As companies increasingly realize the importance of a strong online presence—and the impact it has on branding, sales, and overall growth—the number of job openings in digital marketing has soared.
If you’re thinking about changing careers, and want to translate your skills and experience into a creative, dynamic, and impactful career, then look no further!
In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the twenty-one most popular digital marketing roles, and the requirements for each position.
With this list, you’ll understand the employment landscape in the digital marketing industry, gain insight into the roles that best suit your career goals, and know how to launch a new and rewarding digital marketing career!
Are you ready to start? Then let’s go!
How Important Is Your Marketing Job Title?
A job title holds a lot of weight, irrespective of your industry. It isn’t just a job description. It’s a sign of your experience, seniority, responsibility, and indicates the sort of salary you can expect.
Because of the relative newness of the digital marketing industry, there can be considerable overlap and confusion between different job titles, which can make it hard to draw conclusions about the seniority or salary of the position.
Here are some rules of thumb to bear in mind when thinking about digital marketing job descriptions:
- Job titles containing “specialist,” “associate,” or “coordinator” are typically entry-level positions.
- Job titles containing ‘manager’ can be applied for when you have around 3-5 years’ experience in a specialist or coordination level position.
- The authority, salary, and responsibility associated with any job title will vary significantly from company to company, so it’s important to ask what your position is in relation to others in the team and the company at large.
Popular Digital Marketing Job Titles
General Job Titles
Let’s dive into some of the most popular job titles you’ll find in the digital marketing industry.
Marketing Analyst
Marketing analysts evaluate a company’s public-facing platforms. This includes social media networks, blogs, community forums, and the company website. The marketing analyst collects data from both paid and organic campaigns, tests different content styles, and analyzes the results using tools such as Google Analytics, MixPanel, and Heap Analytics. Once this data has been extracted and analyzed, the marketing analyst will draw conclusions from their findings, and report these to the digital marketing team and upper management. With these insights, the analyst then guides and influences upcoming marketing strategies in order to optimize each campaign.
Demand Generation Manager
A demand generation manager builds and nurtures long-term customer relationships. To do this, they plan a strategy that builds brand awareness, advertises products, helps the business enter new markets, and improves the customer’s experience with the brand.
The demand generation manager builds, executes, and optimizes campaigns. They also develop pipelines and manage advertising campaigns and budgets.
Digital Strategist
The digital strategist (also known as the digital marketing strategist) creates an overarching strategy that aligns all the brand’s marketing efforts across each one of the company’s audience-facing channels, with the ultimate goal of raising brand awareness and launching a product, service, or feature.
The digital strategist is also expected to collaborate with the rest of the team on marketing campaigns, lead digital activation projects, and measure the effectiveness of different channels, networks, platforms, and analytics tools.
Growth Marketer
Growth marketers test and tweak, running iterative tests on every aspect of the marketing team’s output, from content creation through to media buying. They collect data from these tests to adjust strategy decisions that lift key performance metrics. The growth marketer’s overall goal is to improve user engagement and conversion by assessing and improving each step of the customer lifecycle, from first hearing about the brand, to buying a product, to becoming a repeat customer.
SEO Job Titles
SEO Manager
Experts in the science of inbound marketing, an SEO manager plans, oversees and manages a company’s search engine marketing strategy. They optimize the content on a company’s website, blog, social media channels, and other platforms, with the goal of ranking higher in search engine results. The SEO manager works with the SEO specialist to identify industry keywords, monitor search engine algorithms, analyze content, study the SEO strategies of competitors, and schedule optimized content. In-depth knowledge of Google Analytics is essential in this role.
The SEO manager will also report on the success of the SEO team to more senior team members, stay abreast of SEO trends and best practices, and delegate content creation to freelancers or in-house content producers.
Outreach Specialist
Outreach specialists develop and execute outreach programs, with the goal of helping organizations reach their marketing goals. The outreach specialist builds relationships and strengthens connections by contacting journalists, bloggers, influencers, media outlets, publications, and other relevant individuals.
Outreach specialists also identify relevant contacts or leads to pitch, personalize pitches, run A/B tests on different versions of email copy, and grow a list of contacts.
Technical SEO specialist
As SEO has become increasingly important, so too has the demand for technical SEO specialists. Requiring analytical and research skills, the technical SEO specialist researches and identifies keyword strings, guiding their implementation on website landing pages, blogs, and social media.
A technical SEO specialist monitors consumer search trends, changes to search engine algorithms, and their competitor’s content output. When successful, the right SEO strategy can help company’s reach the right audiences and boost overall company growth.
SEO Content Manager
The SEO Content Manager attracts and converts readers with optimized content such as blog posts and landing pages. The SEO content manager creates compelling content that is tailored to search terms from a range of audiences.
Hiring managers and recruiters look for creativity, organizational skills, and research know-how in potential candidates.
Social Media Marketing Job Titles
Social Media Coordinator
Usually, an entry-level position, the social media coordinator plans, executes, and reports on a company’s social media strategy. They do this to increase brand awareness and authority, build customer trust, reach new audiences, increase traffic to the company website, and convert users into potential customers.
Under the guidance of the social media manager, the social media coordinator builds campaigns tailored to the different social media platforms. These campaigns rely on extensive platform research, studies of user behavior, and competitor analysis. Depending on the resources available, a social media coordinator might also handle influencer marketing, building and managing online communities, and responding to customer queries or comments sent via social networks.
Social Media Manager
A social media manager needs to be obsessed with social media trends, social content, and online behavior. This will inform dynamic social media campaigns aimed at reaching target audiences, converting users into prospective customers, and repeating customers into brand ambassadors. The social media manager also ensures that the brand uses social media to build on its reputation as a trustworthy, authoritative, and relevant industry resource.
The social media manager is responsible for creating strategies and campaigns employing paid and organic marketing techniques. This includes posting valuable content, overseeing social media audits, crafting ad campaigns and publishing sponsored posts. Knowledge of digital scheduling tools, influencer marketing, analytics programs, and the business accounts of major social networks will also be expected in this role.
Related Read: What Does a Social Media Marketer Do?
Content Marketing Job Titles
Copywriter
With the rise of content marketing, digital marketing teams need copywriters and wordsmiths to help produce optimized, customer-focused content for landing pages, social media posts, blog articles, ads, and emails.
A role that frequently attracts creatives, copywriters must be adaptable, writing content for different audiences with different purposes on any given day. Although the goals of different texts may vary—they can persuade, inspire, entertain, educate, or inform a reader—the overall outcome is to build trust, boost the authority of a brand, and convert readers into potential customers.
Content Manager
Skilled in inbound marketing techniques, and frequently collaborating with content specialists, the content manager develops, plans, and delegates different types of content for a company’s audience-facing channels, such as a blog, website pages, social platforms, and newsletters.
The content manager defines the voice and tone for the brand’s messaging, something that is informed by researching the target audience and monitoring their competitors’ content output.
In addition to creating a publishing schedule or editorial calendar, the content manager delegates tasks to in-house and freelance content producers. Then they edit and optimize text, studying the results of content campaigns to assess and improve on their success. Within smaller companies or startups, the content manager might also assist the content marketer in content production too.
Storyteller
Storytellers, at least in digital marketing, use narrative to communicate a message to a potential or existing customer. In addition to provoking an emotional response, storytelling also humanizes a company or brand, and lets its customer base know why they should care about it.
Some key benefits of storytelling in marketing include:
- Establishing a deeper connection to an audience
- Increasing brand approachability
- Communicating a message in a way that readers understand
- Increasing readability
- Improving brand accessibility via inbound marketing methods
A storyteller needs considerable imagination and creativity, to be skilled at incorporating complex ideas into accessible and delightful narratives, and to practice using words to connect with readers or audiences.
Email Marketing Job Titles
Email Marketing Manager
An expert in direct marketing, the email marketing manager uses email to promote a product, offer, or service. Creating funnels and email marketing campaigns to accompany the customer journey—from the “Welcome” email sequence through to “Sales” emails—the email marketer addresses the user’s needs, solves their problems, and answers their questions at every stage of the journey, with the ultimate goal of converting a lead or nurture into a sale.
Depending on the size of the company and its available resources, an email marketing manager might write the emails alone, or delegate content production to copywriters, graphic designers, and art directors. When overseeing an entire funnel, the email marketing manager is responsible for guiding tone and messaging, and writing compelling subject lines.
Using mail out and mail analytics platforms such as MailJet, MailChimp, RapidMail, or GetResponse to manage each marketing funnel, the email marketer will also analyze open rates and click-through rates to assess campaign performance.
Marketing Automation Specialist
Marketing automation is the use of programs or software to perform routine marketing tasks, as part of digital campaigns which are unassisted by humans. The goal is to nurture leads along the customer journey.
The marketing automation specialist identifies the problems that can be solved with automation tools. Once the automation goes live, the marketing automation specialist will tweak, test, and optimize the tools to improve engagement metrics such as site traffic, open and click-through rates, lead generation, and ROI.
Product Marketing Job Titles
Product Strategist
The product strategist sets goals for a product, detailing how it will enhance or support an organization. The product strategist also creates and implements a product road map. This document defines the vision, priorities, and progress of a product over the long term.
The performance of digital products is a major concern for the product strategist, who dedicates their time to market analysis, product validation, and the continual iteration and improvement of the brand’s product development strategy.
A product strategist should have excellent communication skills and a good understanding of data analysis techniques. A background in entrepreneurship is also beneficial to those hoping to break into this career choice.
Product Marketing Manager
The product marketing manager is responsible for the positioning, messaging, and branding of a product, with the ultimate goal of attracting new leads and turning one-time customers into repeat customers.
The product marketing manager works with the sales team to help sell the product. With the help of copywriters and storytellers, they’ll also plan and produce different marketing materials such as press releases, blog articles, or website copy.
When hiring for the product marketing manager position, employers will look for excellent organizational, communication, research, and problem-solving skills.
User Experience Researcher
The user experience (UX) researcher monitors the motivations, needs and behaviors of their users. Then, they help create products that meet these needs.
UX researchers study user behavior and trends to create buyer personas. With the help of field surveys, focus groups and interviews, they collect and sort the data they need to inform and improve the user’s experience. A UX researcher should be objective, curious, empathetic, and have the ability to communicate clearly with individuals at all levels, from users to company stakeholders.
Paid Marketing Job Titles
Paid Search Campaign Manager
The paid search campaign manager manages paid ad campaigns appearing on major search engines, such as Google and Bing. They also manage paid advertising on social media or other channels. The paid search campaign manager reports, analyzes, and optimizes these campaigns, and is responsible for their success.
In addition to optimizing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and other paid-for ad campaigns, the paid search campaign manager has to monitor budgets, manage platform accounts, implement a digital strategy, report on performance, and test new ad ideas.
Paid Search Specialist
The paid search specialist works with the paid search campaign manager to execute the brand’s digital paid ad strategy. With a deep knowledge of outbound marketing techniques, the paid search specialist manages Pay-Per-Click campaigns, researches keywords, monitors and analyzes traffic and trends, then optimizes their ads.
Some key digital marketing skills of the paid search specialist include:
- Knowledge of PPC marketing principles and how to apply them
- Understanding of data analytics
- Team player
- Deep knowledge of demand side platforms (platforms and software which enable the purchase of advertising using automation technology)
Performance Marketer
Performance marketing is an umbrella term used to describe online marketing and advertising campaigns whereby advertisers (or marketers) only pay when a certain action is taken by the user. An example of this would be a user clicking a CTA on an advertising banner.
The performance marketer manages a range of digital accounts and paid social channels used for their ad campaigns, such as sponsored advertising, affiliate marketing, or social media marketing, among others. They are also responsible for improving a company’s ROI, handling budgets, allocating spending, creating A/B tests of ad campaigns, trying new channels, and monitoring digital marketing trends.
Digital Marketing Job Title Hierarchy
Knowing the hierarchy of a digital marketing team is handy when you begin applying for jobs in the field. Let’s look at the titles used for different levels and the requirements of each role.
Intern
An internship is an opportunity for newcomers to gain real-world experience and learn how each member of the team operates. Typically unpaid, the intern is tasked with basic administration, online community moderation, content production, or social media scheduling. Depending on the size of the company, the intern may attend digital strategy meetings and assist in the execution of campaigns.
Associate
An associate is an entry-level position. In addition to managing daily administrative tasks, an associate will conduct market research, collect and analyze consumer behavior, and prepare reports. The associate role is suited to young professionals with some work experience, but who haven’t worked in a full-time or permanent digital marketing role.
Specialist
A specialist has a few years of experience in digital marketing or can demonstrate similar experience in related industries such as advertising or data analytics. The specialist should have some strategic knowledge, a grasp of search engine optimization (SEO), have social media marketing skills, understand different digital channels, and know-how to utilize popular marketing analytics and measuring tools.
Manager/Head/Lead
To become a digital marketing manager or team lead in digital marketing, a recruiter is likely to expect up to 4 years of experience in the industry. Implementing strategy and establishing internal processes are major facets of this managerial role, in addition to providing training opportunities, guidance, and career support to junior members of the team. A marketing manager or a team lead will use the expertise of digital marketing specialists to inform their decision-making.
Director
After 7 years of experience in digital marketing, a skilled marketing professional might apply for a director-level position. A director of digital marketing will formulate a coherent long-term strategy using the data from the team and other marketing directors to fulfill the goals of the business.
CMO
The most senior marketing position at any company is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). A role for those with twenty or more years in the field, the CMO is responsible for leading all areas of marketing, including overseeing and signing off on major marketing initiatives. The Chief Marketing Officer also makes quarterly budgeting decisions to ensure the ROI on all marketing activities. They also report on the team’s progress to other C-Suite executives.
Related Read: What Does a Digital Marketer Really Do?
FAQs About Digital Marketing Titles
Do Marketing Titles Matter?
Put simply, yes. Your title will determine the salary you can command or expect, and signals your level of responsibility, essential skills, experience, and the type of work that you do. Your job title will also affect the types of positions you can apply for in the future.
Is It Hard To Change Your Marketing Title?
It depends on the size and type of your company, and your reasons for wanting to change it. Before speaking to your manager, review your current job description and the job descriptions linked to the title you want. Note why your current title no longer fits your role, and why your tasks and responsibilities belong under a different umbrella.
Which Marketing Title Pays the Most?
As the most senior marketing position at any company, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is traditionally the highest-paid member of the marketing team. In the US, the average salary for a CMO is $222,738. However, it’s important to note that factors such as company size, industry, location, and cost of living will all impact the salary a CMO can hope to earn.
Since you’re here…
Ready for a career in digital marketing? Test our curriculum with this free digital marketing learning path, and check out our salary guide to see what you could be making.
