How to become great online marketing manager?

[Drumdrone]

Hello, I have a few people working for me. I don´t know how to control them and what figures are the most important for me. Should I start with google analytics? What should be the basics goals? Invreasing traffic, conversion rate? Thank you

 

[finleydesign]

I would say the most important figure is their salary vs RTI

 

[stevebrownlie]

I would imagine they all have different skills, so your most important objective as a manager (particularly if they are more knowledgeable than you about digital marketing - which I'm guessing they are if you don't know how to control their tasks), is to take the time to understand their skills and knowledge. As the old saying goes, if they can't explain it simply to you, they don't understand it well enough. I'd use that as a starting point for working out who fits in where.

I'm going to guess that you're a standard business not a 'startup' looking to get sold in a couple of years, media company or charity, so your objectives centre around making more money, as soon as possible in a way that doesn't damage your brand or long term success.

With that in mind you will need your team to focus on the following as a minimum 'starting point'.:

- technical aspects of your current site (mostly from a SEO, loading speed etc view)
- usability of your current site (including conversion optimisation)
- content strategy on your site
- brand building and exposure (this should be done 'with the thought' of SEO - ie links acquired - but not with SEO as the main focus). this aspect includes content strategy 'off your site' eg guest appearances, media, PR etc.
- advertising (some part of your strategy is likely to need to include highly targeted ads using the many advanced platforms available including but not limited to Facebook).
- depending on your business your e-mail marketing, social and other strategies may be vital and you may need to consider marketing automation tools.

If your team has significant gaps in any of these key areas (and there are others, naturally) you'll need to consider hiring, outsourcing (bringing in a good agency) or training to fill those gaps.

 

[Matt Thorpe]

If you want to get these people to monitor and measure your website performance then you should look at the following:

No. of visitors - This should obviously be going up all the time. What are they do to encourage this? Can they contact bloggers, journalists, bloggers, etc to spread the word about your services and products?

Time on the site - If people are spending very little time on your site then you need to find a way to keep them there. If your pages are thin on content then get them to improve the product descriptions and features. You can also add video to keep people on there longer.

Homepage bounce rate - You want to get this below 20%. Why are people leaving the page? What can be improve here to stock people leaving on your main page?

Exit pages - Identify the highest exit pages and analyse why this is happening. It may be something simple like a broken link or image. Alternatively, it may be a very uninspiring page that you need to jazz up.

Conversion in the basket - Monitor conversion rate over time to see if this is improving or not. Don't look at the overall conversion rate vs visitors because this will always go down if you have a ton of content on the site. People won't buy on every visit so it skews the figures.

Conversion on product pages - Are people adding to basket? If not, why not?

Basket abandonment stats - Try to identify why people are leaving the basket. It may be that you are hiding postage costs until this point. Therefore, make sure you add them clearly to the product pages so everything is clear before they add to basket.

No. of newsletter signups - Data is the heart of any business. If you don't collect visitor email addresses or social sign-ups then you can't contact them once they have left your site. Try to capture data where possible.

I hope this helps. Now, start cracking the whip.

 

[John_Adams]

For me, a great online marketing manager balances the skills (either there own, their teams or both) with: experience (people who've experience in biddable, SEO, content, social), creativity (able to understand the customers' behaviours and able to communicate the brand) with strong statistical skills (both setting up tracking and reporting results). If you have only one or two of those elements, there will be weakness in the team.

There is no point having a beautiful creative display campaign, at a low CPA to a target audience if you can't measure properly how well it's really done against other campaigns.

 

[antropy]

Hello, I have a few people working for me. I don´t know how to control them and what figures are the most important for me. Should I start with google analytics? What should be the basics goals? Invreasing traffic, conversion rate? Thank you

Can you tell us more about your company and what it is that you're selling? The metrics used to measure performance will depend on that.

 

[Ed B]

A good online mktg manager represents a blend of creative and analytic. for example, the creative bit should be able to come up with candidate campaigns, and the analytic side should know how to measure their individual ROI. They need to be confident in their own abilities and genuinely enjoy their work as its vital to stay ahead of industry developments.

As far as what to task them on specifically, as the poster above suggests, you'd really need to share a little more on what the model is