The ability to internalize a digital marketing department is out of reach for most small and medium-sized companies, however, the trend we are seeing is that these companies are still hiring people with skills necessary to perform purely digital functions.
The dilemma occurs when the manager or director of the company itself must hire and assess the skills of a candidate to empower the company within the digital ecosystem. However, he or she lacks the specific knowledge to assess whether the said candidate even has the necessary skills and experience to cover the outlined deliverables.
In this article, we want to explain the different factors that must be taken into account when we want to internalize the digital marketing department within our company, be it small, medium or large, since there are certain abilities or skills that are critical for when we starting positioning our company within the digital ecosystem, regardless of the company turnover.
Factors you must take into account when creating a Digital Marketing department
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Web
Any company that wants to be present within the digital ecosystem, must have the ability to change its website without entailing invoices of more than € 80 per hour. The website is the main communication tool for our company. Any and all potential clients who are thinking of contracting our services, will first go through our website. At this point, we recommend that you ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you proud of your website?
- If you look at your website from a mobile phone, do you clearly see what services are offered?
- Does your website build trust?
- Is it easy and intuitive to contract your services through it?
If your answer was no for any of these questions, or you have any doubts regarding the answer, you need to modify it, keep it up to date, as this is the main communication tool with your customers.
Why do we want you to reflect on your website? Because, any marketing department must, without a doubt, have the ability to modify the website quickly and easily. Although it is not necessary to know how to modify the entire structure of the page, you must be able to modify its main messages, be able to publish new products, modify the cover images, etc …
The person or people you are going to hire for your digital marketing department must have the ability to modify the said website. We are not saying that you have to hire a programmer, who will charge you more than € 50,000 a year, but they must have a general knowledge of how to quickly edit the website. You need to make sure that the person you are going to hire is familiar with the CMS of your web page, someone who has created web pages in the past or who shows interest in WordPress. Maybe someone who has started a blog, etc … This person must have done SOMETHING digitally which would make it much easier for them to start making changes to your own website as soon as possible.
The position that could cover these types of needs could be that of a product manager, with experience in editing digital assets like web pages, such as a WordPress, Shopify or another platform you might be using. The salary for this type of position, according to our experience, ranges from € 24,000 to € 35,000 per year in Spain.
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Content
What type of content does your company need to distribute? Is it more visual content, or more written, technical content. You should bear in mind that the person you are going to hire for the creation must have the capacity and the initiative to create said content independently.
This section is especially important, since outsourcing content creation, such as creating videos or written content for your sector, is especially expensive.
The creation of a blog, or a video blog, will be one of the first steps the digital marketing department that you are going to create must carry out. The question you should ask yourself is whether the person or people you are going to hire will have the capacity to cover this need.
There are many digital professions that have emerged around the topic of content, such as copywriters, filmmakers, content managers, as well as graphic designers, among others … Depending on the type of company you have, you will need to hire at least one of them.
For example, if we are talking about a law firm, the person you will have to hire for your strategy and content creation, is a person who is familiar with legal terms, who has studied law but has opted for communication, etc. On the other hand, if we are talking about a company that manufactures packaging for other companies, a graphic designer profile will be most appropriate. The salary of these types of candidates, according to our experience, range from € 18,000 to €24,000 gross per year in Spain.
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Content Distribution
Once we have the website and what we want to communicate with the content, we must ensure that these messages reach our potential customers through search engines, display networks, social networks, mailings, etc …
Meaning, we must find a candidate who is focused on maximizing our impact. There are two great strategies when it comes to getting messages out to our potential target, Paid efforts, or Organic efforts.
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- Paid Efforts: You can launch campaigns through paid efforts such as search engines, to appear in the first search positions. You can also launch paid campaigns on social networks so that people who have shown interest in your product or service are impacted by your ads. There are many roles that cover these types of skills, some of them are performance manager, paid media manager, acquisition manager, etc … The important thing at this point is that the person who is going to be in charge of this part of your digital marketing strategy is familiar with paid campaigns that are Cost Per Click, have managed advertising budgets, and that is able to explain certain success stories. For example:
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With the XXX company we planned a campaign to get people interested in buying our products. We spent € 2,000 per month to acquire new clients and we obtained a sales return of € 4,000.
- Organic Efforts: In this case, there are three main communication channels: social networks, search engines, and email marketing.
At the search engine level, there is the classic SEO expert who should try to position the content organically within the search engines before searching for relevant keywords for our company. The salary of a junior SEO position, according to our experience, ranges from € 25,000 to € 35,000 gross per year in Spain.- On the other hand, when talking about social networks, there is the community manager, a person in charge of recurring publications on social networks in order to create brand awareness, ensuring potential customers know about our products or services. The salary of a community manager position, according to our experience, ranges from € 18,000 to € 25,000 gross per year in Spain.
- Another organic strategy is to send emails to the database of our company in order to promote recurrence in the purchase. That is why the person you are going to hire to cover the needs of content distribution needs to have previously launched email marketing campaigns and is familiar with tools such as Mailchimp, Mailpoet, etc …
- The salary of a community manager position according to our experience ranges from € 18,000 to € 25,000 gross per year in Spain. It should be noted that depending on the size of the company and the department to be created, some of the skills that we are highlighting could be covered by the same, more versatile candidate and, yes, with more experience.
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CRM Management
Although this is still part of the organic content distribution, we believe it appropriate to create a different section for this type of function, due to the complexity that this entails.
CRM management is a task that aims to maximize the return for each of the clients or leads within our database. This position is crucial for companies with large customer leads and leads databases. There are many CRM softwares available, Salesforce being one of the top. However, there are other softwares designed for smaller companies that can be adapted to the needs of customers with a smaller size, such as Hubspot or Activecampaign, and are much more cost-friendly.
The positions that have recently appeared in regard to the new space are CRM Manager, CRM Spacialist, CRM Technical Lead, etc … As in the previous cases, perhaps it is not so necessary that the person has used the same software that we have implemented, but is it is necessary for the person to know what strategies must be carried out to maximize the return for our company database. The salary of a CRM specialist candidate, according to our experience, ranges from € 28,000 to € 40,000 gross per year in Spain, depending of course on the number of years of experience and the degree of specialization acquired. In other words, a candidate that has spent a year managing a CRM like Hubspot or a custom CRM, is not the same as a person who has participated in the implementation and execution of a CRM like Salesforce for several years.
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Strategy
Depending on the size of the digital marketing department that we want to create, it is important to fill the position of director of marketing or head of digital transformation. A candidate who is more senior than the rest, who has experience in team management and, above all, has gone through the stages that we have previously defined.
One of the factors that we see constantly repeated is that due to the speed of changes in communication between companies and customers, digital channels have been adopted faster than the ability to learn the necessary skills by managerial profiles. Although it is clear that a managerial profile of team management is not absolutely essential to know how to execute each and every one of the tasks necessary to perform the needs described above, you must know the difficulty of each one, and how much time should be allocated for each of them.
Companies that have a digital marketing or digital transformation managers who have gone through the learning process and have had to execute and touch all of the above digital marketing levers, have a more holistic view and are generally used to adapting in a faster way while report results.
The salary for this type of candidates varies greatly, depending on the number of years of experience and the length of the team that was led, according to our experience, salaries can range from € 40,000 for small and medium-sized companies, reaching € 100,000 gross per year or more in Spain if we are talking about multinationals and leading teams of more than 20 people with strategies in different countries.
