Internet marketer. A specialist who drives the digital economy.

Contents: 

• A profession that is in growing demand
• Who is an internet marketer
• What is the difference between offline and digital marketing
• What an internet marketer should know and be able to do
• How much is he earns
• How to become one. Useful resources for studying

A profession in growing demand

Internet marketing is a young field that is actively developing, but has not yet reached its peak. According to DataReportal, in developed countries, 80% to 99% of the population actively uses the Internet. People not only watch funny videos or communicate on social networks, but also actively search for goods and services.

The size of the digital economy is clearly illustrated by the example of the Amazon marketplace, which has been included in the list of the most successful Global 500 companies for several years in a row, and its founder and owner Jeff Bezos is one of the three richest people on the planet. Jack Ma, owner of Alibaba Group (TaoBao, Aliexpress), is among the most influential people and top entrepreneurs in China. Looking at the world's most valuable companies, the top spots are occupied by technology companies that generate a significant share of their profits from digital services, including online advertising: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta, and Tencent.

Offline companies also promote their services online. Through sites like kufar.by or deal.by in Belarus, you can not only buy a stroller or a mobile phone, but also order firewood, rent a truck crane, find a construction crew or a septic tank installation company. In 2023, even small restaurants and taxi services have their own websites or mobile apps.

The digital economy is still developing. Its share of the GDP of developed countries is between 10-15%. In China, this figure has already reached 40% and continues to grow. In the face of fierce competition and the peculiarities of the internet, where it is impossible to broadcast to a wide audience, but rather to find an approach to each potential client, a huge demand has emerged for internet marketers. They will be able to promote a brand online and maintain high positions, despite changes in search algorithms and the emergence of new advertising platforms. Given the trend of business actively migrating online, the demand for this profession will continue to grow.

Among the perks of the internet marketer profession is that you are not tied to a specific location. You can work with a company from any country. For example, if you're in Gomel, you can promote a restaurant from Chicago, a cleaning company from Barcelona, ​​or a surfboard seller from Sydney.

Who is an Internet Marketer?

An Internet marketer or digital marketer is a specialist who is responsible for promoting a brand, individual products, or services on the Internet. They apply marketing techniques in the digital environment. They can promote both online and offline businesses. It doesn't matter to a specialist whether they need to increase the number of clients for a construction company, sell an online course, boost sales for an online store, or increase traffic to a cafe.

An Internet marketer is a profession at the intersection of economics, psychology, and digital technology.

Firstly, you need to understand your audience, know what they feel and how they will behave in order to convince users with just one or two phrases.

Secondly, you cannot do without analyzing large volumes of statistical data, understanding the capabilities of web development and skills in working with scripts when launching advertising campaigns.

Thirdly, strategic thinking and an understanding of business processes will be useful in order to effectively manage the budget and select advertising tools that will not only bring clients immediately, but also help build a reputation, and with it a flow of clients even after the end of the advertising campaign.

An internet marketer is a creative person who generates new ideas and creates advertising materials. But at the same time, he remains a pedant and a rationalist who strictly controls the budget and is ready to spend time on tests and small changes to increase the effectiveness of an advertising campaign by a few percent.

The specific goals of an internet marketer may differ from project to project:

• increasing brand awareness;
• selling a specific service or product;
• attracting new customers or returning old ones;
• reducing the number of abandoned carts (edit: situations when a customer adds a product to the cart, but never places an order).

In general, an internet marketer must ensure that as many people as possible interested in the service on the internet learn about the company and buy the product.

What does an internet marketer do?

The responsibilities of an internet marketer may vary from company to company. Some companies need a manager who will develop a strategy, a promotion plan, and assign tasks to copywriters, SEO specialists, designers, and targeters. Someone is looking for an employee who will manage a group on social networks and manage the advertising budget.

Among the main responsibilities of an internet marketer, one can note:

• Company analysis.An internet marketer should highlight key services and strengths that are more profitable to focus on, conduct a website audit, evaluate its usability, the promotion methods used and past advertising campaigns.
• Market research. An internet marketer analyzes keywords and popular queries, studies the experience of competitors: studies the websites of similar companies, groups on social networks and advertisements.
• Audience analysis. A marketer must understand the goals and motivations of the target audience, divide it by gender, age, geography, in order to accurately target potential buyers when launching advertising.
• Development of a strategy and preparation of a media plan. Based on the collected data, the internet marketer selects communication channels with the audience, develops a customer acquisition chain and creates a promotion plan, which specifies the stages, deadlines, budget, and goals.
• Creating advertising links and generating ideas for promotion.It is the marketer who comes up with original ideas for banners, creates content plans, a structure for the Landing Page and can submit ideas for improving the main website.
• Process management. The marketer creates technical specifications and distributes them to a copywriter, designer, programmer, etc. Launches and configures advertising, negotiates with bloggers or influencers on social networks, adds the company or individual services to catalogs and platforms for comparing goods and services.
• Analysis and optimization of the strategy.The digital marketer looks at metrics, evaluates KPIs, ROI of individual channels and the marketing strategy as a whole, and adjusts the strategy or individual links.
• Tracking trends and continuous learning.Methods and approaches are constantly changing, new tools are emerging. A marketer must stay informed and quickly apply new techniques.

It's easiest to understand what an internet marketer does with an example. The head of an apartment renovation and finishing company sets a goal of attracting more clients online.

The internet marketer studies competitors' websites and sees what promotion channels they use. He sees that a blog with useful articles on renovation attracts a lot of natural and inexpensive traffic from search engines. Many competitors also have social media groups with life hacks and new products in the field of apartment renovation and design.

But if you start a blog now, it will produce a tangible effect in six months to a year. A social media group with active promotion - in two to three months. Therefore, the specialist plans to use targeted advertising on Facebook and search advertising on Yandex and Google to get traffic right now. In addition, the specialist evaluates the website and decides that its design and text components need to be slightly adjusted: add a "Blog" section, edit the headings, simplify the application form, and move the contact button to a convenient location.

The marketer also studied the prospects of a blog on YouTube, as large companies do this, but abandoned the idea. High-quality content requires investment, and the allocated funds for advertising are limited. Posting "raw" videos from a construction site without editing can create the image of an unreliable company.

The marketer calculates the budget and submits the project to management. After approval, he draws up a media plan, which includes: keywords for promotion, a content plan for the blog, a description of advertising links and deadlines. He assigns the copywriter to write the texts and assigns the programmer to edit the site. Launches advertising, independently or through the involvement of other specialists, in Yandex.Direct and Google Ads. Additionally, tests contextual advertising through Yandex and Google.

What is the difference between offline and digital marketing?

Conceptually, the tasks of a marketer and an online marketer are similar - they form a promotion strategy and ensure sales. In principle, a marketer can become an online marketer and vice versa. Many processes are similar, but the techniques and tools are different.

For example, there are two businesses that sell household appliances: an online store and an offline supermarket. Same niche, similar audience. For a regular store, you'll need to hang banners around town, distribute flyers to promoters, or advertise on local radio. An online marketer will also use banners, but on websites and blogs. However, simply posting an ad and showing it to everyone won't work. You need to target your audience and display ads only on specialized platforms where potential buyers are present. Instead of promoters, you can engage bloggers who will tell you about the store or review products, or add the online store to catalogs and price comparison sites.

While an offline marketer focuses on brand promotion, it's more effective to promote individual product items online, rather than the entire brand. We're not advertising a brand, but rather promoting a coffee maker or washing machine that can be purchased at a specific store.

A single company can employ both a regular marketer and an online marketer. The first is responsible for the brand vision and strategy as a whole, the second is for communicating brand ideas and promoting them among internet users.

What an internet marketer should know and be able to do

In the early 2000s, online service promotion was limited to creating a website and optimizing it for search engines. Even content quality and design were secondary. Now internet marketing is divided into different areas.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO promotion is optimizing a website to meet search engine requirements in order to rank at the top of the search results for a specific query. Typically, it involves adding meta tags and descriptions, creating new pages with keyword-rich text, and building up your link mass (edit: placing backlinks to your site from other resources: forums, blogs, social networks, and directories). Search engine optimization takes time, but it's a relatively inexpensive technique that can ultimately generate a stream of free traffic—readers or potential buyers. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) You can buy a spot at the top of search engine results for keywords and start getting clients right away. This ad looks almost like a regular website link with a description and title, and is distinguished only by a small "advertisement" mark.

Additionally, you can run contextual advertising through the Google Ads and Yandex advertising exchanges. This is a display (graphic) advertising format. However, banner ads on the sites of the advertising network's partners will only be seen by users who previously searched for information using the specified keyword.

The advantage of contextual advertising is that you can show ads to people who have already visited your site and viewed the product (remarketing). The disadvantage of SEM is that as soon as you stop the advertising campaign, the flow of customers will stop. Therefore, this channel is used in conjunction with SEO.

Display advertising through advertising networks (programmatic advertising)

First of all, this is the promotion of goods and services through banner advertising - image ads on sites that the system shows only to certain users. The marketer can flexibly customize such advertising and show it to people of a certain age with specific interests and even specify the location of users, right down to the neighborhood or street.

In addition to banner advertising, other display or media advertising formats are also common: pop-ups, clickunders, push notification ads, native advertising (which looks like part of the site's content), in-app advertising, mobile advertising, teaser advertising, etc.

Many advertising networks target impulsive actions. They promote dating sites, online casinos, dietary supplements, and sweepstakes. But some ad formats, with proper setup and skillful audience segmentation, are also suitable for serious services. For example, for selling accessories, travel packages, electronics, and even cars.

CRM Marketing

Promotion through email marketing, SMS, and messages in messengers such as Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp, and others. This method is not the easiest. First, you need to build a contact database: email addresses, mobile numbers, or nicknames. This can be done through banner or pop-up advertising, collecting subscriptions on the website, or on social networks. When building a database, they usually advertise a gift rather than the service itself. For example, a discount on a service or product for subscribing to a newsletter. The company's client contacts are also added here.

After building the database, the internet marketer develops a strategy and segments the audience. For each segment, a content plan is created, the design of letters or messages is developed, their content is developed (or a technical task is created for a copywriter). With the help of a newsletter, you can announce a promotion, remind about an unfinished purchase.

SMM (Social media marketing)

Marketing in social networks is active interaction with the audience, cooperation with opinion leaders (influencers), publication of promotions and contests on social networks.

Such marketing gives a lot of trump cards in the hands of a marketer: an additional source of traffic and backlinks for the main site, a tool for collecting a user base, the opportunity to increase audience reach.

This is such a powerful tool that some companies abandon other areas of digital marketing and focus only on promotion in social networks.

Targeted advertising

Banner advertising with precise targeting of the audience. When choosing who to show the ad to, you can specify age, gender, location, interests.

Flexible targeting is offered by many advertising networks. But more often, by targeted advertising, internet marketers mean advertising on social networks. You can promote a page on social networks or directly redirect users to the main site. The channel allows you to quickly increase your audience reach.

Content Marketing

Content-based promotion. This isn't just advertising texts with keywords, but communicating ideas through engaging stories (storytelling), publishing useful articles and life hacks, product reviews, or technology breakdowns in a "complex, simple" format. Articles are published on the company blog and third-party platforms. From bloggers, news portals, review sites, etc.

A separate area of ​​content marketing is video marketing - the publication of useful and educational videos with hidden or open advertising, as well as informational videos with infographics, figures, and facts.

Influence Marketing

Influencers or opinion leaders are popular bloggers and social media users with a huge audience from several thousand to tens of millions of subscribers.

It is profitable for businesses to cooperate with influencers, even taking into account the fairly high fees. Viewers and readers trust blog authors. They are a convenient way to convey commercial ideas and talk about new products or services. It doesn't matter whether it's hidden or overt advertising - it won't be perceived with hostility. On the contrary, the gained trust of the opinion leader extends to the advertised product.

Marketing in online maps

A relatively new direction that works well when promoting offline businesses. Advertising in mobile maps, primarily Google Maps, Yandex Maps, allows you to show your ad not just to people who are interested in your services, but, for example, have already ordered takeout food from your cafe. It will be seen by a person who is nearby or whose daily route from work passes nearby.

Typically used to promote offline services: HoReCa, beauty salons and supermarkets. But it is also suitable for online commerce. For example, a tourist traveling to another country can be shown an ad for a translator app or online insurance.

What tools does an internet marketer use in their work?

In their work, internet marketers use different sets of tools and services necessary for launching advertising, analyzing advertising campaigns, and preparing creatives. Let's consider the main ones.

• For collecting keywords: Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Tool, Yandex Wordstat, Sellertools, etc. It is important not only to know how to use these services, but also to understand the principles of collecting semantics.
• For launching advertising: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Yandex Direct, Bing Ads.
• Analytical tools: Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics, Roistat, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics.
• Marketing platforms: SEMrush, SimilarWeb, SerpStat, Botify, etc.
• Landing page and email builders: online builders Wix, Tilda, LPGenerator, desktop applications Adobe Muse CC, WYSIWYG, Dreamweaver, Webflow.
• Automated email distribution: GetResponse, MailChimp, SendPulse, Sendsay.
• Spy services (SPY tools) are applications that help analyze other people's advertising campaigns, view words, targeting settings, and banners by keyword. Popular ones include: SpyFu, Adplexity, Anstrex, Spypush, PowerAdSpy, Adbeat, etc.
• Ad trackers for analyzing and optimizing advertising campaigns: Peerclick, Bemob, AdsBridge, Keitaro, Voluum.
• Photo editors: Photoshop, GIMP, Pixlr, Fotor, Canva. This is useful for small companies that do not have a permanent designer.

It is also important for an Internet marketer to master basic marketing techniques and tools, including: end-to-end analytics, retargeting (remarketing), market research and audience segmentation skills, methods for writing catchy headlines and texts (AIDa, 4U), etc.

How much does an Internet marketer earn?

According to StatistaIn 2021, companies spent $455 billion on online marketing. Analysts predict that by 2028, this figure will exceed $800 billion. Today, both large and local businesses are investing in online marketing. And entrepreneurs are willing to pay well for top-notch specialists.

According to the portal Rating Bynet, internet marketer salaries in Belarus start at $357 for entry-level specialists with less than a year of experience and reach $1,500 for seniors with 10 years of experience.

But an internet marketer can work remotely for a foreign company or look for clients through freelance exchanges like Fiver, Guru or UpWork. According to the Glassdoor portal, in the US, a specialist's salary ranges from $47,000 to $84,000 per year. With bonuses: from $60,000 to $109,000 per year. The average annual salary is $62,650.

The Salary Expert portal gives slightly more modest figures (excluding bonuses) - from $41 to $67 thousand per year. The average annual salary is $55,712. Managers and specialists who are responsible for several areas earn more. For example, the annual median salary of an internet marketing consultant is over $113,000.

How to Become an Internet Marketer. Useful Resources for Study

Marketing is an in-demand profession with a high salary. You can work in an office or remotely. This is an exciting profession that involves working on a variety of tasks. However, it is important to understand that an internet marketer cannot solve all sales problems. Sometimes entrepreneurs don't understand this and accuse specialists of shortcomings. However, the reason for low sales may be poor product quality or incompetent managers who "dump" applications. It is important to be mentally prepared for irregular hours and situations where you need to quickly respond and adjust your advertising campaign.

Internet marketing is developing so quickly that educational programs can't always keep up. Over the past five years, search algorithms have changed several times, and new tools have appeared. For example, end-to-end analytics or new social networks. Therefore, it is important to monitor the relevance of the programs you want to study, be it a university, a secondary vocational school, or distance learning courses.

A higher education in Marketing can be a good foundation. But it is not required. Often, a traditional marketer is responsible for brand vision and strategic planning. An internet marketer usually focuses on online promotion. To gain experience, you can get an internship at a company and learn from more experienced colleagues. An alternative option may be distance learning courses with practical classes. Here, it is important to pay attention to the same relevance of the programs and the opportunity to build a portfolio.

And so that you can get a better understanding of the profession of an internet marketer, the editors of Skillbox.by have prepared a list of useful resources for you.

Blogs:

• cossa.ru — a portal that publishes a lot of information about marketing, online promotion, and communications;
• Setters Advertising Agency Blog — here you can find case studies, interviews, useful tips, and articles about marketing, advertising, and copywriting;
• The "Marketing" section on the VC.RU microblogging portal — here users publish cases and useful articles;
• trafficcardinal.com — the portal is dedicated to traffic arbitrage. But there is a lot of material here about SMM, launching advertising, ready-made cases for promoting goods, reviews of useful tools, etc.;
• Glossary of the SendPulse mass email service - an encyclopedia of internet marketing and eCommerce;
• PR-CY — SEO and website optimization news;
• Plerdy is a blog where new articles about SEO, online sales, internet marketing and website usability appear daily.

Literature:

• Phil Barden "Hacking Marketing";
• Michael Stelzner "Content Marketing. New Methods of Attracting Clients in the Internet Age";
• Seth Godin "Purple Cow";
• Rand Fishkin "SEO - the Art of Website Promotion";
• Perry Marshall, Brian Todd "Contextual Advertising That Works. The Google AdWords Bible";
• Dan S. Kennedy, Kim Welsh-Phillips "Hard SMM. Getting the Most Out of Social Networks";
• Philip Kotler "Marketing 4.0. Pivot from Traditional to Digital: Internet Promotion Technologies";
• Anton Voronyuk, Alexander Polishchuk "Current Internet Marketing".