTM strategies. PMMs are actively involved in user research and product innovation, and post launch, almost entirely own the go to market.
4. CATEGORY MARKETING MANAGER
This role is prevalent mostly in E-commerce companies like Amazon. A Category Marketing Manager needs to drive category growth. For eg — Shoes as a category. This is a role where the core KPI is the overall business of the category. The Category marketing manager simultaneously needs to oversee the GTM of all top brands in the category. Understanding of marketplace models, pricing, inventory and marketing is expected. Key tasks — Channeling organic traffic to the category and driving conversion.
5. E-COMMERCE MARKETING MANAGER
While a Category marketing role focuses on overall category growth, an E-commerce marketing manager will handle client growth in the category. This is a client facing role involving strategising marketing for big clients and ensuring their growth. The role involves complete understanding of available advertising inventory for the e-commerce firm and their usage to growth respective clients.
6. CHANNEL MARKETING MANAGER
This role is relevant to firms with different revenue channels and is expected to deliver the overall channel growth through marketing.
Understanding of industry space, creating awareness of existing products and GTM is expected.
Eg- Retail channel
7. SOCIAL MARKETING MANAGER
Social Marketing Managers create and maintain brand promotions and marketing campaigns for their company or products across several social media networks. Expertise needed is the grasp of social media trends, topicality, and strategising organic growth.
8. GROWTH MARKETING MANAGER
A Growth marketing manager is someone who optimises throughout the funnel, and uses data-driven strategy to lift key performance metrics. Skills extend beyond digital marketing to conversion optimisation and doing growth experiments.
9. PRODUCT SPECIALIST
A role mostly present in big tech firms.These are folks with in-depth understanding of a particular product. They usually consult big clients with their services. Eg- Display ads specialist. Responsibilities include driving client growth by optimisation.
10. PERFORMANCE MARKETING MANAGER
As the name suggests, this role delivers on performance advertising , usually linked to the purchase of a product or service. There is a huge demand of this role as most top brands hire to sell their products online. Again, here the channels are not relevant. One has to leverage every performance channel to drive business. Native Ads, Google, FB and other performance platforms are mostly leveraged.
Eg — Performance marketing for Samsung s22.
11. DIGITAL STRATEGIST
This role is common in Big Tech organisations like Meta, Google and Amazon. Primarily a client facing role , a specialist helps big clients to achieve their business goals through the digital product they specialise in. In some organisations, they might not be restricted to a product, and will look at the customer goals holistically and create a success plan using every available product company in the kitty.
12. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION MANAGER
Digital Transformation is the need of the hour. Most organisations realise they need to move their strategy to digital, but are not very sure on the overall approach. Thus , the core job of a Digital Transformation Manager is leading and strategising digital transformation roadmap for the organisation . This role drives initiatives which lead to digitisation and help the growth in online business share. This is a strategy role also includes imparting knowledge, and conducting learning sessions for internal teams might be expected.
13. CONVERSION OPTIMISATION SPECIALIST
Owing conversion is the core KPI for this role. A Optimisation specialist is expected to provide product feature analysis , develop recommendations for UX improvements, develop relevant A/B tests and drive insights on conversion.
14. MARKETING OPERATIONS MANAGER
A fairly broad role. A Marketing Operations Manager owns end-to-end optimization and governance of marketing processes. Role entails tech and automation integration, funnel optimization, data tracking and reporting tools.
15. SEO — MANAGER/SPECIALIST
This is pretty much self explanatory. Again, this is a role which is very much in demand. Every organisation needs a SEO specialist to drive organic traffic. Given the complexity of the role, good SEO specialists are well sought after at great pays. They are expected to own the overall SEO strategy including off page, on page and technical SEO. Depending on size, this role may or may not work with outsourced agencies.
Let us know if you benefitted from this article. If there is a specific role you are interested in and I missed it here, do let me know in the comments . Do share this if the content helped.
Thanks for reading.
