Digital marketing is constantly changing.
When marketing a business, many SMEs opt to bring on an external digital marketing agency.
The alternative is to hire an internal marketing department which, depending on your budget, may not be cost-effective.
In this article, we’ll cover all of the roles you’ll find in a digital marketing agency, detailing everything you need to know about the people who will help to develop a highly effective marketing strategy for your business.
Why do SMEs use a digital marketing agency?
There are a lot of moving parts in digital marketing, meaning that you’re highly unlikely to find a single person who can:
- Plan your strategy
- Organise your account
- Conduct SEO research
- Write compelling copy
- Design your website/assets
- Develop & program your website
It also means that it’s incredibly expensive to hire enough people to cover all of these necessary elements. This makes a digital marketing agency the most cost-effective way to achieve digital marketing success and business growth.
So, what roles make up a digital marketing agency?
Account Manager
Your account manager is your primary contact with the marketing agency. It’s their role to plan, organise and execute your digital marketing strategy. They will get to know your business inside and out, learning about your pain points, industry and growth goals in order to optimise your strategy.
They’ll work closely with content managers, creative directors and SEO specialists, all of whom contribute to your unique approach.
Digital marketing is fluid, and works best if regularly updated and edited depending on results & external input. As a result, if you ever have any concerns or questions, your account manager is there to answer them.
Account Executive
An account executive’s main role is to support the account manager.
Your account’s executive will handle lots of the day-to-day implementation of your strategy, guided by the manager at all times.
Copywriter/Content Manager
A content manager’s main role is to liaise with you to gain deep insight into content titles, form this information into content strategies and execute said strategies, creating content such as:
- Blogs
- Guides
- Infographics
- Email workflows
- Whitepapers
- Website copy
Essentially, if you need any business communications written, a content manager will handle it. Highly effective, conversion-focused content is best written by someone well versed in creating a strong narrative.
Sure, you can do this yourself, but you’ll see significantly better results by using a professional.
Designer/Creative Director
The creative director is a cornerstone of any digital marketing agency.
Digital marketing relies on high-quality design for almost everything – your website should look professional and be easy to use; your communications should be properly formatted; your ads should be eye-catching and memorable.
There’s so much more that your creative director will do, but in a nutshell, they’ll work closely with you to:
- Help reimagine your brand
- Create quality assets for you to use (imagery, gifs, icons, etc.)
- Design a killer website
The creative director will help to influence your ongoing brand development, allowing you to create something that will truly disrupt the market.
Web Developer
The web developer takes all of the creative director’s stunning designs and makes them a reality.
This is done using complicated strings of code that we won’t get into right now. All you need to know is that a web developer works behind the scenes to ensure that your website works optimally, both from a user experience perspective and a search perspective.
SEO Specialist
SEO (search engine optimisation) specialists are an incredibly important part of any digital marketing agency. They’re the masterminds behind your organic search strategy (the process of getting your website at the top of search engines such as Google.
They achieve this by accessing the back end of your website and thoroughly researching exactly what your target audience are searching for.
This information is then passed onto both you and the content manager, allowing the team to create content that people want to read and Google wants to display.
An SEO specialist also will often handle your PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, which is where you pay a small cost to put your ads at the top of search engines. These ads need to be optimised with your target keywords, which makes the SEO specialist the perfect person for the job (as they are already intimately familiar with your keywords!).
Sales Manager
Any good business needs a sales manager, a digital marketing agency is no different!
While they won’t work with you all that much after you’ve been onboarded, the sales manager is the first point of contact you’ll have with an agency. As a result, they’ll learn all about you and will need to accurately convey this information to the rest of the team.
Be open and honest when talking with a sales manager, as this is the first step on a (hopefully) long and fruitful relationship!
Director
Many directors like to get involved in every client’s journey. They oversee everything that goes into your marketing strategy and are there to ensure things go smoothly at all times.