A career in social and digital media offers exciting opportunities to explore new technologies and show your creativity.
One popular career path in digital and social media is as a digital and social media manager. A manager brings both soft skills (communication, teamwork, etc.) and hard skills (SEO, strategy development) to the table to launch effective marketing campaigns on different platforms and help the brand promote its products or services.
If you have leadership qualities and enjoy creating marketing campaigns, a career as a social and digital media manager might be the right choice for you.
Read the article to learn about the skills that a social media and digital media manager must have.
Who is the manager of digital and social media?
A manager of digital and social media primarily handles websites and social media profiles to establish a company’s online presence and help it reach more people. He oversees the creation of content, tries new digital and social platforms to find out which works the best for the client, and uses analytics to collect useful data about the performance of marketing strategies.
He performs all these tasks to bring more traffic to the client’s website, increase followers on his social media platforms, increase online brand awareness, and drive sales. He applies a variety of strategies to connect with potential customers and persuade them to buy products or services.
What does a manager of digital and social media do?
A manager of digital and social media is responsible for the following tasks.
Set realistic and achievable goals
A manager of digital and social media understands the needs of the business and the problems of the target audience. He uses this knowledge to create achievable goals that will ultimately bring profit to the company.
Develop content, visual design, and marketing strategies
He develops different strategies from scratch to promote sales and brand awareness. The content strategy is built to make the content reach a wider audience and increase its ranking in the search engines. Similarly, a visual design strategy is created to ensure daily posts, product images, and photos visually match the brand.
The marketing strategy is designed according to the goals of the company. It could be about increasing leads and conversions, promoting a new product, or boosting a brand’s reputation.
Communicate with the team
A social and digital media manager handles a team of 3 to 15 members who work collectively towards the same goals – improving the brand’s online presence or increasing the brand’s revenue.
A manager of digital and social media is responsible for assigning different tasks to team members, discussing goals with them, and providing them with the resources and training they need to be successful.
Calculate results
He also calculates results with the help of key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine the success rate of digital and social marketing campaigns. KPIs are the values that gauge a brand’s performance against set targets and objectives. They help draw conclusions about the performance of strategies.
Optimize campaign
A manager uses results to optimize the campaign to improve its performance. He suggests changes to the campaigns and makes sure team members work on them. He evaluates the performance of the improved campaign, and keeps optimizing it until it starts producing the results he initially planned to achieve.
Create reports on the performance of campaigns
He is accountable to his leaders for campaign results. He uses data visualization tools to build reports on the campaign’s results. He creates professional reports that express complex data in the form of easy-to-understand data. He presents the report to the leadership team and stakeholders to inform them about the performance of marketing efforts and campaigns.
Monitor industry trends
A digital and social media manager ensures the company stays ahead of competitors. For this, he explores social and digital media channels and finds new trends and techniques that competitors are using and the public is enjoying. He shares those insights with the marketing and content teams to help them improve their work according to the emerging trends and users’ preferences.
Engage with the target audience
The manager uses a variety of techniques to improve interaction with his target audience and connect with them in a better way. He responds to their comments, uses quizzes and polls, and tries to answer their queries to show that brand cares about its customers and values their words.
Schedule social and digital posts
Social media and digital media posts should be uploaded consistently and regularly. The consistency helps gain public trust and shows visitors that you are constantly working for them to provide them with better content.
A digital and social media manager schedules posts and makes sure they are posted regularly, no matter what.
9 skills every manager of digital and social media must have
Do you want to become a successful manager of digital and social media? Read these skills to learn what makes a manager successful and more marketable.
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Video marketing
Videos are one of the most liked social media and digital media content forms. Data shows that 8 out of 10 users purchase a service or product after watching a brand’s video. 87% of the marketers believe that videos give them a positive ROI (return on investment).
Because of this effect of videos, digital and social media managers build effective video marketing strategies to promote their brands or products. They may not know everything about video production, but they should know how to create a basic video without getting help from professionals.
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Content marketing
Content marketing is the most crucial part of the digital and social media game. A manager of digital and social media should know how to create high-quality content for different mediums, and how to distribute it using effective content marketing strategies.
Content exists in multiple forms, such as long articles, blog posts, infographics, emails, social media posts, images, ebooks, etc. You should know how to create different types of content.
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Data analytics
As a manager of digital and social media, you should know how to use different data analysis tools to understand raw data and use the gathered information to form better strategies. You should know which important metrics define the performance of your strategy.
You should know how to understand trends and insights by collecting data from different platforms, and use it to make data-driven decisions.
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Design skills
Visual content is more powerful compared to simple written text. 65% of people retain the information they get from an image compared to the 10% of people who hear the information. Visual content also has a higher conversion rate and SEO rankings.
Therefore, a social and digital media marketer should have the basic knowledge of graphic design tools like Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and After Effects.
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Technical marketing skills
You should have command over technical marketing skills such as search engine optimization (SEO), advertising, pay-per-click (PPC), conversion rate optimization (CRO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, and digital media marketing.
SEO is one of the most fundamental skills that a manager needs to have. You don’t need to learn its super technical techniques, but you should know the basic ones. You should know how both SEM and SEO can work together in making content rank higher in search results.
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Excellent customer services
Around 47% of customers like brands that respond to their queries fast, and more than 70% of consumers expect to message brands more in the future to get their queries resolved.
That is why a manager of digital and social media needs to make sure his customer service team is available 24/7 to answer the questions of the general public and customers. Managers have access to all business accounts, and they try to stay online on these accounts in order to give a quick response to customers.
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Communication
Communication skills can help you play your role better in many ways. They allow you to understand people and make them understand your thoughts as well. They teach you how to overcome diversities and gain the trust of your team members. These skills allow you to establish a good relationship with your executive leadership team and even your customers.
You learn to listen to the issues and problems of your customers patiently and then offer appropriate solutions. A manager with excellent communication skills can tackle disappointed customers and convince doubtful potential customers. He knows how and when to use his words. He is good at oral as well as written communication.
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Flexibility and adaptability
Adaptability is important in any online marketing role. Social media channels, digital media platforms, and people’s behavior and trends are changing so fast that being flexible has become an absolute necessity.
You should analyze the results of metrics to see the effect of trends on your content strategy, and then make amendments to your strategy according to the results and emerging trends.
Don’t hesitate to try new features, tools, and techniques. In fact, trying new things will ultimately help you find something awesome that can help you achieve your marketing goals more effectively.
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Problem-solving
When you design a strategy, you never know what its outcome will be. Therefore, you should be ready for any kind of situation and provide suitable solutions when the need arises.
If the outcome of a campaign is not as good as you expected, you should be able to find out the underlying issues, get rid of them, and make necessary changes to the campaign to improve its performance and results.
Tips for becoming a successful manager of digital and social media
- Earn a bachelor’s degree in marketing, social media, digital media, mass communication, or a similar field.
- Learn basic skills that we have mentioned above and practice them by creating your own social media profiles and websites.
- Gain experience by working for small agencies or businesses. Learn the basic ethics of the office and how teamwork is done.
- Follow the social media accounts of the company where you wish to work as a manager of digital and social media. Understand their content and marketing strategies. Apply for the job as soon as a vacancy opens.
- Prepare for the interview and use the information gathered through the company’s social media and digital media platforms to show interviews you are interested in working for their company and already know a lot about it.
Salary of a manager of digital and social media manager
According to Glassdoor data, the total salary of a manager of digital and social media can range from $14,805 to $818,258 in the US. The average total salary of a manager in the US is around $79,295 per year. It consists of the base salary, which is $63,822 per year, and an additional salary of $15,473 per year.
Your qualification, skills, experience, organization type, and location are a few common factors that influence the average salary. Zippia data shows that San Francisco, Springfield, Hoboken, and Eden Prairie are the highest paying cities for the manager of digital and social media in the US.
FAQs
Why should businesses use social media platforms?
Today, a normal social media user spends more than 2 hours scrolling, commenting, liking, or doing other activities on social media channels daily. In fact, more than 30% of the total time spent on the internet is spent on social media.
A business that wants to increase its reach and target more people should definitely use social media channels to connect with more people and increase its reach.
Can a manager of digital and social media work from home?
Yes, many managers of digital and social media work from home if their companies allow them to. Many managers handle their clients independently using freelance platforms.
Summing it up
A manager of digital and social media builds social media profiles and constructs a website for the company. He manages them and publishes unique, different forms of content consistently. He plays many roles in an organization to help it meet its social media and digital media marketing goals.